The Statistical Probability Of Love At First Sight (8 page)

“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.

“Me, too. I bet we can squeeze past her.”

He unbuckles his seat belt and half stands in a jerky motion, bumping into the seat in front of him and eliciting a dirty look from the woman seated there. Hadley watches as he tries to maneuver past the old lady without waking her, and when they’ve both managed to make it out of their row, she follows him down the aisle and toward the back of the plane. A bored-looking flight attendant in a folded-down jump seat looks up from her magazine as they pass.

The
OCCUPIED
lights are on above both bathroom doors, so Hadley and Oliver stand in the small square of space just outside. They’re close enough that she can smell the fabric of his shirt, the whiskey still on his breath; not so close that they’re touching, exactly, but she can feel the hair on his arm tickle hers, and she’s again seized by a sudden longing to reach for his hand.

She lifts her chin to find that he’s looking down at her with the same expression she saw on his face earlier, when she woke up with her head on his shoulder. Neither of them moves and neither speaks; they just stand there watching each other in the darkness, the engines whirring beneath their feet. It occurs to her that—impossibly, improbably—he might be about to kiss her, and she inches just the tiniest bit closer, her heart skidding around in her chest. His hand brushes against hers, and Hadley feels it like a bolt of electricity, the shock of it moving straight up her spine. To her surprise, Oliver doesn’t pull away; instead, he fits his hand into hers as if anchoring her there, then tugs gently, moving her closer.

It almost feels as if they’re completely alone—no captain or crew, no rows of dozing passengers stretching the length of the plane—and Hadley takes a deep breath and tips her head to look up at him. But then the door to one of the bathrooms is suddenly thrown open, bathing them in a too-bright wedge of light, and a little boy walks out trailing a long ribbon of toilet paper from one of his red shoes. And just like that, the moment is over.

4:02 AM Eastern Standard Time

9:02 AM Greenwich Mean Time

Hadley wakes suddenly, without even realizing she’d been sleeping again. The cabin is still mostly dark, but the edges of the windows are now laced with daylight, and all around them people are beginning to stir, yawning and stretching and passing trays of rubbery bacon and eggs back across to the flight attendants, who look impossibly fresh and remarkably unwrinkled after such a long trip.

Oliver’s head is resting on
her
shoulder this time, pinning Hadley into place, and when her attempt to stay perfectly still instead results in a kind of twitchy tremor that sets her arm in motion, he lurches up as if he’s been shocked.

“Sorry,” they say at the exact same time, then Hadley says it again: “Sorry.”

Oliver rubs his eyes like a child awakening from a bad dream, then blinks at her, staring for just a beat too long. Hadley tries not to take it personally, but she knows she must look awful this morning. Earlier, when she stood in the tiny bathroom and regarded herself in the even tinier mirror, she’d been surprised to see how pale she looked, her eyes puffy from the stale air and high altitude.

She’d squinted at her reflection, marveling at the fact that Oliver was bothering with her at all. She wasn’t normally the kind of girl to worry too much about hair and makeup, and she didn’t tend to spend a lot of time in front of the mirror, but she was small and blond and pretty enough in the ways that seemed to count for the boys at her school. Still, the image in the mirror had been somewhat alarming, and that was before she’d nodded off for the second time. She can’t imagine what she must look like now. Every inch of her feels achy with exhaustion, and her eyes sting; there’s a soda stain near the collar of her shirt, and she’s almost afraid to discover what might be going on with her hair at the moment.

But Oliver looks different, too; it’s odd, seeing him in daylight, like switching the channel to high-definition. His eyes are still caked with sleep and there’s a line running from his cheek to his temple where it was pressed against her shirt. But it’s more than that; he looks pale and tired and drained, his eyes red-rimmed and somehow very faraway.

He arches his back in a stretch, then squints blearily at his watch. “Almost there.”

Hadley nods, relieved that they’re right on schedule, though a part of her also can’t help wishing for more time. In spite of everything—the crowded quarters and the cramped seats, the smells that have been drifting up and down the length of the cabin for hours now—she doesn’t feel quite ready to step off this plane, where it’s been so easy to lose herself in conversation, to forget all that she left behind and all that’s still ahead.

The man in front of them pushes open his window shade and a column of whiteness—so startlingly bright that Hadley brings a hand to her eyes—streams in all around them, snuffing out the darkness, stripping away whatever was left of last night’s magic. Hadley reaches over to nudge open her own window shade, the spell now officially broken. Outside, the sky is a blinding blue, striped with clouds like layers on a cake. After so many hours in the dark, it almost hurts to look for too long.

