Down and Across: Chapters 7–16

“Uggghhhh.” I fell over sideways like someone had yelled timber, my legs still crisscrossed and arms covering my mortified face.

"You’re a caricature of a real person.”
“Do not mansplain me,” Fiora snapped. "So what? I’m a bunch of different caricatures. You’re a bunch of caricatures. This is the one I am right now. You didn’t see me in Spain over winter break. You didn’t see me last summer when I wrote puzzles obsessively. Every day—sometimes multiple puzzles a day! I didn’t stop until the Times finally accepted one.”

She leaned into me like she was divulging one of the secrets of the universe.

It was a balmy summer night, made bearable by a whistling breeze that kept teasing us.

Trent and I bonded on our walk about Fiora’s elusiveness and her other quirks, like how fidgety she would get sometimes, or how she would bend straws into halves and quarters and eighths.

"I need to apologize,” she began, and we simultaneously took a deep breath, “for my erratic behavior the last two times you visited my office..."

It was another professor's office, but he was out on sabbatical for the year.

Because even if I was beginning to like her—even if my heart turned into a twisty ball of rubber bands whenever she opened those unearthly lips—even if Fiora painted one self-portrait with her staggering beauty and another with her unwavering strength, and I wanted the entire gallery—she was in college and had a boyfriend.

His two teenage daughters spent most of the bus ride scrolling through Instagram, “uh-huh”-ing their dad’s every word. I discreetly paid attention.

At first he thought I was lying. He’d just finished his freshman year at Yale; he was a smart, discerning guy with every reason to be skeptical. But the longer I went on, the more he saw my genuine desperation.

He believes in laissez-faire values!

Fiora assured me that most beginner cruciverbalists don’t come up with swanky themes on their first try.

I scrabbled through the file cabinet of my mind. There were a million drawers and files to pull from, and they were constantly getting shuffled around.

Every corner of our cul-de-sac was covered in a thin coat of frost: car windshields, stray soccer balls, even the littlest blades of grass.

“I haven’t figured out the details yet. Hmm. What could you, Saaket Ferdowsi, possibly do that would give me unadulterated pleasure?”

“Saaket, they’ll be so vulnerable. That’s why they’re at the zoo, to feel loved vicariously through the giant pandas and koala bears and other cuddly animals."

My parents used to watch it all the time, and from the way they raved, it sounded like a dramatic, daredevil-ish, entertaining-enough smorgasbord of television.

There was a palpable moment of silence.

An ambulance blazed down New Hampshire, wailing like a petulant child.

I ran back to the hostel, but not before getting soaked by the torrential downpour that ensued.

I ran back to the hostel, but not before getting soaked by the torrential downpour that ensued.

We crossed a small bridge to enter the Asia Trail, the first section of the zoo, where we were surrounded by gentle streams and gangly bamboo.

“Look, I’m sorry for my soliloquy of sucky parenting over there. I didn’t mean to get fired up like that.”

"How magnanimous of you,” I said. Big words felt right for our conversation.
"You’re welcome.”

I looked around, unnerved, and Jeanette raised a dubious eyebrow.

“Your choice of a pickup venue is also quite baffling,” Jeanette continued.

She wasn’t interesting, per se, but she was interested.

“It sounds silly, but they don't mobilize themselves purely for food and water. They have to fight boredom.”

"Confining elephants to a small space with minimal autonomy can lead to serious behavioral problems. Increased aggression, chewing their own body parts, unnatural lethargy. These are all problems that would inevitably shave time off the elephant’s life span. All of this space is an investment in the elephant’s longevity.”

"Confining elephants to a small space with minimal autonomy can lead to serious behavioral problems. Increased aggression, chewing their own body parts, unnatural lethargy. These are all problems that would inevitably shave time off the elephant’s life span. All of this space is an investment in the elephant’s longevity.”

I’d never seen so many flamingos in one place. They sounded like clown cars in a traffic jam, honking over each other! It was a beautiful cacophony of noise, but Jeanette focused on their feathers.

He said he was on his way to feed the panda, but Jeanette wouldn’t let him leave, so he reluctantly corroborated her hypothesis.

Move a little to feign amusement, but don’t forget to scan the room for a really good time.

The volume dropped from earsplitting to a more bearable loud when the DJ played a sultry, slower song.

“I didn’t think you smoked,” she said.
"Intermittently,” Jeanette replied.

To be clear, it wasn't just me eye-stalking Fiora; our eyes met exactly twice. Both times I apologized profusely with my expression, and both times hers just stared right through me.

Only in the most special of sweaty basements can Robin prosper over Batman in a blaze of carnal glory.

He said the words without wavering, as if he were just stating another fact, like the color of his eyes or what he had for dinner.

I used to stare past the cul-de-sac, which connected to the rest of our quaint neighborhood, which connected to a small street that intersected our town’s main street.

What if thousands of years ago, one man looked out a window and thought, so he wrote about his thoughts, and someone later thought to paint the thinking scene, and someone else thought to depict a dramatic window-gazing thinking scene in a movie, and it proliferated decades of movie scenes, sometimes serving as a pivotal plot moment, sometimes just filling time, and eventually this scene made its mark on me, and that was why I’d think the way I thought, or thunk.