“Well, you’re male,” she says.
Silas just sighs and runs a hand through his hair, somehow making it look even better. Ugh.
“That’s a good point,” he admits.
“Of course it’s a good point, I made it,” Anna Grace says, half-grinning.
“Yeah, yeah,” he says.
“Maybe you shouldn’t have made up a girlfriend,” she goes on.
“I told you it’s complicated,” he says, but now he’s smiling.
“Tell them she’s in Canada.”
“Like you did in seventh grade?”
Anna Grace laughs and casually flips him off.
“Logan, my Canadian boyfriend, was the love of my life,” she says. “And totally not someone I made up so people would think I was cool.”
The front doors to the theater open, and Anna Grace looks at her watch.
“It’s time,” she intones, glancing around. “Kat, you still good for the pie auction?”
I push a very normal smile onto my face.
“Of course,” I say.
“Good luck tonight,” Silas says, backing away, toward wherever he’s actually supposed to be. “And if you think of anyone…”
“I’ll warn them that you need weird favors,” she finishes his sentence, grinning, and he walks away.
“Ugh,” I say, quietly, once he’s out of earshot.
“He’s fine,” Anna Grace says, patiently, clipboard in her hand once more.
I make a face, because I disagree.
“You know, you could stop being mad about college sometime this decade,” she points out, still going down the list. “Just a thought.”
“Or I could stay mad forever,” I counter.
“If you really want to,” she says, shrugging, because this is not the first or even the fifth time we’ve had this conversation. She shoves the checklist back into her pocket and puts her hands on my shoulders. “Okay. I love you and respect your choices even when I think they’re bad and doing you harm.”
“But how do you really feel?” I deadpan.
“Like it’s time for you to go auction off some pies,” she says, nodding at the pie table as she gives me a final smile, then walks away.
I take a deep breath, prepare myself, and head toward some pies.
* * *
The very firstchapter of The Most Popular Person in the Room: Unleashing Your Inner Extrovert and Mastering Every Social Dynamic says that the first step to all that is getting out of your comfort zone, so here I am. Very, very far from my comfort zone. Supervising a pie auction in the front of a theater full of people I don’t know, but who all seem to know each other. Just in case I didn’t feel enough like an outsider as the dorky, awkward, Japanese new girl in a small, Southern town where I’m pretty sure everyone else has known each other since kindergarten.
They’re all milling around and making small talk with each other while I stand here behind the pie auction table, trying to figure out what normal people do with their hands. At any moment one of them could turn the blinding beam of their small talk on me, the deer in this small-talk-as-headlights metaphor, and I’d have to respond.
Of course, The Most Popular Person in the Room: Unleashing Your Inner Extrovert and Mastering Every Social Dynamic has advice for that as well. Prepare topics of conversation, it says. Smile a lot. Be an active listener. Ask questions. Act interested. Act normal.