Page 131 - What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours

the early issues of her favorite comic books; how very odd it must be to operate

within a story where you’re capable, courageous, droll, at the top of your field
professionally and yet somehow still not permitted the brains to perceive that the
man you see or work with every day is exactly the same person as the superhero
who saves your life at night. “Seems like someone behind the scenes clinging to
the idea that the woman whose attention you can’t get just can’t see ‘the real
you,’ no?”

—

DAY LOOKED FROM face to face. Marie might get on with Thalia; they both
favored grave formality and never letting a single hair fall out of place, though
Marie’s Zaire French accent and her tendency to wear jackets over her shoulders
without putting her arms in the sleeves gave her attitude more impact than

Thalia’s. The society was too small to have a leader, but if they’d had one, Marie
would’ve been it. Sometimes, when Marie and Willa spoke together in French,
glancing around as they did so, Day felt that they were disparaging her mode of
dress, but Ed had reassured her that that was just how people who could only
speak English naturally responded to fluent French speakers. Ed, named after
Edwina Currie, was much easier to get to know. You could chat to her about
anything. If she didn’t understand a reference you made she just said so. Rare,

very rare for anyone Day had met at Cambridge to admit to gaps in their
understanding . . . but Ed would ask to hear more. This puckish, boyish young
woman was black like Marie and a Londoner like Willa, but, as she put it
herself, “a different kind of black, and a different kind of London”—it was hard
to picture a time, place, or opportunity other than university and the Homely
Wench Society for the likes of Ed, Willa, and Marie to find out that they really

got on. For one thing all three had a tendency to assume that everybody else was
joking all the time and responded accordingly—Willa with breezy levity, Marie
with frank disappointment, Ed with various micro-expressions, semi-smiles,
really, that made you want to laugh too, even if you really did mean what you’d
just said.

—

THEO AND HILDE, on the other hand, didn’t think anybody was joking about
anything unless they were explicitly told so. Theodora Ackner, Nebraska’s
finest, was still disconcerted by Europe’s ghosts. Hilde, Ed, and Grainne could
no longer hear them, but the ghosts seemed to wake up again around Theo, since