The Last Boy and Girl in the World (44 page)

Dad cleared his throat. “What you're doing to this town is wrong. You know it and I know it.”

“More wrong than you manipulating your neighbors to stand by your side to earn yourself a bigger payday?”

It all started to make sense, especially when I thought back to the fight we'd had outside Mr. Dixon's house. When Sheriff Hamrick had said to my dad, “Your daughter is helping people.” He knew then that my dad wasn't doing it for the town. He was doing it for himself.

Dad was trying to look tough, but I knew by the way he was gripping his cane that he was feeling anything but. “And what if I don't agree to your offer?”

The governor shrugged. “I guess you could try waiting out this storm. But you might not have a home to come back to. In that case, we'd be forced to condemn this site and—”

“Okay. Wait a second here. Just wait one second here, please. I get it. You want to punish me for being a pain in the ass. And maybe that's what I'm due. So yes. I'll agree to take a cut. I will. But let's say three hundred thousand dollars. Remember, I'm losing a home and a business, and from what I understand, those people were given more than—”

“What business?” Aversano said from the couch. “You haven't worked in years.”

Dad turned so he was only facing Governor Ward. I watched his heartbeat in his neck. “Three hundred thousand dollars and I'll sign whatever I need to sign and you'll never see me or my family again.” As if to prove it, Dad picked a pen out of the pen cup on the desk and clicked it.

The governor leaned backward, as far as the chair would go. “Two hundred thousand dollars. You held your cards too long, Jim.”

The mayor picked some dead leaves out of a potted plant. “We know your wife is gone. You aren't going to win her back empty-handed. You're not going to look like the hero then.”

Dad met my eyes, just briefly. I'd never seen him look sadder, not even in the hospital after his accident. And then, with his head down, he said, “Deal.”

I couldn't be in the room any longer. Before I walked out, I walked up to the desk where Governor Ward sat. “But you will do it, right? You will move the bodies?” I looked pleadingly at Sheriff Hamrick.

“Of course,” Mayor Aversano said from the couch. “Clearly, this was an oversight. Thank you for bringing it to our attention.”

I stumbled out into the hall. I was covered in sweat, my T-shirt sticking to me.

With a shaking hand, I checked my phone for the texts Levi had sent to me while we were in the room.

You are the most selfish person I've ever met.

I will NEVER forgive you for this.

Tears rolled over my cheeks as I tucked my phone into my back pocket. I heard the main doors open down the hall. There was Levi, coming in from the rain. He peeled off his raincoat and set it down on a chair. The police officer stepped aside and let him into the hallway, no questions asked. Levi ran a few feet before he saw me. But once he did, he skidded to a stop.

“Levi, I—”

“Don't. Don't even, Keeley. I'm not here for you. I need to talk to my dad. He's going to kill me.”

The hallway was narrow and Levi was waiting for me to step out of his way before he'd get any closer. But I started walking toward him instead, trembling. “Please. Let me explain.”

“There's nothing to explain. You completely betrayed me.”

I felt light-headed, and I put a hand out to the wall in case I fainted. It was too hot and too bright. “That's not what I wanted.”

He couldn't have looked less convinced. “If you really cared about me and my feelings, you would have talked to me about what you found instead of stealing it. We could have gone to my dad together and asked him what was happening. Instead you stole from my house and went straight to your dad.”

“I was trying to do the right thing.”

He laughed snidely. “The right thing for you, maybe. And your dad. You wanted to win, that's all. You wanted to win and you felt completely fine with screwing me over to do it.”

It was not lost on me, even in that moment, the irony. That my father had done the same thing to me, only moments ago. He'd held whatever his true plans were close to his chest. It was just how my mom had said. He wasn't putting us first. And I hadn't put Levi first. Both of us had been dishonest with the people we supposedly cared about. And now it was blowing up in our faces.

“I wanted to force them to do the right thing for your mom and everyone else who's buried in that cemetery. Yes, of course that would help my dad. But it would help other people too.”

