“That’s pretty cool,” Seth decided after a moment.

However foolish it was, she felt a surge of pride that she might have avoided nerddom after all. “But I’d want to know more, wouldn’t you?”

She’d caught his interest. “Like what?”

“Why did they choose this particular house. What are their goals? What is the status of their relationship? Who handles the money, which indicates the disposition of power, and why? If you study people, you see the patterns.”

“How come it matters?”

“I don’t understand.”

“Who cares?”

She considered. “Well, if you understand the patterns, the social picture on a large scale, you learn why people behave in certain manners.”

“What if they don’t fit?”

Bright boy, she thought on another, deeper wave of pride. “Everyone fits some pattern. You factor in background, genetics, education, social strata, religious and cultural roots.”

“You get paid for that?”

“Yes, I suppose I do.”

“Weird.”

Now, she concluded, she had definitely been relegated to nerd status. “It can be interesting.” She racked her brain to come up with an example that would salvage his opinion of her. “I did this experiment once in several cities. I arranged for a man to stand on the street and stare up at a building.”

“Just stare at it?”

“That’s right. He stood there and stared up, shading his eyes from the sun when he had to. Before long someone stopped beside him and stared up at the same building. Then another and another, until there was a crowd of people, all looking up at that building. It took much longer for anyone to actually ask what was going on, what were they looking at. No one really wanted to be the first to ask because that was an admission that you didn’t see what you assumed everyone else was seeing. We want to conform, we want to fit in, we want to know and see and understand what the person beside us knows and sees and understands.”

“I bet some of them thought someone was going to jump out of a window.”

“Very likely. The average time an individual stood, looking, interrupting their schedule, was two minutes.” She believed she’d caught his imagination again, and so she hurried on. “That’s actually quite a long time to stare at a perfectly ordinary building.”

“That’s pretty cool. But it’s still weird.”

They were coming to the point where he would have to veer off to go to the boatyard. She thought quickly and in a rare move went with impulse. “What do you think would happen if you conducted the same experiment in St. Christopher’s?”

“I don’t know. The same thing?”

“I doubt it.” She sent him a conspirator’s smile. “Want to try it?”

“Maybe.”

“We can head over to the waterfront now. Will your brother worry if you’re a few minutes late? Should you go tell him you’re with me?”

“Nah. Cam doesn’t keep me on a leash. He cuts me some slack time.”

She wasn’t sure how she felt about the loose discipline in that area, but at the moment she was happy to take advantage of it. “Let’s try it, then. I’ll pay you in ice cream.”