“
What’s your favorite word?”
Startled, I looked up at him, unsure I’d heard him right. “My favorite word?”
He nodded, slipping his glasses up his nose with a quick, practiced scrunch of his face that made him look angry and then surprised within a single second. “You have seven boxes of books up here. A wild guess tells me you like words.”
I suppose I had never thought about having a favorite word, but now that he asked, I kind of liked the idea. I let my eyes lose focus as I thought.
“Ranunculus,” I said after a moment.
“What?”
“Ranunculus. It’s a kind of flower. It’s such a weird word but the flowers are so pretty, I like how unexpected that is.”
They were my Mom’s favorite, I didn’t say.
“That’s a pretty girly answer.”
“Well, I am a girl.”
He kept his eyes on his feet but I knew I wasn’t imagining the gleam of interest I’d seen when I said ranunculus. I bet he had expected me to say unicorn or daisy or vampire.
“What about you? What’s your favorite word? I bet it’s tungsten. Or, like, amphibian.”
He quirked a smile, answering, “Regurgitate.”
Scrunching my nose, I stared at him. “That is a gross word.”
This made him smile even wider. “I like the hard consonant sounds in it. It kinda sounds like exactly what it means.”
“An onomatopoeia?”
I half expected trumpets to blast revelatory music from an invisible speaker in the wall from the way Elliot stared at me, lips parted and glasses slowly sliding down his nose.
“Yeah,” he said.
“I’m not a complete idiot, you know. You don’t have to look so surprised that I know some big words.”
“I never thought you were an idiot,” he said quietly, looking toward the box and pulling out another book to hand to me.
For a long time after we returned to our slow, inefficient method of unpacking the books, I could feel him looking up and watching me, tiny flashes of stolen glances.
I pretended I didn’t notice.
”
”