The Statistical Probability of Love at First Sight

by Jennifer E. Smithwr

“Don’t be too sure,” he says stiffly. He’d been sitting close, his body angled toward hers, but now he moves away again, just barely, but enough so that she notices.

  Hadley leans forward as he leans back, as if the two of them are joined by some invisible force. It’s not as if her father’s wedding is a particularly cheery subject for her, and she told him about that, didn’t she? “So will you get to see your parents while you’re home?”

  He nods.

  “That’ll be nice,” she says. “Are you guys close?”

  He opens his mouth, then closes it again when the beverage cart comes rolling down the aisle, the cans making bright noises as they clink against one another, the bottles rattling. The flight attendant steps on the brake once she’s past their row, locking it into place, then turns her back to them to begin taking orders.

  It happens quickly, so quickly that Hadley almost doesn’t see it at all: Oliver reaches into the pocket of his jeans for a coin, which he thumbs into the aisle with a quick snap of his wrist. Then he reaches across the sleeping woman, grabbing the coin with his left hand and snaking his right one into the cart, emerging with two miniature bottles of Jack Daniel’s wrapped in his fist. He tucks them into his pocket, along with the coin, just seconds before the flight attendant twists back in their direction.

  “Can I get you anything?” she asks, her eyes sweeping across Hadley’s stricken face, Oliver’s flushed cheeks, and the old woman still snoring with vigor at the end of the row.

  “I’m okay,” Hadley manages.

  “Me, too,” Oliver says. “Cheers, though.”

  When the flight attendant is gone again, the cart moving safely away, Hadley stares at him openmouthed. He pulls the bottles out and hands one to her, then twists the cap off the other with a shrug.

  “Sorry,” he says. “I just thought if we were going to do the whole ‘talking about our families’ thing, a bit of whiskey might be in order.”

  Hadley blinks at the bottle in her hand. “You planning to work this off or something?”

  Oliver cracks a smile. “Ten years’ hard labor?”

  “I was thinking something more along the lines of washing dishes,” she jokes, passing the bottle back to him. “Or maybe carrying luggage.”

  “I’m assuming you’ll make me do that anyway,” he says. “Don’t worry, I’ll leave a tenner on the seat when I go. I didn’t want a hassle, even though I’m eighteen and we must be closer to London than to New York at this point. You like whiskey?”

  Hadley shakes her head.

  “Have you ever tried it?”

  “No.”

  “Give it a go,” he says, offering it to her again. “Just a sip.”

  She unscrews the cap and brings the bottle to her mouth, already grimacing as the smell reaches her nose, harsh and smoky and far too strong. The liquid burns her throat as it goes down, and she coughs hard, her eyes watering, then screws the cap on and hands the bottle back to him.

  “It’s like licking a campfire,” she says, making a face. “That’s awful.”

  Oliver laughs as he finishes off his bottle.

  “Okay, so now you’ve got your whiskey,” she says. “Does that mean we get to talk about your family?”

  “Why do you care?”

  “Why wouldn’t I?”

  He sighs, a sound that comes out almost like a groan. “Let’s see,” he says eventually. “I have three older brothers—”

  “Do they all still live in England?”

  “Right. Three older brothers who still live in England,” he says, unscrewing the cap on the second bottle of whiskey. “What else? My dad wasn’t happy when I chose Yale over Oxford, but my mum was really pleased because she went to uni in America, too.”

  “Is that why he didn’t come over with you at the start of school?”

  Oliver gives her a pained look, like he’d rather be anywhere but here, then finishes off the last of the whiskey. “You ask an awful lot of questions.”

  “I told you that my dad left us for another woman and that I haven’t seen him in over a year,” she says. “Come on. I’m pretty sure there’s no family drama that could top that.”

  “You didn’t tell me that,” he says. “That you haven’t seen him in so long. I thought you just hadn’t met her.”

  Now it’s Hadley’s turn to fidget in her seat. “We talk on the phone,” she says. “But I’m still too angry to see him.”

  “Does he know that?”

  “That I’m angry?”

