What does "making to" mean, in the following text?
And I’m left with this girl, this Siren of Mixed Signals, this Norah. She’s a fuck-good kisser, but clearly has some massive consistency issues. I ask her how the fuck she knows Tris, because that is leaving me completely confused, and at first she’s looking at me like I’m this guy she didn’t just start kissing out of nowhere, but then she’s got her hand on my arm in a way that makes me really notice I have an arm, and then she’s making to run away, and at the same time looking at me like I’m some cancer child. Then I take hold of her arm and she resists without really resisting. Finally she pulls away, only to touch my face in this way that reminds me exactly of her kiss. Then she calls me “you poor schmuck.”
The closest thing I can find in dictionary is this:
If you make to do something, you are just going to do it when something interrupts you
It doesn't seem to apply quite right in the quote. It makes more sense to me if it means "trying to." So, how many different meanings can "making to" imply?
Best Answer
“Making to” does mean roughly what you found in the dictionary. “She's making to run away” is mostly synonymous to “she's about to run away”. The difference is that “about to” indicates that she will run away in the future and doesn't convey how the narrator knows this, whereas “making to” tells us that the narrator sees something that shows that she intends to run away. She may be getting into a running stance, or distancing herself from the narrator. If she's “making to” run away, she might still change her mind, or be prevented from running away. That is, she is preparing to do it, but she might be interrupted either by internal reasons (change of mind) or external reasons (prevented) — in fact here it's a combination of the two (the narrator grabs her arm, and she doesn't really attempt to escape).