Read What Happens to Goodbye Online
Authors: Sarah Dessen
What Happens to Goodbye (34 page)
Eleven
“Hi,” the librarian said, smiling up at me. She was young, with straight blonde hair, wearing a bright pink turtleneck, black skirt, and cool red-framed eyeglasses. “Can I help you?”
“I hope so,” I replied. “I’m interested in looking up some town history. But I’m not sure where to start.”
“Well, no worries. You have come to the right place.” She slid back in her rolling chair, then got to her feet, coming around the desk. “We just happen to have the most extensive collection of newspapers and town-related documents in town. Although don’t tell the historical society I said that. They tend to be a little competitive.”
“Oh,” I said. “Right.”
“Are you looking for anything in particular?” she asked, motioning for me to follow her through the main reading room. It was full of couches and chairs, most of them occupied by people absorbed in books, laptops, or magazines.
“I’m trying to find a maphat might detail downtown, like, twenty years ago,” I said.
“We’ve definitely got that,” she replied, leading me into a smaller room with shelves on all four walls, a row of tables in between them. It was empty except for someone in a parka, the hood up, sitting facing the wall. “This is from the seventyfive-year anniversary of the town’s incorporation,” she said, easing a large book out. “They put together a commemorative record of the town, with maps and all the history. Another option is looking at the tax and land records for, say, ten years back to see who owned them, and when they were bought or sold. Usually they’re searchable by address.”
I looked at the stack of books as she put them on the table beside me. “This should be a good start,” I said.
“Great,” she replied. “Good luck. Oh, and just FYI, you might want to keep your coat on. The heat barely works in this room. It’s like a meat locker.”
I nodded. “Will do.”
She left, and for a moment I just sat there, watching her as she wound her way through the reading room, picking up discarded books from a few tables along the way. There was a fireplace—a real one—crackling in the next room, and it was only as I looked at it that I realized, suddenly, how chilly it was where I was sitting. I pulled my coat closer around me, zipping it up again, and bent over the town history, beginning to turn pages.
In the two weeks since Deb’s first day of involvement on the model, it was more on track to actually being finished than I’d ever imagined possible. And that was despite the fact that, even though she’d made several phone calls, Opal couldn’t rally any more delinquents to help us. Luckily, Deb had a plan. Or several plans.
First, she had incorporated multiple systems to increase our overall working efficiency. Besides CAA, there was STOW (Same Time Owed Weekly, a written schedule that insured one of us was at the model every afternoon), PROM (Progress Recap Overview Meeting, held every Friday), and my personal favorite, SORTA (Schedule of Remaining Time and Actual). This last one was a large piece of poster board detailing all the work we still had to do alongside the days that were left before May 1, the councilwoman’s deadline.
Deb had also created a Listserv for the model project, as well as a blog that documented the progress as we put it together. Her e-mails were just like Deb herself: cheerful, concise, and sort of relentless, landing in my inbox on an almost daily basis. There was one thing about the model, though, that I wanted to do on my own.
“Mclean? ”
I blinked, then looked over at the table beside me. Sitting there, in his parka with a book in his hands, was Jason, the prep cook from Luna Blu. “Hey,” I said, surprised. “When did you get here?”
“Actually, I’ve been here.” He smiled. “I was just being antisocial. I didn’t realize that was you who was talking to Lauren until I turned around a minute ago.”
“Lauren? ”
He nodded at the reference desk, where the librarian who’d helped me was now typing away at a computer, her eyes focused on the screen. “She’s the best when it comes to hunting down information. If she can’t help you find what you’re looking for, no one can.”
I onsidered this as he picked up his own book—a worn paperback of something called
A Prayer for Owen Meany
—opening it again to his place. “So you hang out here a lot?”
A Prayer for Owen Meany
—opening it again to his place. “So you hang out here a lot?”
“I guess,” he replied. “I worked here for a while when I was in high school. You know, summers and after school.”
“Wow,” I said. “That must have been different from the kitchen at Luna Blu.”
“Nothing is like working at Luna Blu,” he agreed. “It’s like contained chaos. Probably why I like it so much.”
“Dave said you went to Harvard,” I said.
“Yep.” He coughed. “But it didn’t really work out, so I came back here and took up cooking for a living. Natural career progression, of course.”
“It sounds like it was a lot of pressure,” I said. He raised his eyebrows, not sure what I meant. “The school you and Dave went to, and the college courses you took, being so driven academically.”
“It wasn’t all bad,” he replied. “Just not what I wanted, eventually.”
I nodded. Then he went back to his book, and I turned my attention to the one open in front of me. After looking through some tiny-typefaced documents and a few sketches, I turned a page and there it was: a map from twenty years earlier of the area of downtown that included Luna Blu. I leaned in closer, scanning the pages until I found my street, and my own house, identified only by a parcel number and the label SS DOM: single-story domicile. I ran my finger over it, then over Dave’s next door, before moving back across the page to the square behind it. There it was, the shape familiar, and also listed with a parcel number. Above it, it said only HOTEL.
