What Happens to Goodbye (19 page)

Read What Happens to Goodbye Online

Authors: Sarah Dessen

I’d just spped off the curb to cross the street when I heard a door shut. When I glanced back, there was Dave Wade, in jeans and a flannel shirt, sliding his keys into his pocket as he started down the street just a few feet behind me. I thought of what Riley had said, that he might like me, and suddenly felt self-conscious. Today was complicated enough, and it was not even noon yet. I nodded at him and kept walking.
When I crossed the street, though, he did the same. And when I turned down the Luna Blu alley, he did that, too. I slowed my pace as I got closer to the kitchen entrance, waiting for him to pass me and continue on to the street. He didn’t. In fact, within moments he was right behind me, having slowed down as well.
Finally, I turned around. “Are you following me?”
He raised his eyebrows. “What?”
“You just walked, like, two feet behind me the entire way here.”
“Yes,” he agreed, “but I’m not following you.”
I just looked at him. “What would you call it, then?”
“Coincidence,” he proclaimed. “We’re just headed in the same direction.”
“Where are you going?”
“Here,” he said, pointing at the kitchen door.
“No, you’re not.”
“I’m not?”
Suddenly, the door swung open, and there was Opal, wearing jeans, shiny black shoes, and a white sweater, a coffee cup in one hand. “Please tell me,” she said to Dave, skipping any greeting, “that you are here for the community project.”
“Yep,” he replied. Then he shot me a look that could only be described as smug. “I am.”
“Oh, thank God.” Opal pushed the door open farther and he stepped through. Then she said to me, “You saw all the people here the other day. I had tons! And now, today, when the local paper and freaking Lindsay Baker are coming in twenty minutes, no one. Not a single person!”
She was still holding the door, so I stepped inside behind Dave, who was standing there awaiting instruction. Opal let the door bang shut, then hurried around him and started down the hallway to the restaurant, still talking.
“Plus the walk-in conked out at some point last night, so we lost half our meat and all of the fish. On the day of the Defriese game! The repairman can’t get here until this afternoon and he’ll charge double overtime, and all the suppliers are totally out of everything because everyone else ordered so big for game day.”
That explained my dad’s text, at least. Sure enough, as we passed the main door to the kitchen, I could see him in the walk-in, poking at something with a screwdriver. Jason the prep cook was standing behind him with a toolbox, like a nurse handing off instruments during surgery. It was not the time to interrupt—you never wanted to bug anyone when they were doing hardware repair on old kitchen equipment—so I continued following Opal and Dave through the restaurant and to the stairs that led to the attic.
“The last thing I was worried about,” Opal was saying now as she started up the stairs, “was not having enough delinquents for this freaking photo op.” She stopped, suddenly, both walking and talking, and turned back to look at Dave. “Oh. Sorry about that. I didn’t mean to call you—”
“It’s okay,” he told her. “Kind of comes with the community-service requirement.”
She smiled, relieved, and turned back around. “Seriously, though. I had such a turnout on Wednesday, and now today nobody shows up? I don’t get it.”
“Did you sign their sheets?” Dave asked her.
Opal paused. “Yeah, I did.”
“Oh.”
She looked back again. “Why?”
“Well,” he said, “it’s just that I’ve heard that once some people get a signature, it’s easy to just copy it. The court office is usually too busy to do more than double-check the name matches.”
Opal looked appalled. “But that’s so wrong!”
Dave shrugged. “They
are
delinquents.”
“So, wait.” She narrowed her eyes at him. “Does that mean
you’re
just here for one day and a signature, then?”
“No,” he said. Then he glanced at me, like I was going to vouch for him, before saying, “I’m not a true delinquent. Just did something stupid.”
“Haven’t we all,” Opal said, sighing.
“Opal?” someone yelled up the stairs. “There’s a reporter at the front door asking for you.”
“Oh, crap,” she said, taking a panicked look around the attic space. Behind her, I saw the boxes had all been opened, and someone had constructed the rest of the model’s base around the one piece I’d put down. Everything looked ready to begin, except for the fact that we had only one delinquent. Or sort-of delinquent. “She’s early. What am I going to do? It’s supposed to look like I have a whole crew here!”
“Two isn’t a crew?” Dave asked.
“I’m not part of this,” I said. “I just came to see my dad.”
“Oh yes, but, Mclean,” Opal said, desperate, “you can just pretend, right? For a few minutes? I will owe you big.”
“Pretend to be a delinquent?” I said, clarifying.
“You can do it,” Dave advised me. “Just don’t smile, and try to look like you’re considering stealing something.”
I actually had to fight not to smile at this. “It’s that easy?”
“I hope so,” Opal said, “because I’m about to recruit everyone I can get my hands on. Can you guys please start taking some stuff out and just, you know, make it look like it’s in progress? ”
“Sure,” Dave said.
“Bless you,” she replied, setting her coffee cup down on a nearby table with a clank. Then she was bolting down the stairs, announcing, “I need anyone here under thirty upstairs, stat! No questions! Now, now!”
Dave watched her go, then looked at me. “So,” he said. “What exactly are we d here?”
“It’s a model,” I told him, walking over to the A box and pushing the flaps all the way open. “Of the town. Opal got roped into organizing the assembly of it for the city council.”
