"What interests you?" He asked. In all honesty, the boy can't actually recall his exact words; it is an educated approximation.
A little alarmed that the person sitting next to her hands-on-admirer had broken from his stupor of silence and entered into her auditory ingress of awareness, not through a staggering presence but rather because the fluctuations of his sound, which had been up until that point closemouthed, triggered the hammer to hit the anvil, creating subtle waves of frequency within the cochlea where the reverberations trickled to the auditory lobe and ferried via action potentials and ion channels where her brain processed his verbal gesticulations.
A similar concept is how one person, it is almost always the one with the croakiest, tone deaf voice combined with a profound self-consciousness, decides to postpone his entrance into happy birthday until the coming of the second line because he erroneously believes that his delayed crooning will thus go unregistered –yet, if only he had thought it through he would’ve realized that our brains work not by a process of selection (we can’t choose what we hear) but by a process of differentiation: which allows the person living in LA to acclimate to the sounds of sirens and the Vermonter to acclimate to the sounds of silence. It is the reason why we can walk down a familiar road and rarely recall the colors of the buildings, the reason why you probably would be hard pressed to name the president on the face of a Nickel, and unfortunately, why the murmurs of a man trying to mask his voice become even more noticeable. If only he had thought through this, he could’ve concealed his epiglottal yelps and the ensuing embarrassment.
What is even sadder is that most sixth graders in symphonic band know the unnecessity of a delayed entree: lack of skill can be adequately eclipsed by the bellows of the other instruments.
Although one could suggest that given her supporting role as a waitress her ear would’ve been even more attuned to these subtle changes of frequency, we can only postulate that the reason for her rotation –the degree to which she rotated is known with certainty (20 degrees) –is the same reason that a deer cuffs its ear in the woods. It is also known with certainty that as she concluded her rotation the word "what?" simultaneously flowed from her mouth (to be exact it also flowed with assistance from her nasal cavity).
She assumed he was talking to her and she was correct in her assumption but her full, undivided attention, which he had not factored into his causal analysis, gave him no ballast to steady his keel and threw him off balance. It was this anchor of attention that made him even more self-conscious as he was forced to repeat the question. Although some may think it advantageous that he already knew the question (because he had rehearsed it seconds ago), he saw himself as disadvantaged because he would much rather escape into thought about how to break the silence with other filler questions. The words, through no great virtue or accomplishment of his own, eventually stammered their way out (a larger percentage of airflow than preferred dripped from his naval cavity). The only thought that evaded autopilot was that it would be cloddish to reiterate the same exact sentence so he rephrased it.
"What do you like to do?"
Had he not taken public speaking in high school, we are unsure if he would've acquired the impromptu skills to think on his feet.
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