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I try to catch it in my mouth, but it hits my cheek instead. “Not true. Did you know I was going to do that?”
Miles snorts, then clears his throat. He places his container on my desk, swishes his fork around in it, then rakes a hand through his hair. A few strands stick up in the back, but he doesn’t seem to notice. Not to be outdone by the upper half of his body, one of his legs starts bouncing up and down, like he can’t quite decide which anxious tic to focus on.
Miles… is nervous. Despite his frequent fiddling, it’s a look I haven’t seen on him before. It humanizes him, reminds me he’s still a teenager, not an actual working physicist, and this realization is accompanied by a foreign tug of my heart.
“Okay,” he says on a whoosh of an exhale. “I… want to double major in film.”
I just stare at him, waiting for something else, like I want to double major in film, and my go-to karaoke song is “Spice Up Your Life,” or I want to double major in film, and I’m raising a litter of kittens abandoned by their mother in the seventh-floor lounge.
“I haven’t declared it yet,” he continues. “But I’m going to. I’ve been to my film class a dozen times now, and it’s just an intro class—a prerequisite for the major—but even the syllabus is exciting. That’s ridiculous, right? Getting excited about a syllabus?”
It both is and it isn’t, and if anyone were to derive joy from a syllabus, it’s Miles.
“What kinds of movies do you like?” I ask. “Or, sorry, should I say films?”
“Movies is fine. I’m not one of those purists.” A grin spreads across his face. It’s the brightest one I’ve seen from him yet—I’ve barely seen his teeth up until this point. “I watch a lot of genres”—when I open my mouth to protest, he lifts his eyebrows—“except for the ones you’ve decided I missed out on, but that’s mostly because my favorites… are period pieces.”
“Why would I laugh at any of this? I fucking love period pieces. Men in tailcoats and cravats? Those sweeping shots of the English countryside? That’s the good shit.”
Miles’s posture softens the tiniest bit. “I don’t know. Well—no, that’s not true. I do know. But it’s kind of a long story.”
I link my fingers and tuck them under my chin. “Tell me?” Miles, the secret film buff. I sort of love it.
“So my parents, the professors, they weren’t the biggest fans of TV, but they made this deal with my brother and me growing up,” he says. “We couldn’t watch TV during the week, but if we finished all our homework by Friday afternoon, then we’d get to watch a movie that night. We turned it into this big thing for Shabbat—we’re pretty secular, so we’d do dinner, but my parents were okay with us using electronics. And after dinner, we’d get to watch a movie. Since there was no TV during the week, we always wanted to make it count.”
“Well, sure. You wouldn’t want to waste your one weekly pick,” I say. “Your brother—Max? How old is he?”
Something odd passes across his face, so slight I almost don’t catch it. “Twenty-one.” Then he barrels onward. Guess they aren’t the closest of siblings. “I compiled all these lists in a spreadsheet”—now that sounds like Miles—“making sure I was picking objectively the best movies I possibly could. We went through the AFI list, IMDB, Rolling Stone. And I really latched on to period pieces. Anything with royalty or nobles, or based on an Austen novel. They’re just the best kind of escapism. Plus, the way people insult each other is much better than the way we do it today. There’s nothing more scathing than an insult from the 1800s—like… flapdoodle, or blunderbuss.”
His whole face has changed, eyes lighting up and turning dreamy, and it’s almost unsettling, the way this makes me warm to him. It must be the journalist in me, curious about the parts of Miles he doesn’t show the rest of the world.
“All of that sounds completely and utterly delightful,” I say, unable to help grinning along with him. “Where’s the part where I laugh at you? I’m feeling a little ripped off here.”
“I was very briefly part of a film club in high school that… wasn’t the best,” he says, jaw tightening again. “It was a bunch of guys who wanted to talk about how much they loved American Psycho and Fight Club. It was your typical story: person likes something that isn’t considered ‘cool’; others make fun of them for it.”
“That’s some bullshit. Typical or not.”
“I agree. But thank you. For not laughing.” He returns to his food for a moment while I try to reconcile this new Miles with the old.
“So, what, you want to make movies about science?” I ask. “Period pieces about nineteenth-century physicists?”
“I don’t know yet,” he says, giving the side of my bed a light kick. “It’s only the five hundredth day of freshman year, Barrett. Right now I just want to study what I love. And god help me if I still love it on day one thousand.”
“Then I have just one crucial question for you.” I give him my most serious face. “What’s your favorite Pride and Prejudice?”
Miles taps his fingers on his chin. “I have to go with the 1995 BBC miniseries.”
I groan. “Colin Firth was such a boring Mr. Darcy. He’s way too… Colin Firthy. Nothing excites me about Colin Firth. But then you have the beauty of the 2005 version! Keira Knightley! The hand flex, Miles, the hand flex! It’s just lovely in every way,” I say. “My mom would agree with you, though. It’s the source of one of our biggest arguments to date.”
“You and your mom are really close,” he muses.
I nod. “It’s just the two of us. She, uh, had me when she was pretty young. Nineteen.” And then I brace myself for the judgment that always comes after I tell someone this. Because it’s one thing when someone slut-shames you. It’s completely another when they slut-shame your mom.
But he just says, “That must have been really tough for her.”
“It was. She still graduated in five years, though, which is pretty badass. And then she moved to the suburbs with her darling daughter and opened a stationery shop. She’s been solidly thriving for over a decade and counting. It’s always felt dorky to say this, but she’s like… my favorite person.”
“Not dorky.” He points to himself. “The collection of science books on my shelves at home that I had a nearly impossible time deciding which to leave behind, despite the fact that I was only moving half an hour away? Definitely dorky.”
