The Option Play by Jamie Bennett

Author:Jamie Bennett [Bennett, Jamie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2022-06-28T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 9

We didn’t say anything about avoiding everyone else, but yes, Kellen and I avoided the rest of the people on the boat for the rest of the day. We hung out on the upper deck together and talked a lot about football, mostly. I moved into the sun and then he would move me out of it, I put sunscreen on him and he put more on me and then criticized my burn. I heard a little more about the places he’d lived, and while he told me, I looked them up on my phone so I could see exactly where he was talking about. I thought that maybe I hadn’t been paying great attention during that part of social studies. All those parts of social studies.

Anyway, I learned a lot but he did, too, because mixed in with the football discussion, I talked about social stuff. How to greet people, for example, which included a non-scary smile and not counting the number of times you pumped their hand. How not to stare at them until you made them sweat or run away. Little things that I would have thought he’d have known but somehow, he’d missed them.

He listened and took notes on his phone as I talked, and he asked me questions, too. Questions like, “Would you say, ‘nice to meet you’ or ‘pleased to meet you?’ I’ve noticed that around sixty-eight percent of the people I’m introduced to use ‘nice’ instead of ‘pleased.’”

“Either is good. Just don’t say it with quite so much eye contact,” I recommended.

“Eye contact makes people believe that you’re trustworthy. Any number of psychological studies could tell you that, and all you need is for them to believe it. It’s about perception and image, Caitlyn.”

“That much eye contact makes people perceive and imagine that you’re a serial killer, Kellen.” But our talk made me realize exactly how he’d learned this social stuff before. He’d been reading about people, researching how to act, the same way he’d learned how to replace the battery in his car. And as he’d admitted to me then, it was easier to learn if someone showed you.

So I explained that yeah, you should give your hosts a nice compliment, like what Kellen had tried to do with my dad when he’d said that his brown eyes matched our couch. I mentioned that you didn’t need to be quite as specific, that broader things like “I love your house” were better, and to stay away from animal comparisons—he’d also told the Cottonmouth head coach’s wife that her laugh reminded him of a kea parrot from New Zealand. She hadn’t known quite what to do with that, but being a nice lady, she’d ignored it. I offered a few examples of other things to say that wouldn’t lean towards insulting.

It was a fun afternoon. Kellen relaxed a lot, more than I’d ever seen him do besides when I’d rubbed his back earlier in the day. He smiled and laughed and even slouched a little in his chair, and he made me laugh, too.

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