Atmosphere(11)

Once Joan hung up, she looked in the oven at her still-half-frozen dinner and felt a familiar sadness creeping over her. She turned off the oven, put the food in the fridge, and headed out to Frenchie’s for dinner on her own.

She walked straight up to the bar and ordered a Caesar salad and the chicken marsala, then grabbed a book from her bag and began reading. But before she even got to the second paragraph on the page, someone sat down next to her.

Joan knew who it was before she saw her face. She also knew there was a scientific explanation for these moments in which she felt she could sense the future. Information was being received at such a rapid speed that it felt as if the reaction was coming in before the stimulus. But the sensation was eerie, nonetheless. She understood why people got confused sometimes, started calling things fate.

“Hi,” Vanessa said.

“Oh.” Joan put away her book. “Hi. I’m Joan. I’ve seen you around, but I don’t think we’ve officially met.”

“Vanessa.”

Joan looked at Vanessa and tried not to stare. Vanessa’s eyes were light golden brown, almost amber. Her hair was such a dark shade of brown it was verging on black. And there was so much of it, the curls taking up so much space.

“It is nice to formally meet you,” Vanessa said.

Vanessa seemed more stoic than Donna, less high-strung than Lydia. Joan started to wonder what she must seem like to Vanessa. Bookish.

“No one has really introduced themselves to me,” Vanessa said. “But you all seem to know each other already.”

“Oh,” Joan said. “It’s because we all met about a week and a half ago. We moved into the same apartment complex.”

“The one right next to campus?” Vanessa said, nodding. “Makes sense.”

“Where do you live?”

“A bit further out.”

“Didn’t want to bunk with the rest of the us?”

“No, it’s not that,” Vanessa said. She smiled out of the left side of her mouth and then laughed. “Or maybe it is. I like my privacy. Not sure I’m going to be good at this whole ‘living in a fishbowl’ thing.”

Joan laughed as the bartender brought her salad and put it down in front of her. “Thank you,” she said to him.

Vanessa leaned forward, gestured to the bartender. “Can I have a glass of cabernet and a steak, medium rare?”

Joan’s salad seemed so boring now.

“I really am sorry none of us have spoken to you,” Joan said. “It wasn’t on purpose, but I regret it.”

Vanessa sat back on the barstool, waved her off. “It’s perfectly all right. I figured it was up to me to say hello. So, hello.”

“Hello,” Joan said. She speared a piece of romaine on her fork. It was disarming—a little confusing, maybe—to think of Vanessa as in want of company. She was the sort of woman who seemed like she could have any friend she wanted. Didn’t the world revolve around women like her? She was tall and lean, with big eyes. Her hair was so shiny. That way she smiled out of the side of her mouth—certainly that pulled people in.

“Settling in okay?” Joan asked.

Vanessa shrugged as her glass of wine arrived. “I mean, it’s hot as hell out here. But otherwise, it’s going okay.”

Joan nodded. “July is the worst of it. The humidity is brutal. You get used to it.”

“Do you?”

Joan laughed. “No, I don’t know why I said that. It’s miserable.”

Vanessa chuckled and sipped her wine.

This made no sense at all. Vanessa was the one who had come up to her and said hello. But now, somehow, it was Joan leaning toward her, as Vanessa sat there, cool in every sense of the world.

Detached. Effortless. Aloof.

Joan thought about Paul Newman in Cool Hand Luke—and got the sense that it would not end well for her if she challenged Vanessa to eat fifty eggs. If she challenged Vanessa to anything at all.

“How about you?” Vanessa asked. “How is it for Miss Popular over here?”

Joan laughed so loud that it startled the man a few seats down. She covered her mouth. Vanessa reached over and gently took her by the wrist, pulling her hand away from her mouth. Joan looked at Vanessa’s fingers on her.

“You did him a favor,” Vanessa said. “He was falling asleep in his beer. But, really, how are you settling in?”

“Well, wildly incorrect assumptions about my social status aside . . .” Joan said. “It’s going all right.”

“Glad to hear it.”

Joan wasn’t sure why she was still talking—what she was thinking, saying this out loud? “Though . . .”

“Hm?”

“Did you sense an . . . undercurrent today?” Joan asked, turning toward Vanessa. “When talking to almost anyone in the astronaut corps?”

“You mean the feeling that any of them would slit your throat for ten bucks?”

Joan laughed, this time at a completely reasonable volume. “Exactly!”

“Yeah, I suspect we have a horse race ahead of us,” Vanessa said.

“Am I supposed to compete with you?” Joan asked. “And Donna and Griff and everyone? It seems like a lot of work, to do all that and still put all my time into training.”