Page 47 of 56 Days
“Doyou?”
“I asked you first,” he says.
“So we’re playingthatgame...”
“Well, we’ve literally nothing else to do.”
She laughs at this.
“I would like it,” he says then, “if we were.”
“Me too.”
“So let’s be.”
They look at each other, expectant and awkward and embarrassed, until they both break and laugh. Then Ciara turns back to her open suitcase, her cheeks warm, to pull out more clothes.
Oliver moves to help her.
Her NASA mug is sitting on top of some jeans. He lifts it out.
“So you’re a meatball girl then,” he says.
She has no idea what this means. Her first reaction is that he has insulted her somehow, that she should be offended, but then when she considers that he’s never even come close to saying anything like that before, her second reaction is total confusion.
“Awhatgirl?”
Oliver points to the insignia on the mug, the blue circle littered with tiny white stars and slashed with a red vector.
“That’s what that’s called,” he says. “The meatball. The logo they had in the eighties, the one with just the letters—that’s the worm.” He pauses. “You’ve never heard that before?”
“Don’t think so.” She turns to pull more clothing from the suitcase and takes it to the wardrobe. “But in that case, I amdefinitelya meatball girl. I hate that other one. It’s awful.”
It takes her at least fifteen seconds to hang a dress and refold twoT-shirtsso she can add them to a stack and in all that time, Oliver says nothing. When she turns back to him, she finds him still holding the mug, looking down at it.
“Hey,” she says.
He lifts his head.
“You okay? You’re staring at that thing like you’re in some kind of daze.”
“I was just thinking,” he says, “what’s the red slash about?” He points to it on the mug—the sidewaysV-shapethat bisects the blue disc. “What’s that supposed to be?”
“Isn’t it a wing?”
He raises his eyebrows.
“The blue disc is a planet,” she says, “the stars are space, the little white orbital line thingy represents space travel, and the red thing is a wing, for aeronautics.”
She wants to addI thinkto that but she knows she’s right, so she forces herself to swallow it.
Oliver smiles.
“Well,” he says, “I guess you learn something new every day.”
50 Days Ago
Midmorning, word spreads around the office: Taoiseach Leo Varadkar is about to make a statement, live from Washington, DC.
