Mad, Bad & Dangerous to Know - Samira Ahmed Page 0,26
I raise my palm, twisting my fingers upward in my desi-fied WTF gesture.
“You are such an unusual combination of American, French, and Indian. It’s fascinating,” he says.
“Ugh. You sound like a nineteenth-century anthropologist discovering a ‘lost’ tribe.”
He stops grinning and takes my hand.
I’m annoyed, but I let him. And my skin feels like it’s cupped around a lit sparkler.
“I’m sorry. That’s not what I was trying to convey. At all. What I meant to say, and failed at, was that I’ve never met anyone like you. You’re so . . . unexpected.” Alexandre looks at me with those hazel-y eyes and presses my hand. Bending his head lower, closer to mine, he whispers, “You are singular.”
His face hovers inches from mine.
“As opposed to plural?”
Dammit. We were about to have a moment. And I come up with a dad joke? He’s right. There is no one like me. I explain the singular-plural play on words. He laughs politely and releases my hand.
I would like to be the girl in the Instagram picture, like Rekha, all big smiles and confidence and expectations that are always met. But I’m the self-sabotaging dork who falls for physics jokes and snorts sometimes. What’s the opposite of je ne sais quoi? Because that’s me. Despite my Frenchiness. Whenever I need it most, I have no chill.
An extremely pregnant pause passes between us. Apparently, I’m the human form of an electricity dampener. I open my mouth a couple times, searching for something to say. “So . . . you said there were no other references to the raven-haired woman, right?” At least I’m on topic.
Alexandre looks down and touches the file with his fingertips. His voice now is all business. “There’s nothing else in the Delacroix library, but I haven’t searched through all the Dumas archives. These are only some of the letters and documents we have from the 1840s. There’re probably more stuffed away in storage boxes.”
When they speak, the French end their sentences with a period. Americans seem to end all our sentences with exclamation marks. The French talk with a flat intonation—an almost totally unaccented language. And there are instants, even knowing the language, even being French, when the neutral accent sounds harsh to my ear. Like I’ve done something wrong, but have no idea what.
This is one of those moments.
I try to breathe through it. I know Alexandre felt that charge between us. He’s the one that took my hand. Was I wrong about that, too, about him leaning in? Maybe he’s being nonchalant, friendly, French. Or maybe I’m overreacting, and our entire interaction only feels totally awkward to me.
I’m still mentally grasping for something to say when Alexandre turns back to me. “Can I interest you in a little more detective work?” When he smiles, the color of his eyes shifts a little toward amber, like the eyes of this old stray cat in my neighborhood. Hyde Park has a weirdly large number of strays. And one, a fluffy cinnamon cat, used to hang out by the front porch a lot. There were times when she seemed to understand what I was saying—even if I wasn’t speaking to her. She was well fed, everyone on the block saw to that, but this cat took a particular pride in her appearance. I have no idea how she managed to have fur that never looked matted. And sometimes when she looked at me with those amber eyes, it would make me think of the old jinn stories my nani would tell me from when she was a girl in India. About how some jinn might protect you. About how you can sense it.
As far as I know, there are no corporeal French-speaking jinn, but I could be wrong, because Alexandre certainly has the enigmatic eyes for it.
Alexandre’s phone buzzes and snaps me out of my daydreaming. He glances at it, frowns, and then quickly puts it away. “What do you say?”
“Sorry. Sure. I mean, yes, definitely.” I reach for the file.
He places his fingers on mine, staying my hand. “Perhaps tomorrow or the day after? I have some things I have to attend to this evening.”