Spencer shrugged and sat back, folding his arms over his chest in temporary surrender.
Chip returned just as the guacamole cart came rattling up to the table. They all watched a man with an alarmingly wide smile whack avocados in half and smash them to bits in a huge stone mortar. It looked like a carefree job, one that helped you get out all your aggressions and frustrations. Scarlett watched him enviously as he smacked down the pestle, grinding in the garlic and onions and cilantro. He would never need therapy. Anytime he had a problem, an avocado would meet a terrible death.
“Obviously, um, tonight’s on me,” Chip said as the waiter approached. “I just thought, you know, dinner…”
“Thank you,” Lola said politely. She was doing some kind of napkin origami in her lap.
Once they had ordered half the menu (Spencer wasn’t kidding), a fog of silence fell on the table. Lola and Chip kept slipping looks at each other, being tediously, horribly coy. Unlike the silences between Scarlett and Eric, these were full of meaning and potential, and Scarlett wanted no part of them.
“What are you majoring in?” she asked, breaking the silence. She didn’t care, it was just the only question that sprang to mind.
“Oh…yeah.” Chip shuffled his utensils. “We, um, we don’t have to pick our majors for a year or two. So I’m just taking a bunch of classes. And probably row. I guess. They row a lot. In Boston. They have a…big river. I forget what it’s called.”
“The Charles,” Marlene said. “I looked up your school online, and some stuff about Boston.”
Sometimes, Marlene could be really creepy. She could get away with it while she was eleven, but it was going to be a problem really soon.
“Oh right,” Chip said, smiling. “Yeah, I knew it was a name.”
“You knew the name was a name?” Spencer asked politely.
Scarlett thought she felt a kick brush by under the table.
“I won the canoeing trophy,” Marlene said. And this time, she provided an explanation. An extremely long one. The trophy had apparently been the result of some all-day adventure course where Marlene had to navigate around the lake. They were treated to descriptions of every single girl in Marlene’s bunk (she didn’t like them, except for one named Zoe, who sounded like she was now Marlene’s little lieutenant). Chip listened intently. A conversation about eleven-year-olds rowing around a lake was one he could keep up with. And he was a rower. Paddling techniques were exchanged. This had a softening effect on Lola, who liked it when anyone paid attention to Marlene.
After a while, Chip must have felt like he had to share his attentions with another Martin, and so he finally turned to Scarlett.
“Hey, Scarlett,” he said. “Good summer?”
“I…guess?”
“Are you still seeing that guy?” he asked. “Ed…no…”
“Eric,” Scarlett corrected him, far too hastily.
“Right,” Chip said. “Eric. Nice guy. From the show, right?”
“Right…”
Spencer fell back in his chair and looked up at the red-tiled ceiling, probably wishing that it would choose this moment to collapse.
“That guy was an idiot,” Marlene continued. “He was just messing with Scarlett. And he was really—”
“Marlene!” Lola said brightly. “Tell Chip about the Powerkid of the Year competition. Marlene is being considered for…”
The interruption only confirmed Marlene’s suspicion that she was onto something worth talking about.
“Eric was gross,” Marlene went on, leaning toward Chip. “I hated him, and…”
“Hey, is this one spicy?” Spencer said, making a wide reach across the table for the Scotch bonnet salsa, the one that glowed an alarming yellowish-green. Before anyone could answer, he filled a chip with a massive scoop and ate it.
The reaction that followed, while certainly exaggerated, was not entirely fake. The gasping and grabbing all the glasses of water—the banging on the table that drew the attention of all the nearby diners and the waiter—all of it was designed to kill this avenue of conversation. Marlene took the hint this time.
Dinner passed by slowly. Now that he had convened the Martins, Chip had nothing to say to them. It was a puzzling exercise of silences punctuated by the sizzle of fajitas and the endless consumption of pricey smoothies. Marlene tried to keep filling the air, but after a while no one was even pretending to listen to the canoe stories.
Just as they finished up, Spencer’s phone rang.
“I have to take this,” he said, springing out of his chair. He returned a minute later. Scarlett could tell from the tightness of his jaw and the way he fixed his eyes on the table and didn’t play around anymore—the call had been about the audition, and the news had not been good.
“Anyone want dessert?” Chip asked cheerfully.
Demo version limitation
ACT II