Charmed Thirds_ A Jessica Darling Novel - Megan McCafferty [71]
“Well,” he said when he was finished. “I'm sure that this story will prove to be relevant for many future generations of naive college girls.”
“Don't you have one of those girls waiting for you?” Bastian asked, as I had lost my will to live, let alone speak.
“Oh, right,” he said. And with a swagger, he was off.
“So is his story true?” Bastian asked.
“What did his face say?”
Bastian, it should be noted, is writing a dissertation titled, “Facial Metacommunications: How Physiognomy and Microexpressions Influence Interpersonal Perceptions.” (English is not his first language, but all dissertation titles sound like this.) A large part of it is devoted to the tiny, involuntary facial movements that reveal people's true emotions. Most people can't detect them because they flash past in a blink, but Bastian can.
“He did not seem to be lying,” he admitted. “But I did not want to believe it.”
“Well, believe it,” I said. “Because it's true.”
Bastian laughed. He has a very loud laugh for someone so soft-spoken. His laugh bounces off walls and almost seems to echo, as if he's filling up all the world's open empty spaces with his joy.
“You, bella,” he said, “have very bad taste in men.”
the twenty-ninth
It's said that there are eight million stories in the naked city. Well, it's not true. By my count, there are exactly nine. They can be categorized as such:
1. Urban legends involving cockroaches and/or other vermin and the unlikely human orifices in which they decide to seek shelter and/or reproduce
2. Intoxication tales involving the breakdown of crucial bodily functions
3. Family sagas that seek to explain why the narrator is in therapy
4. Wistful childhood nostalgia for a time when life wasn't so damn complicated
5. Sexual hyperbole
6. 9/11/01
7. Eulogies (unrelated to #6)
8. Character sketches of crazy New Yorkers
9. Romances with crazy New Yorkers gone horribly, horribly wrong
I'm not saying that other stories don't exist, it just seems that these are the types of stories that people care to share with others. The truly fascinating thing about New Yorkers, or, I suppose, humans in general, is that we assume that we are far more interesting than we really are. Why we think total strangers want to hear about the mundane minutiae of our small world, or banal observations about the big world, is beyond me. I guess it's the same compulsive creative impulse shared by bloggers and, to a lesser degree, diarists like myself.
I'm barely two weeks into this gig and bored out of my mind because most people just have no idea how to tell a captivating story. And I disagree with my adviser, who has said that my boredom stems from raging narcissism. I mean, I keep waiting for the teller to get to the good part, or the unexpected plot twist, and more often than not it never comes. Inside, I'm dying to ask more questions, to dig a little deeper, but we're not allowed to influence the storytellers in any way. And so, I find myself embellishing these tales inside my head, just to make them more interesting: “I'm banging this girl and she had a heart-shaped birthmark on her ass . . . which means she's my long-lost twin sister!”
Bastian is an extremely sensitive soul, so it's no wonder he has picked up on my disinterest. He's tried to keep me engaged by quizzing me on speakers' microexpressions. He's trying to teach me to see what he sees.
“Did you see how he tugged the corners of his lips down with his triangularis, then raised his chin by flexing his mentalis?”
“Uh, no.”
“Then he contracted his zygomatic major in a classic smile, just for a split second?”
“No.”
“He wanted us to think that he was sad when talking about the death of his stepfather, but actually he is quite happy about it.”
“Really,” I said, more of a statement than a question.
“Oh, yes,” he said. “Words lie. I see the truth.”
Wouldn't this be useful if Marcus were here?, I thought. I could have Bastian read his thoughts without him having to say a single word. And then I hated myself for thinking about