It’s only four AM in New York, and when the pilot’s voice comes over the PA it sounds far too cheerful for the early hour. “Well, folks,” he says, “we’re making our final descent into Heathrow. The weather looks good down in London; twenty-two degrees and partly sunny with a chance of showers later. We’ll be on the ground in just under twenty minutes, so please fasten your seat belts. It’s been a pleasure flying with you, and I hope you enjoy your stay.”

Hadley turns to Oliver. “What’s that in Fahrenheit?”

“Warm,” he says, and in that moment she feels too warm herself; perhaps it’s the forecast, or the sun beating at the window, or maybe just the proximity of the boy at her side, his shirt wrinkled and his cheeks a ruddy pink. She stretches to reach the nozzle on the panel above her, twisting it all the way to the left and then closing her eyes against the thin jet of cool air.

“So,” he says, cracking his knuckles one at a time.

“So.”

They look at each other sideways, and something about the expression on his face—an uncertainty that mirrors her own—makes Hadley want to cry. There’s no real distinction between last night and this morning, of course—just dark bleeding into light—but even so, everything feels horribly different. She thinks of the way they stood together near the bathroom, how it seemed like they’d been on the brink of something, of
everything
, like the whole world was changing as they huddled together in the dark. And now here they are, like two polite strangers, like she’d only ever imagined the rest of it. She wishes they could turn around again and fly back in the other direction, circling the globe backward, chasing the night they left behind.

“Do you think,” she says, the words emerging thickly, “we might have used up all our conversation last night?”

“Not possible,” says Oliver, and the way he says it, his mouth turned up in a smile, his voice full of warmth, unwinds the knot in Hadley’s stomach. “We haven’t even gotten to the really important stuff yet.”

“Like what?” she asks, trying to arrange her face in a way that disguises the relief she feels. “Like what’s so great about Dickens?”

“Not at all,” he says. “More like the plight of koalas. Or the fact that Venice is sinking.” He pauses, waiting for this to register, and when Hadley says nothing, he slaps his knee for emphasis. “Sinking! The whole city! Can you believe it?”

She frowns in mock seriousness. “That does sound pretty important.”

“It
is
,” Oliver insists. “And don’t even get me started on the size of our carbon footprint after this trip. Or the difference between crocodiles and alligators. Or the longest recorded flight of a chicken.”

“Please tell me you don’t actually know that.”

“Thirteen seconds,” he says, leaning forward to look past her and out the window. “This is a total disaster. We’re nearly to Heathrow and we haven’t even properly discussed flying chickens.” He jabs a finger at the window. “And see those clouds?”

“Hard to miss,” Hadley says; the plane is now almost fully enveloped in fog, the grayness pressing up against the windows as the plane dips lower and lower.

“Those are cumulus clouds. Did you know that?”

“I’m sure I should.”

“They’re the best ones.”

“How come?”

“Because they look the way clouds are supposed to look, the way you draw them when you’re a kid. Which is nice, you know? I mean, the sun never looks the way you drew it.”

“Like a wheel with spokes?”

“Exactly. And my family certainly never looked the way I drew them.”

“Stick figures?”

“Come on now,” he says. “Give me a little credit. They had hands and feet, too.”

“That looked like mittens?”

“But it’s nice, isn’t it? When something matches up like that?” He bobs his head with a satisfied smile. “Cumulus clouds. Best clouds ever.”

Hadley shrugs. “I guess I never really thought about it.”

“Well, then, see?” Oliver says. “There’s loads more to talk about. We’ve only just gotten started.”

Beyond the window the clouds are bottoming out, and the plane lowers itself gently into the silvery sky below. Hadley feels a rush of illogical relief at the sight of the ground, though it’s still too far away to make any sense, just a collection of quilted fields and shapeless buildings, the faint tracings of roads running through them like gray threads.

Oliver yawns and leans his head back against the seat. “I guess we probably should have slept more,” he says. “I’m pretty knackered.”

Hadley gives him a blank look.

“Tired,” he says, flattening the vowels and notching his voice up an octave so that he sounds American, though his accent has a vaguely Southern twang to it.

“I feel like I’ve embarked on some kind of foreign-language course.”

“Learn to speak British in just seven short hours!” Oliver says in his best announcer’s voice. “How could you pass up an advert like that?”

“Commercial,” she says, rolling her eyes. “How could you pass up a
commercial
like that?”

But Oliver only grins. “See how much you’ve learned already?”

They’ve nearly forgotten the old woman beside them, who’s been sleeping for so long that it’s the absence of her muffled snoring that finally startles them into looking over.

“What did I miss?” she asks, reaching for her purse, from which she carefully removes her glasses, a bottle of eye drops, and the small tin of mints.

“We’re almost there,” Hadley tells her. “But you’re lucky you slept. It was a
long
flight.”

“It was,” Oliver says, and though he’s facing away from her, Hadley can hear the smile in his voice. “It felt like forever.”