Weird. I’d been expecting something other than a house, but for some reason this was a surprise to me. I grabbed a pen and an old receipt from my purse and wrote the parcel number of the hotel on it, as well as the official address, then folded it away and stuffed it in my pocket. I was just stacking the books into a pile when my phone beeped. It was a text from Deb.
STOW REMINDER: YOU’RE SCHEDULED 4 TO 6 TODAY! ☺
I looked at my watch. It was 3:50. Right on schedule. I picked up my bag, sliding the phone into it. As I got to my feet, Jason turned around again.
“You going to the restaurant?” I nodded. “Mind if I walk with you?”
“Not at all.”
We left through the reading room, passing Lauren, who was helping an older woman in a baseball cap at the computers. “Thanks for your help with the catalog system earlier,” she said. “You’re a genius!”
Jason shook his head, clearly embarrassed, as I followed him out the main doors and onto the street. We walked a little bit and then I said, “So it’s not just Tracey and Dave who think so. You
are
brilliant.”
are
brilliant.”
“Three people does not make a consensus,” he said, pulling his hat down over his ears. “So. Did you find what you were looking for?”
“Sort of,” I told him. We kept walking, crossing the street. A few blocks ahead, I could see Luna Blu, its signature azure awning in the distance. “I’m closer than I was, at any rate.”
We walked another short block. The snow was still on the ground, but gray and dirty looking now, hard and slippery beneath our feet. “Well, that’s a start,” he said. “That’s good, right?”
I nodded. This was true. But anyone can begin. It was the part with all the promise, the potential, the things I loved. More and more, though, I was finding myself wanting to find out what happened in the end.
“There you are!” Deb said as I came up the stairs. “We were getting worried! I thought you were coming right at four.”
“It’s only five after,” I pointed out.
“Yes, but, Mclean,” Dave, who was sitting cross-legged on the floor, said, “you know that the STOW waits for no man. Or woman.”
“Sorry,” I said, flicking him as I passed. “I had something to do. I’ll make it up, I promise.”
“Yes, you will,” he said.
Deb, over at the table, began rummaging through some pieces, humming to herself as I bent down over my sector. For a long time, we worked in silence; the only sounds were distant voices from the kitchen downstairs. Hearing them, I kept thinking about Jason, what he’d said to me about Harvard and the choices he’d made. Amazing how you could get so far from where you’d planned, and yet find it was exactly where you needed to be.
About a half hour later, there was a loud knock from the bottom of the stairs—
BANG! BANG! BANG!—
and Deb and I both jumped. Dave, though, hardly looked fazed as he called out over one shoulder, “Yo. We’re up here.”
BANG! BANG! BANG!—
and Deb and I both jumped. Dave, though, hardly looked fazed as he called out over one shoulder, “Yo. We’re up here.”
A moment later, the door creaked open, the sound followed by a sudden, bustling rush of voices and footsteps. Then Ellis appeared at the top of the steps, with Riley and Heather behind him.
“Oh my God,” Heather, who was in a red jacket and short skirt with thick tights beneath it, said, “what is this place?”
“It’s called an attic,” Ellis told her. “It’s the top floor of a building.”
“Shut up,” she replied, smacking the back of his head.
“Enough,” Riley said in a tired voice. Then she looked at Dave. “I know we’re early. But being stuck in the car with both of them was about to make me insane.”
“Understood,” Dave replied. “I’ll be done here in a sec.”
“So this is where you’ve been spending all your time,” Ellis said, sliding his hands in his pockets as he walked along one side of the model. “Reminds me of all that action-figure stuff you used to play with.”
“It was war staging,” Dave said loudly, “and very serious.”
“Of course it was.”
Dave rolled his eyes, fastening one last house onto his sector. Then he stood up, wiping his hands on his jeans. “Okay, that one’s done. I’ll start up the next when I come in Saturday.”
Deb glanced over, checking his work. “Sounds good.”
“You’re leaving?” I asked.
“Previous engagement,” he replied, as Heather and Ellis walked over to the windows, looking down at the street. Riley was still standing over the model, taking it all in. “We have this dinner thing we do every month. It’s kind of mandatory.”
“What he means is,” Ellis piped up, “the food is so good you don’t want to miss it for anything. Or, um, anyone.”
Heather snorted, glancing at me. Riley said, “Let’s just go, okay? You know how she gets if we’re late.”
Ellis and Heather started for the door, with Dave falling in behind them. Riley took one last look across the model, then said, “You guys are welcome to come. I mean, if you want.”
“Where are you going, exactly?” I asked.
“My house,” she replied. “And Ellis is right. The food is amazing.”
“I don’t know,” I said. “It sounds great, but we’ve got this schedule, and owe time . . .”
“. . . but it can be readjusted,” Deb finished for me. I looked at her. “I mean, we can make it up. It’s not a problem.”
“Oh,” I said, surprised she was so quick to agree to this. “Well, great. Sure, then. We’d love to.”
Riley nodded, then turned to follow Dave and Heather, who were at the top of the stairs. Over her shoulder, she said, “Fair warning, though. My family’s kind of . . . crazy.”
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