Were she capable of reading his thoughts, Anye would have laughed at the idea of attracting chaos and possibly suggested it was the other way around. She had no idea what he was thinking however. There was a time when she could read him like a book, but these days? He was becoming more and more a mystery to her. His thoughts and motivations were something she agonized over the past few months, picked apart with a fine tooth comb. She wasn't sure how close to the truth her theories were, but none of them were good. Anye smiled. "Who would you have been friends with if not me? Nobody half as fun. Nobody with the imagination I had. I kept things exciting. The other kids didn't know what they were missing." And then Anye would have had no friends. Other little girls avoided her like the plague, as though they could all see the invisible target on her back. Her mom had once held out some hope this would change, but it was no good. Mrs. Lee came to accept it somewhere around junior high, when most girls were all about boy bands and clothes, and Anye wanted fencing lessons and aspired to building a functioning trebuchet someday. Cammie Lee's hopes almost revived in high school when Anye took on a few extra-curriculars to pad her college applications, but even in drama club and girl's field hockey, there was only so much social stigma the average teenage girl could overlook. There were a few girls that had come to like Anye in those groups, but in a private, 'here only' sort of way.
Anye weighed her options perhaps a little more seriously than was necessary. Subway was faster, and she was kind of tired, but if they walked there, wouldn't Nick be even less likely to want to walk home? She was deeply considering this when he touched her, and she had to admit, there was no feasible way for Nick to ever know her weakness for being touched on her neck by the opposite sex. It wasn't a thing they talked about. Turn-ons didn't exactly come up in regular conversation, and for all she knew Nick thought she was a 30-something-year-old virgin. Alas, Anye was especially sensitive about her neck, and her toes did curl just the slightest bit inside her shoes. She rolled her eyes again as she looked over at him. "You think I'm going to complain in this heat?" she asked, putting up a good front of being unbothered. But she couldn't entirely suppress the shiver. At least he wouldn't know it had nothing to do with the cold. She sighed, smushed the palm of her hand in her ice cream, and then shoved said hand in his face. Hadn't he just said she was quicker than he was?