by Cara Malone
“It’s not bad – a bigger city than where I went to undergrad, but that just means there’s more to explore,” Ruby said. “So far I’ve only hit this place, the yoga studio, and the bar down the street.”
“You have to try the Mexican restaurant a few blocks over,” Mira said, rolling her eyes as she mimicked a food-induced orgasm. “They make their sopapillas fresh every day and they’re to die for. Max and I love that place.”
Ruby bristled slightly at the mention of Max, quickly bringing her straw to her mouth and hoping that Mira didn’t catch it, but she did.
“What?”
“Nothing,” Ruby said innocently. Mira kept staring her down over the small table, though, and eventually she caved, bursting out with, “I just don’t get it. You’re so normal and Max is so… difficult.”
Mira sighed, as if Ruby had deeply disappointed her by airing this grievance. Her expression was that of a girl who has had to speak on Max’s behalf a hundred times already and who was growing weary of it. But she took a deep breath and dived in anyway.
“Max and I met freshman year,” Mira said. “We were randomly assigned as dorm mates and I had about the same reaction to her for the first month or so as you did. She’s rough around the edges, but once you get to know her – and figure out how to talk to her – she’s an incredible person. She’s funny and charming and tenacious and wicked smart, and to the people she trusts, she’s very sweet.”
Ruby couldn’t help snorting at this last bit. She knew the time to shut up had come, but Mira was the polar opposite of Max - the only things they seemed to have in common were academic drive and a forced living arrangement in undergrad. Before she could stop herself, Ruby said, “Sweet? I don’t know if we’re talking about the same person, because the Max I know is an arrogant jerk.”
Mira put her fingers to the bridge of her nose – either she was having brain freeze from the smoothie, or more likely, Ruby was severely testing her patience.
“I’m sorry,” Ruby quickly added, her mind quickly flashing to Megan. “I would kill someone if they said that about my girlfriend-”
“Oh, Max isn’t my girlfriend. We’re just friends,” Mira objected, surprising Ruby. Mira set down her smoothie and looked hard at Ruby, scrutinizing her. Then she said somewhat hesitantly, “Look, you can never tell Max that I told you this because she hates it when people know. But you’re obviously not going to get it unless I spell it out for you.”
“What?” Ruby asked, taken aback as Mira rolled her eyes at her.
“She has Asperger’s,” Mira said. “Do you know what that is?”
“Yeah, it’s a form of autism, isn’t it?” Ruby asked, a little confused.
“Yes,” Mira said. “Max has a pretty mild case, but it still makes social interaction pretty hard for her because she doesn’t understand things like sarcasm, or body language, or a lot of the unspoken stuff that the rest of us take for granted. She’s not trying to be rude, or arrogant, or whatever else people usually think when they first meet her – she’s just doing the best she can to put together her puzzle without the reference photo that the rest of us are born with.”
“I didn’t know,” Ruby said, at a loss for any other words.
“And you still don’t,” Mira said, giving her another pointed glare. “Max would kill me if she knew I told you. She doesn’t want people to look at her differently, so she doesn’t tell people. The only reason I’m telling you is because I’m pretty sure she’s into you.”
There was a heavy pause as they both sipped their smoothies and Ruby let all of this sink in. Then she said, “I just got out of a rough break-up.”
“I’m not telling you this so you can go ask her out,” Mira said, incredulity edging into her voice. “I’m telling you so that you don’t turn her completely off dating. I don’t think she’s ever really liked someone before, and all I want from you is a little understanding. Don’t treat her any differently or do anything you wouldn’t have done – just keep what I told you in mind, and maybe try not to be a dick to her.”
Ruby opened her mouth to object to this final accusation, but Mira was already picking up her smoothie and slinging her yoga mat over her shoulder.
“I have an evening class to prepare for,” she said. “Maybe I’ll see you at the studio again sometime.”
“Get Bent,” Ruby said, and Mira cracked a smile before she walked out of the coffee shop.
Ruby sat back in her chair, letting out a long exhale and feeling like a ton of bricks had just been dropped on her. So much for that zen feeling.
CHAPTER 9
“Morning, Maureen,” Max called in the direction of the reference desk as she crossed the library lobby toward the elevators. Maureen put her finger to her lips as Max’s voice echoed across the tile like it always did and a few nearby heads turned toward her.
It was still early on Wednesday morning and Max had woken up well before her alarm. Her first class of the day, one for her user experience degree, wasn’t for two more hours but she came to the library anyway. Partly it was because she’d decided to take extra precautions after being late to McDermott’s class, and partly she just wanted a quiet place to finish the readings for next week.
Whoever lived in the apartment beside her had a penchant for violent video games and all she heard through the thin dorm walls day and night was gunshots, interspersed periodically by the tinny speakers of the television as the characters cried out, “Cover me, I’m reloading!” She’d only lived there a week and a half and Max had already had enough of the game, so she came to find a quiet corner of the library where she could get some peace.
