Free The Whispers by Lisa Unger

anxiety, maybe even a tendency toward depression? I still didn’t have her on the page. So I stopped and turned around.
    She was scared and mad, her eyebrows arched, her mouth pulled tight. All the other nannies were watching us from the playground fence, moving close together, staring like an angry line of lionesses against the hyena eyeing their adopted cubs.
    “Hey,” she said. “Are you following us?”
    “Uh,” I said. I looked up at the sky, then down at the silver-green-purple pigeon strutting near my foot. He cooed, mocking me. “No. No. Of course not.”
    She did a funny thing with her body. She wasn’t quite squared off with me; she tilted herself away, ready to run if she needed to, back to the safety of the playground. “This is the third day I’ve seen you here.”
    I held up the Shake Shack bag, offered a little shrug. I didn’t have to try to look sheepish and embarrassed. I was.
    “I eat here on my break,” I said. “I’m sorry.”
    “Oh,” she said. She deflated a little, drew in a deep breath. “Oh. Okay.”
    Woop, woop , said the police car on Madison, trying to push its way through traffic. Woop .
    Was she going to apologize? I wondered. If I were writing her, what would I have her do? I’d like to get that little wiggle in her eyebrows, that tightness of uncertainty around her eyes, the just-barely-there embarrassed smile. It’s all those little muscles under the skin; they dance in response to limbic impulses we can’t control. It’s their subtle shifting and moving that make expression.
    “It’s just something you have to look out for, you know?” she said. She looked back at the playground and gave a little wave. The tension dissipated, the line blurring, the nannies began talking among themselves. “When you watch kids at the playground. Especially here in the city.”
    I nodded. “Yeah,” I said. “I get it. No worries.”
    “Okay.”
    Nope. She wasn’t going to say she was sorry. Because she didn’t believe me. She knew I wasn’t there on my break. But she also knew I wasn’t stalking the kids. She started moving back toward the playground. I saw Toby looking at her through the fence.
    “Meggie,” he called. “What’s wrong?”
    “I’m okay, Toby,” she said. “Go play. I’m watching you.”
    She started moving away, going back to him. I didn’t want her to.
    “I saw you a couple of days ago,” I admitted. It just kind of came out.
    She turned back, and I came a step closer. She didn’t back up. I looked up at the sky again, the bare branches, the little brown birds watching us. “I think you’re the prettiest girl I’ve ever seen. I’ve been looking for a chance to talk to you.”
    I’ve never been much good at anything but total honesty. Sometimes it works for you. Then I saw it: a brief, reluctant smile. And I knew I wasn’t sunk—yet. I tried to remember that I wasn’t the loser kid on the school playground. I wasn’t Fatboy anymore. I was okay to look at; I had money. She could like me. Why not?
    “Really,” she said flatly. She looked down at her outfit, another winner—faded jeans, a stained white button-down, a puffy parka with a fur-lined hood, scuffed Ugg boots. She gave me a half-amused, half-flattered look.
    “Really,” I said.
    I could see her scanning through a list of replies. Finally: “That’s the nicest thing anyone has ever said to me.”
    I was sure that wasn’t true. She looked like the kind of girl to whom people said nice things all the time.
    “There’s more where that came from,” I said. I went for a kind of faux-smarmy thing. And this time she smiled for real.
    “Meeegaaaan,” called Toby, whiny, annoyed.
    She backed away again toward the playground, blushing in a really sweet way.
    “Want to get a coffee?” I asked.
    “Uh,” she said. “I don’t know. This is weird.”
    I waited, still thinking to myself: I’m okay. Chicks dig me. I get laid with some frequency. I don’t always pay for it. I’m