  Oliver nods.

  “Of course,” she says, then tilts her head at him. “But we’re not talking about me, remember?”

  “I just find it interesting,” he says, “that you’re so open about it. Everyone’s always wound up about something in my family, but nobody ever says anything.”

  “Maybe you’d be better off if you did.”

  “Maybe.”

  Hadley realizes they’ve been whispering, leaning close in the shadows cast by the yellow reading light of the man in front of them. It almost feels as if they’re alone, as if they could be anywhere, on a park bench somewhere or in a restaurant, miles below, with their feet firmly on the ground. She’s close enough to see a small scar above his eye, the ghost of a beard along his jawline, the astonishing length of his eyelashes. Without even really meaning to, she finds herself leaning away, and Oliver looks startled by her sudden movement.

  “Sorry,” he says, sitting up and pulling his hand back from the armrest. “I forgot you get claustrophobic. You must be dying.”

  “No,” she says, shaking her head. “Actually, it hasn’t been so bad.”

  He juts his chin at the window, where the shade’s still pulled down. “I still think it would help if you could see outside. It feels small in here even to me with no windows.”

  “That’s my dad’s trick,” Hadley tells him. “The first time it happened, he told me to imagine the sky. But that only helps when the sky’s above you.”

  “Right,” Oliver says. “Makes sense.”

  They both fall silent, studying their hands as the quiet stretches between them.

  “I used to be afraid of the dark,” Oliver says after a moment. “And not just when I was little. It lasted till I was nearly eleven.”

  Hadley glances over, not sure what to say. His face looks more boyish now, less angular, his eyes rounder. She has a sudden urge to put her hand over his, but she stops herself.

  “My brothers teased me like mad, switching off the lights whenever I walked into a room and then howling about it. And my dad just hated it. He had absolutely no sympathy. I remember I’d go into my parents’ bedroom in the middle of the night and he’d tell me to stop being such a little girl. Or he’d tell me stories about monsters in the wardrobe, just to wind me up. His only advice was always just ‘Grow up.’ A real gem, right?”

  “Parents aren’t always right about everything,” Hadley says. “Sometimes it just takes a while to figure that out.”

  “But then there was this one night,” he continues, “when I woke up and he was plugging in a night-light next to my bed. I’m sure he thought I was asleep, or else he’d never be caught dead, but I didn’t say anything, just watched him plug it in and switch it on so there was this little circle of blue light.”

  Hadley smiles. “So he came around.”

  “In his own way, I guess,” Oliver says. “But I mean, he must’ve bought it earlier in the day, right? He could’ve given it to me when he got back from the shop, or plugged it in before I went to bed. But he had to do it when nobody was watching.” He turns to her, and she’s struck by how sad he looks. “I’m not sure why I told you that.”

  “Because I asked,” she says simply.

  He draws in a jagged breath, and Hadley can see that his cheeks are flushed. The seat in front of her bobbles as the man readjusts the doughnut-shaped pillow around his neck. The cabin is quiet but for the hum of the air-conditioning, the soft flap of pages being turned, the occasional snuffling and sh
uffling of passengers trying their best to endure these last hours before landing. Every now and then a patch of turbulence sets the plane rocking gently, like a boat in a storm, and Hadley thinks again of her mother, of the awful things she said to her back in New York. Her eyes fall to the backpack at her feet, and not for the first time, she wishes they weren’t somewhere over the Atlantic right now, so that she might try calling again.

  Beside her, Oliver rubs his eyes. “I have a brilliant idea,” he says. “How about we talk about something other than our parents?”

  Hadley bobs her head. “Definitely.”

  But neither of them speaks. A minute ticks by, then another, and as the silence between them swells, they both begin to laugh.

  “I’m afraid we might have to discuss the weather if you don’t come up with something more interesting,” he says, and Hadley raises her eyebrows.

  “Me?”

  He nods. “You.”

  “Okay,” she says, cringing even before she’s formed the words, but the question has been blooming inside of her for hours now, and the only thing to do, finally, is to ask it: “Do you have a girlfriend?”