She went up to the second floor where there were comfortable chairs in the center of a donut-shaped circle of bookshelves. It was her favorite place on campus, especially early in the morning, because it felt cozy and private before the rest of the students began to stir. She was the only person on the second floor, relishing the silence. She went over to her favorite chair and sat down, putting her backpack on the floor and carefully withdrawing a few packets of paper – scholarly articles on information retrieval and accessibility that were so long she had a hard time stapling them when she printed them off.
Max was about ten pages into the first article when she heard the elevator ding in the distance. The doors slid open and someone entered the space. Max curled up tighter in her chair and went back to her reading – it was probably just one of the librarians looking for a book. They would leave soon.
Soon enough, though, Max heard a girl’s laugh – by the high-pitched, giggly tenor, she guessed that the girl was a freshman.
“Come on, baby,” came the voice of a second person, much deeper and masculine.
“Stop fooling around, Brad,” the first voice objected. “I have to get this essay done – it’s due in a couple of hours.”
Max smirked at this. It was an exchange she’d heard more than once in all her time spent observing the mannerisms of others, and she never understood how someone could shirk their responsibilities to such a degree simply to answer their more physical desires.
Clearly, neither of these two were familiar enough with the second floor of the library to know that the shape of the stacks made all sounds funnel into the center of the room – that, or they didn’t know Max was here. That did tend to happen a lot.
“Then why did you bring me?” Brad asked. His voice was taunting in a way that Max recognized as seduction, although it was a concept foreign to her set of personal experiences.
“Shut up and help me find the psychology books,” the girl said, and a sound like she’d thumped him in the chest echoed over to Max.
The two of them were moving closer to the center of the donut – Max knew the psychology section was pretty close to where she was sitting – and rather than being annoyed by this interruption, she was curious. Her scholarly article had been forgotten in her hands as soon as the girl’s tittering laugh echoed through the room, and Max was suddenly very interested
to know how Brad and his girlfriend’s trip to the library would turn out.
She set her papers down on the arm of the chair, then reached into her backpack again to pull out her notebook. Flipping to a fresh page, she dated it and then wrote ‘Library – Observing a Flirtation’ in the header, hoping that neither of them would come close enough to her chair to see it and figure out that she was spying on them.
Brad appeared at the end of one of the rows, his eyes scanning the books as he walked around the stack and kept searching. He was completely oblivious to Max’s presence, so she studied him outright. He was tall – probably over six feet – with defined muscles and a haircut similar to Max’s, except that his was tousled and unkempt as if he’d just rolled out of bed. Probably had, Max thought, judging by the wrinkly clothes.
“Caitlin, they’re over here,” he called, and the girl came prancing over to him.
She was young just like Max suspected – looking barely old enough to be in college. She wore a short skirt that rose high up her thighs, her hair pulled into a neat ponytail, and it looked like she was wearing a full face of makeup. That must mean they’d slept over in her dorm room last night.
A surge of jealousy rose up the back of Max’s throat at the idea that this little nymphet had managed to lure a guy back to her dorm room within the first two weeks of college, and had him hooked so severely that he was willing to wake up and follow her to the library while the rest of campus slept on. Max was still waiting for a moment like that.
But the jealousy passed as quickly as it came and she set about the task of making observations, trying to keep them as scientific and factual as she could despite the fact that flirting was, unfortunately, a soft science at best.
Caitlin came through the stacks, brushing her hand briefly over Brad’s backside as she bent down to look at the books, and Max wrote down the gesture. She jotted notes on the way they looked at each other – she’d heard the term ‘fuck me eyes’ once or twice in movies and she thought it applied here. The way Caitlin smiled at him wasn’t quite friendly – there was something more carnal at play, something that reminded Max of the way animals bare their teeth in a heated moment that has an equal chance of ending in fighting or mating.
Max’s pen was flying over the paper now, and it was a good thing the two of them were completely caught up in their own world because she wasn’t even trying to pretend she was minding her own business rather than taking notes on their interaction. It was all excellent stuff – Brad’s puffed-out chest and the way he hovered possessively over Caitlin, and how everything he said was a double entendre that elicited another giggle from her.
And there were the million subtle ways she reacted to him, letting him know she was into it. She bit her lip. She looked up at him through her thickly mascara-coated eyelashes. She stood close to him and paid absolutely no attention to the task that originally brought them here.
As Max was furiously transcribing all of this, an uncomfortable thought popped into her head. Was she writing all this down for intellectual purposes, or as a roadmap to follow should she ever have the good fortune to try it out for herself… perhaps with Ruby?
The idea was patently ridiculous – Ruby clearly hated her and went out of her way to be saccharine sweet with everyone except Max – but the thought lingered nonetheless. Would Ruby giggle and bite her lip like Caitlin? Max scribbled a hypothesis at the bottom of the page. Are the rules of love universal or do they differ from person to person?
But the answer was obvious after even a short observation of these two giggling stupidly in the library stacks. Ruby was nothing like this silly freshman girl – Max was pretty sure she was a different class of woman entirely, and if that was the case, these notes would be useless to her.
