958 Lovely Complex

Now here's a fun quandary for the enlightened ones. If a single picture is worth a thousand words, how many words could you quantify into a single smile? 

From where I was sitting, Amanda's silent, stiff, yet ever so polite expression could fit a couple of dictionaries and probably still have room for multiple other languages too. Indeed, her unblinking eyes alone spoke an entire soliloquy of unimaginable horrors that the following evening entailed.

Verbally, she went, "Oh." 

Really no better way she could have put it, I don't think. 

"Samantha's mentioned that you're quite the cook," Mom said. "I hope you won't mind if I allow myself to be the judge of that." 

"Ah…" Amanda's mouth hung loose, mute. The kind where you just have so much to say that you don't know what to say. "I… I don't know if… I'm not sure that I—"