Page 77 of Second Alarm
Everybody turns.
"What?" Cal stares at her.
"I told you. At Thanksgiving. You were drunk. I told you."
"You were at the academy that week?" Cal turns back to me.
"I visited. Mom flew me out for that week," Hanna says.
She saysvisitedthe way a surgeon saysI made an incision— technically accurate, not the whole picture. I watch her say it and I think about the three months she's not saying, and I thinkabout the fact that she is the most precise liar I have ever met in my life.
"Wait, really?" My voice comes out a half step too surprised.
"Really. I saw him do it live, Cal."
Cal laughs so hard. The crew is cackling. Mrs. Patel is wiping her eyes.
Hanna looks exactly like a paramedic delivering a clinical fact at a social occasion — no smirk, nothing moving. She's operating the Poker Face at a rare level, and she's also telling one true thing stacked on top of another true thing, and if Cal starts stacking, the whole thing will collapse like the sprinkler system did.
Cal doesn't stack.
"How come I don't remember you at the academy that week," he says.
"You had that stomach thing that week. You were in the health center for two days."
"I mean we never overlapped. You being there that week," Cal says to Hanna.
"I was there. And watched Brennan wear a stranger's shirt. Among other things," Hanna says.
She says it so flatly that Derek chokes on his hot dog. Cal, bless him, doesn't hear the choke. He claps me on the back.
"Ty. Buddy. Sitting next to my sister for ten years and you never knew she saw it live."
"No. I didn't know that."
"Sister's a snitch," Cal says.
"Appears so."
Hanna takes a bite of her hot dog.
Derek's rubber-chicken-and-chart routine is at one-fifteen.
The chart is a whiteboard that says HANNA'S SMILE: A SCIENTIFIC STUDY, complete with bar graphs, dates, and a small corner illustration of a firefighter Cupid.
The rubber chicken has a beanie on it. The chicken is named Roger.
"Ladies," Derek says. "Gentlemen. Big Jim — dad"
"Derek."
"I've been studying, for research purposes only, the smile output of our own Hanna Larsen since the second week of her tenure at Station 7 — "
"Derek."
"— and I'm prepared, today, to present — "
"I'll pay you forty dollars to stop," Hanna says.
