She was totally h4wt -- that is to say, hot. It was like looking at that picture of a vase and noticing that it was also two faces. I could see that Van was just Van, but I could also see that she was hella pretty, something I'd never noticed.
Of course, Darryl had known it all along, and don't think that I wasn't bummed out anew when I realized this.
"You can't tell your dad, you know," she said. "You'd put us all at risk." Her eyes were closed and her chest was rising up and down with her breath, which was distracting in a really embarrassing way.
"Yeah," I said, glumly. "But the problem is that I know he's just totally full of it. If you pulled my dad over and made him prove he wasn't a child-molesting, drug-dealing terrorist, he'd go berserk. Totally off-the-rails. He hates being put on hold when he calls about his credit-card bill. Being locked in the back of a car and questioned for an hour would give him an aneurism."
"They only get away with it because the normals feel smug compared to the abnormals. If everyone was getting pulled over, it'd be a disaster. No one would ever get anywhere, they'd all be waiting to get questioned by the cops. Total gridlock."
Woah.
"Van, you are a total genius," I said.
"Tell me about it," she said. She had a lazy smile and she looked at me through half-lidded eyes, almost romantic.
"Seriously. We can do this. We can mess up the profiles easily. Getting people pulled over is easy."
She sat up and pushed her hair off her face and looked at me. I felt a little flip in my stomach, thinking that she was really impressed with me.