“And that’s Opal,” he said, nodding at the stairs, where, distantly, we could still hear her voice, ordering all hands on deck.
“Yep.”
He walked over to the model, bending over it, then reached for the directions, which were lying to the side, flipping them open. “Look at that,” he said, turning a page. “Our houses are actually on here.”
“Really,” I said, unloading a few shrink-wrapped stacks of plastic pieces from the box.
“In your yard,” he said, turning another page, “we should put someone lying prone in the driveway, felled by a basketball.”
“Only if we put a weeping girl in a car in front of yours,” I replied.
He glanced at me. “Oh, right. Riley said she saw you last night.”
“I feel bad for her,” I said, pulling out more stacks. “With the cheating and all. She seems like a nice girl.”
“She is.” He flipped another page. “She just has really lousy taste in guys.”
“You two seem really close,” I said.
He nodded. “There was a time when she was literally my only friend. Except for Gerv the Perv.”
I raised my eyebrows as downstairs, a door slammed. “Gerv the what?”
“Just this kid I used to hang out with at my old school.” When he glanced up and saw me still watching him, he added, “I told you I was weird. So were my friends.”
“Friend.”
“Friend,” he repeated. Then he sighed. “When you’re fourteen and mostly taking college courses, it’s not like you have much in common with everyone else in your classes. Except for the other weird, smart kid.”
“Which was Gerv,” I said, clarifying.
“Gervais,” he corrected me. “Yeah. Riley coined his nickname because he was always staring at her chest.”
“Classy.”
“I only hang with the best,” he said cheerfully.
I sat down, taking one of the shrink-wrapped stacks of plastic pieces and ripping it open. “So you and Riley . . . you weren’t ever a couple?”
“Nope,” he said, taking his own stack and plopping down a couple of feet from me. “Apparently, I’m not up to her low standards.”
“You have the same tattoo, though,” I pointed out. “That’s a pretty serious thing to do with someone.”
He flipped over his wrist, exposing the circle there with the thick outline. “Ah, right. But it’s not a couple thing. More of a friend thing. Or a childhood thing. Or,” he said, ripping open the plastic bundle in his lap, “a wart thing.”
“Excuse mont>
“Long story,” he said, shaking out the pieces. “Okay, so where do we start, you think?”
“No idea,” I said, spreading out all my pieces on the floor around me. I’d been thinking I’d take a stab at it without the directions, but as soon as I looked at it closely I knew that wasn’t happening. There were many tabs and pieces, each labeled, making up a crazy quilt of letters and numbers. “This looks seriously impossible.”
“Nah,” he said. Then, as I watched, he collected four flat segments from his own pile, clicked them together, then added a couple of curved ones. Finally, he picked out a thicker, shorter one and pressed it into the bottom with the palm of his hand. One, two, three, and he had a house. Just like that.
“Okay, so that,” I told him, “was impressive.”
“One of the bonuses of being a delinquent,” he replied. “Good spatial skills.”
“Really?”
“No,” he said. I felt my face flush, feeling like an idiot. But he just picked up the house, glancing at the bottom of it, then carried it over to the base. “I was just really into model making when I was a kid.”
“Like trains?” I asked, picking up a piece from beside me. It had an
A
and a 7 on it and I had no idea what to do with it. None.
“Model trains?” he replied. “Are you trying to insult me or something? ”
I looked at him, wondering if he was serious. “What’s wrong with model trains?”
“Nothing, technically,” he said, squatting down by one edge of the base. “I, however, did war models. Battlefields, tanks, soldiers. Aircraft carriers. That kind of thing.”
“Oh,” I said. “Well, that’s totally different.”
He looked over at me, his expression flat, then placed the model on a spot on the base, pressing it down with the heel of his hand. When it clicked, he stood, taking a step back.
“So,” he said after a moment. I could hear someone—or several someones actually, by the chaotic thumping—climbing the stairs up toward us. “What do you think?”
I walked over beside him. Together, we looked down at the tiny house, the sole thing on this vast, flat surface. Like the only person living on the moon. It could be either lonely or peaceful, depending on how you looked at it.
“It’s a start,” I said.
Twenty minutes later, between Dave, me, and the handful of Luna Blu employees impersonating delinquents who’d joined us, the model was looking pretty good. After a few minutes of chaos and complaining all around, we’d settled into a system. Dave and the prep cook Jason—who, it turned out, knew each other from attending some academic camp years earlier—assembled the pieces, and the rest of us matched them to the proper spot where they belonged. So far, we’d managed to get about ten different structures on the upper left-hand corner of the base: a handful of houses, a couple of buildings, and a fire station.
“You know, I think I used to live in this neighbrhood,” Tracey said to me as we secured a long, square building where the diagram indicated. “This is a grocery store, right?”
I glanced down at the building as I pressed it in, waiting for the click I now knew meant it was secured. “I don’t know. It doesn’t say what it is.”
“None of them do,” Leo, the cook, called out from beside one of the boxes where, as far as I could tell, he’d done little other than pop bubble wrap while the rest of us worked. “Which seems kind of stupid to me. How can it be a map if you can’t tell where you are by looking at it?”
“Leo,” Jason said, looking up at him as he fit a roof onto another house, “that is so profound.”

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