  Oliver’s cheeks redden, and the smile she catches as he ducks his head is maddeningly cryptic; it is, Hadley decides, a smile with one of two meanings. The bigger part of her worries that it must be charitable, designed to make her feel less awkward about both the question and the coming answer, but something else keeps her wondering all the same: Maybe—just maybe—it’s something even kinder than that, something full of understanding, a seal on the unspoken agreement between them that something is happening here, that this just might be a kind of beginning.

  After a long moment, he shakes his head. “No girlfriend.”

  With this, it seems to Hadley that some sort of door has opened, but now that it finally has, she isn’t quite sure how to proceed. “How come?”

  He shrugs. “Haven’t met anyone I want to spend fifty-two years with, I guess.”

  “There must be a million girls at Yale.”

  “Probably more like five or six thousand, actually.”

  “Mostly Americans, though, huh?”

  Oliver smiles, then leans sideways, bumping her gently with his shoulder. “I like American girls,” he says. “I’ve never dated one, though.”

  “That’s not part of your summer research?”

  He shakes his head. “Not unless the girl happens to be afraid of mayo, which, as you know, dovetails nicely with my study.”

  “Right,” Hadley says, grinning. “So did you have a girlfriend in high school?”

  “In secondary school, yes. She was nice. Quite fond of video games and pizza deliveries.”

  “Very funny,” Hadley says.

  “Well, I guess we can’t all have epic loves at such a young age.”

  “So what happened to her?”

  He tilts his head back against the seat. “What happened? I guess what always happens. We graduated. I left. We moved on. What happened to Mr. Pizza?”

  “He did more than deliver pizzas, you know.”

  “Breadsticks, too?”

  Hadley makes a face at him. “He broke up with me, actually.”

  “What happened?”

  She sighs, adopting a philosophical tone. “What always happens, I guess. He saw me talking to another guy at a basketball game and got jealous, so he broke up with me over e-mail.”

  “Ah,” Oliver says. “Epic love at its most tragic.”

  “Something like that,” she agrees, looking over to find him watching her closely.

  “He’s an idiot.”

  “That’s true,” she says. “He was always sort of an idiot, in hindsight.”

  “Still,” Oliver says, and Hadley smiles at him gratefully.

  It was just after they’d broken up that Charlotte had called—in a display of phenomenal timing—to insist that Hadley bring a date to the wedding.

  “Not everyone’s getting a plus one,” she’d explained, “but we thought it might be fun for you to have someone there with you.”

  “That’s okay,” Hadley said. “I’ll be fine on my own.”

  “No, really,” Charlotte insisted, completely oblivious to Hadley’s tone. “It’s no trouble at all. Besides,” she said, her voice dropping to a conspiratorial whisper, “I heard you have a boyfriend.”

  In fact, Mitchell had broken up with her just three days earlier, and the drama of it was still tailing her through the halls at school with the persistence of some kind of invincible monster. It was something she didn’t particularly want to discuss at all, much less with a future stepmother she’d never even met.

  “You heard wrong,” Hadley had said shortly. “I’ll be okay flying solo.”

  The truth was, even if they were still dating, her father’s wedding was pretty much the last place she’d ever be inclined to take somebody. Having to endure the night in a disaster of a bridesmaid dress while watching a bunch of adults do the “Y.M.C.A.” would be hard enough to bear on her own; having company would only make it worse. The potential for secondhand embarrassment was sky-high: Dad and Charlotte kissing amid clinking glasses, stuffing cake into each other’s faces, making overly cutesy speeches.

  Hadley remembers thinking, when Charlotte extended the invitation all those months ago, that there was nobody in the world she hated enough to subject them to that. But now, looking at Oliver, she wonders if she got it wrong. She wonders if it was really that there had been nobody in the world she liked enough, nobody she felt so comfortable with that she’d allow them to witness this uneven milestone, this dreaded event. To her surprise, she has a fleeting image of Oliver in a tuxedo, standing at the door of a banquet hall, and as ridiculous as that is—the wedding isn’t even black-tie—the idea of it makes her stomach flutter. She swallows hard, blinking away the thought.

