Free The Statistical Probability Of Love At First Sight by Jennifer E. Smith

“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