But instead of understanding me, seeing it from my side, Levi bared his teeth. “I shared stuff with you. Stuff about my mom that I haven't talked about with anyone. You wouldn't even have thought about that graveyard if it weren't for me.”

“I care about you, Levi. I care about you so much. That's what I came to your house to tell you today.” He closed his eyes and dropped his head back and I knew he was thinking about it, how we'd almost kissed. I wanted to go back to that moment and do everything differently.

“The worst part is that, if you had asked me, I probably would have told you to go ahead, take the stupid paper.” Hearing Levi say it, I knew it was true. He would have. My breath caught in my chest. “I've done everything you've asked of me ever since all this stuff went down. I feel like I earned that from you. The trust. But you cut me out, Keeley. So for the last time, stop pretending like this was for me. It wasn't.”

And that's when I knew there was nothing I could say to Levi that would make it better.

Because there was nothing my dad could say to me.

And yet, I still tried.

“My dad . . . this whole thing wasn't what I thought. He wasn't trying to save Aberdeen for the right reasons. Or maybe he was in the beginning, but not anymore. I don't even know, to be honest. If I had known that, I . . .” At that point, I was sobbing. “I didn't mean to hurt anyone. I made a mistake, but I thought it was the right thing to do.”

He shook his head. “It's doesn't matter. It's over. And you've actually helped me. I'm glad Aberdeen is going under, because I know for sure I'll never have to see you again.” He edged past me.

•  •  •

About an hour later, Dad walked out of the office, his face wan. He had a piece of paper in his hand. He didn't look at me and I didn't look at him. We got into his truck and were escorted by two police cars back to our house. One of them handed me a purring Freckles. He'd been taken out of the cardboard box and put into a proper kitty kennel with a soft towel, probably by sweet Levi. By then, the rain was coming down harder than hard, the streets were flooded worse than that night we were all brought into the gym. Another officer gave us a handful of cardboard boxes to fill up, but in the time it had taken him to bring them from the trunk of his car up to our house, they'd gone pulpy and were collapsing. But he didn't seem to care.

“You've got thirty minutes.”

I didn't even know what I was shoving in there. I was crying so hard. Dad came into my room to help me, but I screamed at him to get out.

Thirty minutes later, we got back into Dad's truck. The police cars followed us again, all the way out to the highway. When we reached the Aberdeen town limits, they slowly peeled away. With Freckles's kennel on my lap, I turned around in my seat and watched my hometown disappear in a mix of rain and tears.

“I thought things would work out differently,” Dad said quietly.

And though I was so mad at him, I had to nod. I had to give him at least that.

It broke my heart. Because he wasn't a bad person. Just like I wasn't a bad person. So how did we both screw up so badly?

Tuesday, October 11

Sunshine, breezy, high of 45°F

I was five months into my new life when I learned that the dam had been completed. It struck me as slightly anticlimactic, only because water had continued to slide over Aberdeen all throughout construction. You could see it happening from the lookout on the other side of the river, which I visited sometimes. But now that things were finished, it would happen quickly. A complete overtaking. Some said a few days, others predicted a few hours.

Welcome to Lake Aberdeen.

Governor Ward planned a huge celebration. There'd be a parade, carnival rides and food trucks, and fireworks at night, and the Ridgewood High School Marching Band would play during the ribbon-cutting ceremony. That was the reason why I heard about it before a single poster or banner went up. Governor Ward's invitation was the top story of morning announcements.

I say
top story
because now that I was a senior at Ridgewood High School, morning announcements were an actual news program beamed from the school's television studio to the flat-screen televisions in every single classroom. Everyone in my homeroom knew I was from Aberdeen, and they all discreetly glanced over to see if I was, I don't know, going to cry or something? Well, I didn't cry. I kept my face in my AP trig textbook and pretended to be too absorbed to have heard anything. There were a handful of other former Aberdeen residents who now went to Ridgewood. I bet they acted the same way. We were all friendly, but I wouldn't say we were friends. They were better about starting new lives for themselves than I was. They made new friends, aligned themselves with new groups. If they missed their old lives at all, I couldn't tell.

