She sat up straight, her beer was almost gone. “It sounds like a dream, then.”
“But it should be very much said that I don’t have whatever the skill is. Or at least I don’t have it anymore. Maybe I only ever had it one time.…The conversation-with-strange-girls skill, the willingness-to-be-humiliated skill. And so it almost became doubly frustrating. All these women, and I don’t have an angle in on any of them. I can’t download the apps, because we can’t have people we know seeing us on there, right? So the whole thing is, like, walking up to these women and putting it out there cold. That gives me hives. I don’t have any of those superpowers.”
She smiled. “Just your X-ray glasses.”
“Exactly,” he said.
“So, do you still have them?”
“What’s that?” he said, smiling back and reaching for his beer.
She sat up straight again and twisted in her seat so that her legs dangled off the stool, dark denim and a long brass zipper facing him squarely, the black of the leotard up under her arms, up over her shoulders. Will’s eyes involuntarily down-and-upped her. It was still very cold beneath the AC unit. He caught himself lingering and squinted instead, as though he’d been testing out the glasses, as though it were a bit.
“I guess the powers ran out at the end of the month,” he said.
“Too bad. I was gonna test you to see if they really worked.”
“Oh yeah? Test how?”
“Just a quiz, you know, colors, that sorta thing.”
“What kind of colors?”
“Like: What color is my bra?”
Will smiled but Jenna’s face was serious. His smile faded slowly and he heard himself breathing.
“Well, Jenna, that would be a trick question,” he said.
“Oh!” she said. “So they do still work. I knew you were a liar.”
“A liar with heart.”
She’d picked up a cocktail straw and was chewing it. She smiled in appreciation of the callback.
“You know, hearing you say that just now,” he said, “that was the thing I think I enjoyed the most. About the month. About the whole thing. Was just the ability to lie again, and the lying being okay. You spend all these years, or at least I spent all these years, trying to do the right thing—bending it sometimes, but knowing I’d be caught out if I didn’t just spill the complete truth to Whitney. That it was just easier to cut the crap and say it straight. But this whole thing was different. Stuff like: I’ll call you. And: I just got out of a long relationship. And: I’m going out of town next week, so won’t be around for your party, sorry. And obviously the small ones lead to bigger ones, and soon you’re doing nothing but lying—purposefully, consciously, spooling out these elaborate whatevers. But with these little interactions, these little rendezvous with women, there were no consequences. And so: a hundred little lies—who cares? The lightness of that, the ease and the lack of consequence. I loved it. I’d never given myself over to it before.”
“So there were lessons learned,” she said. “And now you get it.”
He smiled into his beer and squinted at her again. “Bear with me for apparently stating the obvious to an old pro…” he said.
“I’m not advocating for it, Will Who Cannot Lie. I’m just saying: Yep, that’s part of the game.”
“Jenna Saisquoi…”
Her face deadened, and then she bit down on the edge of her glass with both rows of teeth, and started laughing her biggest laugh yet.
“Exactly…” she said. “Now he’s starting to understand.”
The theater lobby was stained with the scent of popcorn butter, and when they saw the rain through the windows, they stopped short of the doors.
“I guess we made the right call,” Whitney said, pressing her hands to the glass and peering up into the blackness. It could’ve been the middle of the night, but according to her phone, they were still an hour out from sunset.
“I wonder if they got crushed by this at the festival,” Jack said.
“I just saw a text from Will. He said there was a rain delay but that they were gonna stay close by, and that he’d let me know if things change. But my phone’s about to die. Should I tell him to just text you instead?”
“Sure, but I wonder what’s up with my service, too. Couple things popping up all at once,” he said, and they stood there staring at their screens. “Wow. The team says they have me on a flight tomorrow. That they’ve started booking people out for the afternoon and evening.”
“Let the countdown begin, then,” Whitney said. “Twenty-four hours left of…”
It turned down the corners of his mouth.
“This is a good thing,” she said. “We all need to get on with it, and, you know, lucky you to have a seat. I wonder if Will heard anything for us.”
Jack had a little glisten in his eyes. He was such a lightweight and he’d been drinking those big beers. He was hanging there in the space and light of the lobby, almost like he was underwater.
“Let’s get out of here,” he said. “The smell of this place is making me dizzy.”
“You have an umbrella?”
“I’m not that far from here. Five or six blocks. Want to make a run for it?”
“I guess? It occurred to me during the movie that Will has the fucking key—and I need to get somewhere to charge my phone.