  Beside her, Oliver glances over at the old woman, still snoring in uneven rasps, her mouth twitching every now and then.

  “I’ve actually got to use the loo,” he admits, and Hadley nods.

  “Me, too. I bet we can squeeze past her.”

  He unbuckles his seat belt and half stands in a jerky motion, bumping into the seat in front of him and eliciting a dirty look from the woman seated there. Hadley watches as he tries to maneuver past the old lady without waking her, and when they’ve both managed to make it out of their row, she follows him down the aisle and toward the back of the plane. A bored-looking flight attendant in a folded-down jump seat looks up from her magazine as they pass.

  The OCCUPIED lights are on above both bathroom doors, so Hadley and Oliver stand in the small square of space just outside. They’re close enough that she can smell the fabric of his shirt, the whiskey still on his breath; not so close that they’re touching, exactly, but she can feel the hair on his arm tickle hers, and she’s again seized by a sudden longing to reach for his hand.

  She lifts her chin to find that he’s looking down at her with the same expression she saw on his face earlier, when she woke up with her head on his shoulder. Neither of them moves and neither speaks; they just stand there watching each other in the darkness, the engines whirring beneath their feet. It occurs to her that—impossibly, improbably—he might be about to kiss her, and she inches just the tiniest bit closer, her heart skidding around in her chest. His hand brushes against hers, and Hadley feels it like a bolt of electricity, the shock of it moving straight up her spine. To her surprise, Oliver doesn’t pull away; instead, he fits his hand into hers as if anchoring her there, then tugs gently, moving her closer.

  It almost feels as if they’re completely alone—no captain or crew, no rows of dozing passengers stretching the length of the plane—and Hadley takes a deep breath and tips her head to look up at him. But then the door to one of the bathrooms is suddenly thrown open, bathing them in a too-bright wedge of light, and a little boy walks out trailing a long ribbon of toilet paper from one of his red shoes. And just like that, the moment is over.

  7


  4:02 AM Eastern Standard Time

  9:02 AM Greenwich Mean Time

  Hadley wakes suddenly, without even realizing she’d been sleeping again. The cabin is still mostly dark, but the edges of the windows are now laced with daylight, and all around them people are beginning to stir, yawning and stretching and passing trays of rubbery bacon and eggs back across to the flight attendants, who look impossibly fresh and remarkably unwrinkled after such a long trip.

  Oliver’s head is resting on her shoulder this time, pinning Hadley into place, and when her attempt to stay perfectly still instead results in a kind of twitchy tremor that sets her arm in motion, he lurches up as if he’s been shocked.

  “Sorry,” they say at the exact same time, then Hadley says it again: “Sorry.”

  Oliver rubs his eyes like a child awakening from a bad dream, then blinks at her, staring for just a beat too long. Hadley tries not to take it personally, but she knows she must look awful this morning. Earlier, when she stood in the tiny bathroom and regarded herself in the even tinier mirror, she’d been surprised to see how pale she looked, her eyes puffy from the stale air and high altitude.

  She’d squinted at her reflection, marveling at the fact that Oliver was bothering with her at all. She wasn’t normally the kind of girl to worry too much about hair and makeup, and she didn’t tend to spend a lot of time in front of the mirror, but she was small and blond and pretty enough in the ways that seemed to count for the boys at her school. Still, the image in the mirror had been somewhat alarming, and that was before she’d nodded off for the second time. She can’t imagine what she must look like now. Every inch of her feels achy with exhaustion, and her eyes sting; there’s a soda stain near the collar of her shirt, and she’s almost afraid to discover what might be going on with her hair at the moment.

  But Oliver looks different, too; it’s odd, seeing him in daylight, like switching the channel to high-definition. His eyes are still caked with sleep and there’s a line running from his cheek to his temple where it was pressed against her shirt. But it’s more than that; he looks pale and tired and drained, his eyes red-rimmed and somehow very faraway.