Elizabeth Bevarly - Beauty And The Brain

And now, here Willis stood, in her own home no less, making her feel really, really stupid all over again. It was almost more than she could bear.

“What are you doing here?” she demanded. Instead of waiting for an answer, she turned to her mother. “Mom, what’s he doing here?”

Her mother smiled that soothing, complacent smile that had always made Rosemary feel anything but soothed or complacent.

“Willis is here for the Comet Festival, darling.”

“I’m here to study Bobrzynyckolonycki,” he announced shortly at the same time.

Rosemary blinked at the eight-syllable word that rolled so effortlessly off his tongue. “You’re here to study what?” she asked. “Bobra...Bobriz...” She gave up and asked, instead, “Is that something in the water we should know about?”

Willis frowned at her again. She remembered now that he had always frowned at her, and that she’d actually wondered a time or two what he would look like if he had smiled just once, even with the sunlight glinting off his braces.

“Bob,” he clarified through gritted teeth, as if he couldn’t stand the sound of the word. “Bobrzynyckolonycki is ‘Bob’ to members of the laity, like you.”

She narrowed her eyes at him. She wasn’t sure what he meant by “laity,” but his tone of voice indicated that whatever it was, it certainly wasn’t anything good. Before she could question him about it, however, her mother began to speak again.

“Willis is on sabbatical, dear. MIT has sent him back here to figure out why Bob’s appearances are so regular, and why he always makes his closest pass to the planet right above Endicott. Isn’t that nice?”

Rosemary turned back to look at Willis. She should have expected something like this. He’d always been fascinated by that damned comet.

“MIT?” she echoed.

“Massachusetts Institute of Technology,” he clarified

She frowned at him. “I know what MIT stands for,” she told him.

He arched his brows in surprise.

“I just want to know why you’re here, exactly.”

He nodded. “It’s really very simple, Rosemary. I’ve designed a telescope that will enable me to gauge Bobrzynyckolonycki’s approach to the earth—and, consequently, Endicott—in a rather, shall we say, unorthodox manner. That part—” he added in an offhand tone of voice “—is really much too difficult for someone like you to understand, so I won’t waste my time trying to explain it. Suffice it to say that my study might potentially provide the answers to a number of questions that have puzzled the scientific community for decades.”

Rosemary was too busy steaming at his easy dismissal of her intelligence to respond to his oration. Which was just as well, because evidently, there was a lot more her mother wanted to add.

“Willis has five degrees,” Janet gushed. “Isn’t that amazing? Five, Rosemary. In physics, mathematics, astronomy...” Her voice trailed off and she turned to Willis for help. “What are your other two in, dear?”

“Astrophysical engineering and accounting,” he told her.

Rosemary narrowed her eyes at him again. “Accounting?” she asked, finding that one a trifle out of place.

He smiled, blushing a bit. “For two wild and crazy semesters, I went a little off the deep end and thought about becoming an accountant,” he told her.

She nodded, but refrained from comment.

“There, uh...” he added little sheepishly. “There was a girl involved.”

Rosemary smiled inwardly. His announcement gave her the perfect opportunity to give as good as she was getting. “A girl?” she repeated, punctuating the question with what she hoped was a look of stunned disbelief. “You were actually involved with a girl? Don’t tell me—let me guess. She was an exchange student who couldn’t speak a word of English, from some unreachable little village in the Upper Volta where the average age of the local bachelors was seventy-two.”

Willis eyed her venomously. “Oh, listen to you. You wouldn’t know the Upper Volta from Butternut, Wisconsin.”

Rosemary eyed him back, just as malignantly. “Oh, wouldn’t I?”

Before the argument could escalate, Janet March cut in again. “And here you dropped out of the community college and beauty school, Rosemary.” She punctuated her disappointment with a cluck of regret.

Rosemary bit her lip and dropped her gaze to the floor. More like she’d flunked out of the community college, she recalled. But she’d never tell her mother that, let alone Willis. And beauty school just hadn’t been her thing—there had been too much chemistry involved. Besides, she loved her job as a travel agent. What was the big deal about college anyway?

When she looked up again, Willis was smirking at her. Actually smirking. That pizza-faced little...

Okay, so he was just a twerp now, she amended. His smirk told her that he knew exactly what was going through her head with her little self-evaluation of her failures. It also told her that he agreed more with her mother’s less-than-satisfactory assessment of her.

Rosemary swallowed with some difficulty, reminded herself that she was a thirty-year-old woman with a good job and a full life, and that nobody, not her mother, not even Willis Random, was going to make her feel the way she’d always felt about herself when she was a teenager.

Self-esteem was an insidious thing, very difficult to hold on to. It had taken Rosemary years to build hers up once she’d graduated from high school, and she wasn’t going to let Willis, with his five degrees and his own state-of-the-art engineering feat, tear her down again. She just wasn’t.

“I have a good job, Mom,” she reminded her mother in as level a voice as she could manage.

“You could have been a computer programmer,” her mother reminded her back, “if you’d stayed enrolled at the community college.”

Willis barked out a laugh at that. “You?” he asked Rosemary incredulously. “You were studying computer programming? You’re joking, right? You couldn’t possibly fathom anything as mentally challenging as that.”

Mrs.- March sighed again, this time with even more disappointment. “Yes, I suppose her father and I should have realized when Rosemary started that it wasn’t really the thing for her. But she seemed so intent on it at the time. It was almost as if she were trying to prove something. I just didn’t have the heart to try to talk her out of it.”

Something cold and wet landed hard in the pit of Rosemary’s stomach, but she turned to face Willis fully. “Yeah, me,” she said. “I studied computer programming for a whole semester. Then I realized that you were right about me, Willis. I wasn’t cut out for college. And I certainly wasn’t cut out for science. So I found a job I like just fine. And I’m good at it, too, okay?”

He was silent for a moment, and she wished more than anything in the world that she could understand what that intense expression on his face meant. “So what do you do for a living these days?” he finally asked her.

She almost believed he cared. Almost. “I’m a travel agent,” she replied, telling herself there was no reason for her to feel so defensive.

He nodded. “Then I guess you finally get to visit all those places you used to talk about visiting, hmm?”

Her mother waved her hand airily and smiled. “Oh, Rosemary never goes anywhere, do you, darling? She has a terrible fear of flying, not to mention claustrophobia, and she suffers from violent motion sickness.”

Willis threw Rosemary another odd look at that, but she couldn’t for the life of her figure out what it meant. Instead she cursed him for coming back to Endicott, and wondered at her mother’s assertion that he would be a guest in her house.