Isobel stepped through the archway of the kitchen to find her mother at the sink, cutting chunks of boiled chicken with a pair of red-handled culinary scissors. Varen stood farther down the counter, slicing stalks of celery into thin crescent shapes. He glanced up as she walked in and, catching her eye, smiled faintly.
“Oh, Isobel,” her mother said, “there you are. I hope you don’t mind that, while you left your guest waiting, I enlisted him to help with supper.”
Isobel moved farther into the kitchen, not knowing whether to be relieved that her mother hadn’t had an atomic meltdown, or mortified that she’d taken it upon herself to play head chef with the nearest thing Trenton High had to a Dark Lord.
Well, at least it looked like he hadn’t minded. In fact, Isobel was surprised to note how adept he seemed to be at chopping celery. Practiced, even.
“You’ll stay to eat with us, won’t you?” her mom asked. Varen flicked a quick glance at Isobel.
“Yeah,” she said, “you should stay for dinner.”
Could this day get any weirder? She tried to picture Varen at her family’s dinner table, and she only hoped Danny wouldn’t embarrass the hell out of her. She could just hear her little brother asking all sorts of stupid questions, like if his underwear was black too.
She stepped up to stand next to Varen, placing the Poe book on the counter.
“Varen says you’re doing a project together,” her mom said. “Isobel’s never been a big reader,” she added in an aside to Varen, who shot Isobel an amused smirk. She was glad he was enjoying himself so much.
“I was just telling Varen how I studied Poe in college,” she continued. “I mostly read his detective stories, though. ‘The Purloined Letter,’ ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’—I think I had a crush on Monsieur C. Auguste Dupin,” she prattled on, pronouncing the name with the worst French accent ever. Isobel felt her ears go hot.
“Varen, would you like some iced tea?” her mother asked. “I just made some about a half hour ago. Ginger peach. There’s some lemonade in the fridge too.”
“Mom,” Isobel cut in before he could answer, “can we please go study now? If that’s all right.”
“Okay, okay,” her mom said, and stepped aside from the sink so Varen could wash his hands.
“Why don’t you two go in there on the dining room table so I won’t be in your way? There’s plenty of room to spread out.”
Isobel, her ears still burning, didn’t wait for a second invitation to vamoose before her mom could find anything else embarrassing to say or do. Picking up Varen’s satchel, which she found on one of the kitchen chairs, she hauled it into the dining room, knowing that if it held his black book, then wherever it went, he would follow.
He was still smiling that “I am silently amused by your quaint home life” smile by the time she set his bag down on one of the tall-backed dining room chairs. She pulled out another for herself and sat.
“What?” she said, waiting for whatever dry quip he’d been preparing to throw at her.
“Your mom’s nice” was all he said. He moved his satchel and took the seat she’d inadvertently designated for him. She found herself wishing that she’d thought to position him closer, but it would look weird if she got up and moved now.
Isobel set the Poe book out on the table between them. She sighed, deciding to get the worst over with first and confess. “I haven’t read anything you told me to read,” she blurted, proud of herself for looking him straight in the eye while saying it.
He nodded, like a doctor whose suspicions about a patient’s diagnosis had been confirmed.
“Don’t worry,” he said, his fingers flipping through the pages, “skim through the ‘Red Death’ and write down the quotes you think are the more memorable ones. After that, find the poem ‘Annabel Lee’ and do the same with it. I’ve got to finish up the conclusion for our paper, and then we can start organizing the presentation stuff into categories.”
Isobel took the book as it was rotated and scooted toward her, too humbled to even try to find the right words to thank him, grateful for his uncharacteristic show of patience.
Eventually she settled into a process where she allowed herself to sneak upward glances at him every time she copied down an acceptable quote in its entirety. At one point, her mom drifted in to deliver a pitcher of her peach tea, two glasses, and a plate of raspberry sandwich cookies, for which Varen set down his pen and stood to thank her, not taking his seat again until her mother was out of the room. He didn’t seem to be aware that the gesture had come off as being totally old-fashioned, which made it all the more strange—because it made Isobel realize that he’d done it without thinking.