The Statistical Probability of Love at First Sight(16)
Author: Jennifer E. Smith

“Because I asked,” she says simply.

He draws in a jagged breath, and Hadley can see that his cheeks are flushed. The seat in front of her bobbles as the man readjusts the doughnut-shaped pillow around his neck. The cabin is quiet but for the hum of the air-conditioning, the soft flap of pages being turned, the occasional snuffling and shuffling of passengers trying their best to endure these last hours before landing. Every now and then a patch of turbulence sets the plane rocking gently, like a boat in a storm, and Hadley thinks again of her mother, of the awful things she said to her back in New York. Her eyes fall to the backpack at her feet, and not for the first time, she wishes they weren’t somewhere over the Atlantic right now, so that she might try calling again.

Beside her, Oliver rubs his eyes. “I have a brilliant idea,” he says. “How about we talk about something other than our parents?”

Hadley bobs her head. “Definitely.”

But neither of them speaks. A minute ticks by, then another, and as the silence between them swells, they both begin to laugh.

“I’m afraid we might have to discuss the weather if you don’t come up with something more interesting,” he says, and Hadley raises her eyebrows.

“Me?”

He nods. “You.”

“Okay,” she says, cringing even before she’s formed the words, but the question has been blooming inside of her for hours now, and the only thing to do, finally, is to ask it: “Do you have a girlfriend?”

Oliver’s cheeks redden, and the smile she catches as he ducks his head is maddeningly cryptic; it is, Hadley decides, a smile with one of two meanings. The bigger part of her worries that it must be charitable, designed to make her feel less awkward about both the question and the coming answer, but something else keeps her wondering all the same: Maybe—just maybe—it’s something even kinder than that, something full of understanding, a seal on the unspoken agreement between them that something is happening here, that this just might be a kind of beginning.

After a long moment, he shakes his head. “No girlfriend.”

With this, it seems to Hadley that some sort of door has opened, but now that it finally has, she isn’t quite sure how to proceed. “How come?”

He shrugs. “Haven’t met anyone I want to spend fifty-two years with, I guess.”

“There must be a million girls at Yale.”

“Probably more like five or six thousand, actually.”

“Mostly Americans, though, huh?”

Oliver smiles, then leans sideways, bumping her gently with his shoulder. “I like American girls,” he says. “I’ve never dated one, though.”

“That’s not part of your summer research?”

He shakes his head. “Not unless the girl happens to be afraid of mayo, which, as you know, dovetails nicely with my study.”

“Right,” Hadley says, grinning. “So did you have a girlfriend in high school?”

“In secondary school, yes. She was nice. Quite fond of video games and pizza deliveries.”

“Very funny,” Hadley says.

“Well, I guess we can’t all have epic loves at such a young age.”

“So what happened to her?”

He tilts his head back against the seat. “What happened? I guess what always happens. We graduated. I left. We moved on. What happened to Mr. Pizza?”

“He did more than deliver pizzas, you know.”

“Breadsticks, too?”

Hadley makes a face at him. “He broke up with me, actually.”

“What happened?”

She sighs, adopting a philosophical tone. “What always happens, I guess. He saw me talking to another guy at a basketball game and got jealous, so he broke up with me over e-mail.”

“Ah,” Oliver says. “Epic love at its most tragic.”

“Something like that,” she agrees, looking over to find him watching her closely.

“He’s an idiot.”

“That’s true,” she says. “He was always sort of an idiot, in hindsight.”

“Still,” Oliver says, and Hadley smiles at him gratefully.

It was just after they’d broken up that Charlotte had called—in a display of phenomenal timing—to insist that Hadley bring a date to the wedding.

“Not everyone’s getting a plus one,” she’d explained, “but we thought it might be fun for you to have someone there with you.”

“That’s okay,” Hadley said. “I’ll be fine on my own.”

“No, really,” Charlotte insisted, completely oblivious to Hadley’s tone. “It’s no trouble at all. Besides,” she said, her voice dropping to a conspiratorial whisper, “I heard you have a boyfriend.”

In fact, Mitchell had broken up with her just three days earlier, and the drama of it was still tailing her through the halls at school with the persistence of some kind of invincible monster. It was something she didn’t particularly want to discuss at all, much less with a future stepmother she’d never even met.

“You heard wrong,” Hadley had said shortly. “I’ll be okay flying solo.”

The truth was, even if they were still dating, her father’s wedding was pretty much the last place she’d ever be inclined to take somebody. Having to endure the night in a disaster of a bridesmaid dress while watching a bunch of adults do the “Y.M.C.A.” would be hard enough to bear on her own; having company would only make it worse. The potential for secondhand embarrassment was sky-high: Dad and Charlotte kissing amid clinking glasses, stuffing cake into each other’s faces, making overly cutesy speeches.

Hadley remembers thinking, when Charlotte extended the invitation all those months ago, that there was nobody in the world she hated enough to subject them to that. But now, looking at Oliver, she wonders if she got it wrong. She wonders if it was really that there had been nobody in the world she liked enough, nobody she felt so comfortable with that she’d allow them to witness this uneven milestone, this dreaded event. To her surprise, she has a fleeting image of Oliver in a tuxedo, standing at the door of a banquet hall, and as ridiculous as that is—the wedding isn’t even black-tie—the idea of it makes her stomach flutter. She swallows hard, blinking away the thought.

Beside her, Oliver glances over at the old woman, still snoring in uneven rasps, her mouth twitching every now and then.

“I’ve actually got to use the loo,” he admits, and Hadley nods.