Mom had moved us to Ridgewood about a week before my senior year started. She'd signed a lease on a different apartment close to Baird, and she and I had been living there for almost a month, but when she heard from another nurse that half a duplex in Ridgewood was going to come up for rent because the occupant had died, she broke that lease and signed a new one. Actually, she didn't have to break the lease. Dad took it over.

So she and I lived on the ugliest street in Ridgewood, where the houses were old and small and none of them had front lawns. The first rental had been nicer and less expensive, but Mom felt that the opportunity for me to have a senior year at one of the best public schools in the state was too good to pass up. Luckily, I didn't have to repack anything because I'd never bothered unpacking in the first place.

Mom settled into our new place right away. And though it didn't feel like home, not to me anyway, she had done a lot to make the place cozy. Little by little, she replaced the cast-off stuff she'd gathered from her departing patients with things of her own choosing. A chenille throw found on sale at Marshalls to replace someone's hand-knit afghan. Other things she made, like a white canvas cover for our old couch, and pillows with goldenrod flowers and periwinkle stripes. I wondered if that was what my life would be as time passed, memories replaced with new experiences.

Mom could have completely refurnished the apartment all at once with the settlement money Dad had given her, but she was trying not to spend a dime of that. She and Dad agreed it should be college money for me, so I wouldn't have to go to Baird if I didn't want to.

I had actually decided to apply to a few other schools that I never would have considered if not for the college fair my new high school put on. I went to the fair because I had nothing else to do, but I ended up talking to a few admissions counselors. My life was now a weird blank slate, and I could insert myself anywhere pretty easily. I had no best friend to leave behind, no boyfriend suggesting I stay close, no cozy bedroom in my childhood home pulling at my heartstrings. It was all gone. But the upside of that was that, even though Ridgewood's curriculum was infinitely harder than anything at Aberdeen High, I was killing it. I had nothing else to do but study and do homework.

When I came home from school that day, Mom was on the linoleum floor, her back up against the fridge, our kitchen phone pressed to her ear. “Okay, well, I should probably go. Keeley just walked in from school. Oh, wait, just hold on a second, Annie.” Mom cupped her hand over the receiver and whispered to me, “Do you want me to see if Morgan can come to the phone?”

She asked this every time.

Though I always wanted to say yes, I never did. If Morgan wanted to speak to me, she would. She knew my number. More than that, she knew I was trying to get in touch. I had to wait for her to forgive me, if she ever would.

I'd lost count of how many times I'd reached out to her since the day she left Aberdeen. At first, I would leave her these long rambling messages. I'd talk to her as if she were on the other end of the line, instead of sending my call straight to her voice mail. But now, months later, I'd keep it short and sweet, not much more than “Miss you, Morgan.”

Elise and I were still in touch. She texted me totally out of the blue, near the middle of September. She wanted to know how I was doing, if I had made any new friends, stuff like that. It was more than I deserved, and I immediately wondered if Elise was acting as an intermediary for Morgan. But then, I realized, no. Elise was just that terrific a person.

She was liking Florida, especially the boys, who were perpetually tan. She loved living in a place that was more diverse. “You should really think about going away for college. You need to be meeting different types of people, seeing that the world is a bigger place. And, I mean, the food alone, Keeley, oh my God. I'm obsessed with Cuban food. I don't know that I could stomach one of Saint Ann's bland old casseroles again.”

It was weird. I'd always thought Elise and I were friends, but it wasn't until after she left that we actually got close. There was more room for us now that we didn't have Morgan's attention to compete for.

I hadn't heard from Levi, either, but that was a different story. He was at college now, far away from Aberdeen. He wasn't online at all and he'd changed his cell number.