Siobhan made a half-hearted effort to enjoy herself at the gig. She wanted to have fun, she really did. There was a big part of her that just wanted to lose herself in the music, feel the crush of the others in the crowd. She had thought that the date would be an opportunity to be enthusiastic. The group-injected enthusiasm of the crowd, though, merely served to heighten whatever emotion it was that she was letting consume her. Malaise, maybe. She hoped she was coming off as pensive or pious to her date.
Rob knew that she couldn’t care less about the band or his company. He’d asked her to come because she had a bit of a reputation as a good time girl. He’d never seen that side of her, though. The Siobhan he knew from those quick conversations in the hall outside their Canadian Social History classroom seemed to have perennial dark circles under her eyes. She tried to hide the bags with concealer. She couldn’t hide the vacant look in her eyes, the one that looked through him even as she agreed to come out with him. Rob was not one of those undergraduate boys who postured philosophically, yet even he might have said that she looked as if she had lost the spark in her soul, at least that part of the soul that was reflected in the expressions of the eyes. Whatever else she might be going through, whatever else made her tired and drained, she still had said yes to him. This fact made Rob feel slightly better about the fact that their date so far had been, if not an absolute nightmare, at least an exercise in futility.
