That, he noted, prompted a different sort of smile. He guessed he’d said something more valuable than complimenting her looks.
“It’s not that difficult, really,” she said. “You wouldn’t believe the party my parents insisted on hosting for Carissa’s first birthday.”
“I can imagine.” He could, too, though it was mostly a line other people were fond of using. I can imagine, as if they’d lent their thoughts to it with frequency. Most people were really expressing their capacity for pattern recognition, for modeling data in their heads. He doubted many of them were using true imagination, except possibly for Regan. He made a point to ask her later: Do you imagine things? Is your life a dream or a chart? Have you thought of this or this or this?
He knew she would answer them and shivered prophetically.
“It is a bit cold,” Madeline said, glancing over her shoulder. “I’d go back inside, but we should give them a minute. Sorry about my sister,” she added.
Aldo didn’t immediately see how the two thoughts were related.
“Why?” he asked, and Madeline blinked.
“Well, you know how she is, I’m sure,” she said. “She’s a bit difficult.”
“Difficult,” Aldo echoed, suffering an apprehensive twitch of misalignment at the word, and Madeline shrugged.
“She’s always been this way. Very prone to picking fights, especially with my mother. I always tell her she’s too defensive, and that Mom’s way of showing she cares is, you know … overbearing, I guess, at times. But then she just accuses me of being on Mom’s team, so it’s really a bit of a lose-lose sit-”
“Of course she’s difficult,” Aldo said, still stuck on the initial verbiage. “She’s more than difficult, actually. She’s—” He paused, struggling to explain. “Well, within any equation, there’s variables,” he attempted, and Madeline, like many people he spoke with, gave him a look of amusement mixed with confusion. “You would know this, obviously,” he recalled. “You’re a scientist.”
“Of sorts,” Madeline permitted, and he nodded.
“Most people are relatively simple. A combination of environmental factors, genetic proclivities, inherent traits…”
He checked that she was with him. “I follow,” she said, nodding as if she did.
“Right,” he said. “So most people are fairly straightforward functions of x and y, behaving within constraints of expectation.”
“Social constructs?” Madeline guessed.
“Presumably,” Aldo confirmed. “So within those parameters, some people are exponential functions, but still largely predictable. Regan”—Charlotte, he reminded himself too late, but dismissed it as a foregone error—”isn’t just difficult, she’s convoluted. She’s contradictory—honest even when she lies,” he offered as an example, “and rarely the same version twice. She’s confounding, really intricate. Infinite.” That was the word, he thought, clinging to it once he found it. “She’d have to be measured infinitely in order to be calculated, which no one could ever do.”
He glanced at Madeline, who was giving him a bemused half-smile.
“Does that make sense?”
“Yes,” Madeline said slowly, “it does.”
Aldo decided he liked Madeline.
“Anyway,” he said, figuring he’d gone on long enough. People typically didn’t care for his theorizing, and though there was more he could say on the subject, he forced himself to summarize neatly with, “You shouldn’t apologize for her.”
“No,” Madeline agreed, “I suppose I shouldn’t.”
They were quiet for a moment, as it felt like her turn to speak. She seemed more interested in her own thoughts, though, and when she folded her arms over her chest, Aldo caught the evidence of raised gooseflesh on her arms. His phone buzzed in his pocket; probably his dad asking if he was behaving himself. Try not to stare at the ceiling when other people talk, Masso usually said, which Aldo found difficult. At the moment, his ceiling was a sky full of stars. If he’d had a joint and silence, it would be an evening like any other spent atop his roof.
Except that it wasn’t, he remembered, because Regan was somewhere nearby.
“You’re cold,” he noted to Madeline, observing the way she’d curled around herself for warmth. “You should go back in. I’ll be out here,” he said, and then lied, “I’ll get a drink.”