Just then, she heard a metallic clank as Brad pushed Caitlin up against the stacks, his hand going under her shirt. Max shoved her notebook and scholarly articles back in her bag and got the hell out of there, leaving the second floor to the lovebirds and wondering briefly if she should alert Maureen about the situation in the stacks before she left the library.
***
The following Saturday afternoon was the next time Max saw Ruby, and she’d grown inexplicably nervous since their second Information Theory class. Max arrived early and sat in the front row, hoping that Ruby would sit next to her like they had in McDermott’s first class. She couldn’t exactly smack Ruby on the ass and push her up against the wall like Brad, but she spent a good hour before class trying to think of things to say to Ruby.
She’d come up with What did you think of the readings? and How’s your speech for GLiSS coming? and Do you still miss your ex-girlfriend? None of these were show-stoppers, and Max was pretty sure she should steer clear of that last one, but it was the only question she was really interested in knowing the answer to. There was no point in flirting with a girl who was hung up on her ex, no matter how smooth your pickup lines are.
And Max’s weren’t smooth.
Unfortunately for her – and probably fortunate for Ruby – she didn’t get to try any of them out. Ruby walked into the room, gave one glance in Max’s direction, and slid into a seat in the back row. At the end of class, she was gone before Max even packed up her bag.
Today she’d get another chance, though, because their group was heading into Granville to do the research portion of McDermott’s project. They’d all agreed to meet in the courtyard of GSU’s library and then carpool to save gas and make sure no one got lost. Being without a car of her own, Max was at the mercy of the group.
Walking across campus toward the library, she tried out a few more pickup lines, her palms growing sweaty at the idea of actually deploying them. What was it like going to Northwestern? Did your sorority participate in hazing rituals? Again, these were not A-plus lines, but at least they were a jumping off point. Max had never met anyone before who made the stomach-churning idea of flirting seem worthwhile, but there was something about Ruby that made her want to try.
For once, Max wasn’t the first to arrive. She just couldn’t get her feet to carry her any faster toward her destination with all those butterflies in her stomach, and when she finally got to the courtyard, all three of her fellow group members were waiting for her. Ruby waved when she drew near and Max’s heart skipped a beat.
“Whose car are we taking?” She asked as they all stood up to meet her. Max knew by now that the Candy Crush player was David and the girl whose alarming desert island book choice had been The Bell Jar was named Lydia, but they both faded into the background compared to the tall, commanding presence of Ruby.
“I can drive,” she volunteered, pulling a pair of car keys with a large fob of silver-plated Greek letters out of her pocket. “I’m parked in the lot right over there.”
The four of them piled into Ruby’s late-model Fusion. The interior was absolutely spotless and smelling of a faint, enticing strawberry air freshener. Max got stuck in the back seat when David yelled shotgun before they’d even reached the parking lot, and she let out a silent smirk as he slid into the seat next to Ruby. Max had never had occasion to observe the social implications of calling shotgun, but by the way he kept glancing over at Ruby, she was pretty sure David was barking up the wrong tree.
Max paid him no mind, though, and as he complimented Ruby lavishly on every little feature of her car, she even shot a glance at Max in the rear-view mirror. Again, she wasn’t great at reading Ruby yet, but Max was pretty sure this look was meant to convey bemusement at David’s obliviousness. Max vowed that when she got her chance, she would do better than talking about the features on Ruby’s car.
Ruby took them through the busy streets of downtown Granville, bustling with traffic on Saturday afternoon, and Max was pleased to see that the public library’s parking lot was filled with cars when they pulled into the lot. This meant there would be plenty of people to observe and lots of data to collect.
“I think we should go over the details before we get out of the car,
” Max said as Ruby pulled into a parking space at the back of the lot. “We’ll want to avoid the observer effect - if we talk about our project in the library, we run the risk of polluting the data by allowing the subjects to overhear the goal of our experiment.”
“I don’t think it’s that big of a deal,” David said, looking sleepily in Max’s direction. “Let’s just go watch some people using the computers so we can get on with the rest of our Saturday.”
“Their behavior will change if they know they’re being observed,” Max said, her voice rising a little bit as she grew slightly incensed. If they didn’t do this experiment correctly, then they might as well not do it at all, and this was something she wouldn’t budge on. Fortunately, Ruby stepped in to back her up before she had a chance to get belligerent over it.
“I think that’s a good idea,” she said, cutting the engine. “It’ll only take a minute because we already went over all of this last time we met. Max, give us a refresher.”
Max was slightly taken aback by this sudden show of support from the girl who had been dying to make space between them ever since they met. She couldn’t waste this opportunity by dwelling on it, though – the more important thing right now was getting this project done correctly and making sure every member of the group was on the same page.
“We’re here to observe instances of information seeking behavior,” she announced. “That means everything from using the computers, as David said, to asking for help from a librarian, to browsing the stacks – anything that falls under the umbrella of gathering information. We’re all going to keep our own log of these instances – write down the behavior, any information theories you can identify to go along with it, and as many of the pertinent details about the incident as possible. Then we’ll reconvene in a couple of hours and combine our notes so that we can write up the report.”
“See people using the library, write down how they’re using it,” David said. “Got it. Can we go in now?”