What Happens to Goodbye (16 page)

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Authors: Sarah Dessen

BOOK: What Happens to Goodbye
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“Really.”
Opal nodded. “Although he’s not been happy with the new coach. I don’t keep up with it that much, but apparently there was some kind of scandal. Something to do with his personal life, or—”
“Anyway,” my dad said, cutting her off. I felt my face flush. “Let’s get back to the crisis at hand. What are our options here? ”
“Well,” Opal said slowly, “I think for the time being the best we can hope for is that the councilwoman takes pity on us and finds another room. Which might happen. But . . . not today.”
“Right,” my dad said. “Today, we have a roomful of criminals to deal with.”
“They’re not criminals,” Opal told him. “They just owe community service.”
“Isn’t that the same thing?”
“Well, not—”
There was a loud
thud
from above them, followed by some guffaws. Opal glanced up the stairs. “I think I’d better get up there. I’m supposed to be supervising.”
My dad looked, too, then sighed, shaking his head. “What did you say that councilwoman’s name was?”
“Baker. Lindsay Baker.”
“Okay,” my dad said, turning to go down the stairs, “I’ll give her a call, see if I can move things along.”
“Oh,” Opal said quickly, “I . . . I don’t think that’s a good idea.”
“Why not?”
Opal swallowed. “Well,” she began, as another thump sounded from the room, “it’s just that she’s kind of . . .”
My dad waited.
Mth="1em" align="left">
“. . . a force,” she finished. “As in, to be reckoned with. She has a tendency to kind of, um, overwhelm people.”
“I think I can handle her,” my dad said as I moved off the bottom step, out of sight, to wait for him in the dining room. “You just deal with the criminals.”
“They’re not criminals,” Opal called out. “They’re—”
My dad shut the door on this, apparently not interested in alternative definitions. When he spotted me, he gave a weary smile. “Hey there,” he said. “How was your day?”
“Uneventful,” I said as we walked around to the bar side. “You? ”
“Just the usual chaos. You hungry?”
I thought back to the soggy turkey sandwich I’d had for lunch, ages ago. “Yeah.”
“Good. Come back to the kitchen with me and I’ll fix you something.”
I was about to reply when, turning the corner, we suddenly came face-to-face with a tall guy in an army jacket, wearing a backward-facing baseball hat. There was a huge black-ink tattoo of an eagle covering his neck. He looked at my dad, then at me, and said, “Hey, where’s the probation thing? I need my sheet signed.”
My dad sighed, then nodded behind us. “Up the stairs. Shut the door behind you.”
The guy grunted, then walked past us, slouching his hands into his pockets. At the table by the window, the two waits rolling silverware tittered. My dad shot them a look, and they quickly quieted, just as his phone rang. He pulled it out of his pocket, then glanced at the screen, his brow furrowing.
“Chuckles,” he said to me, flipping it open. “Hello? Yeah, I did. The ice-machine repair guy was just here. Well . . . do you want the bad news, or the bad news?”
By the sound of it, it would be a few minutes, so I wandered back into the dining room. The door to the stairs was open, despite what the tattooed guy had been told. When I went to shut it, I heard Opal talking and started toward her voice instead.
“What this really is,” she was saying, “is an opportunity for you, as citizens of this town, to get to know the center of it in a way you never would otherwise. Street by street, corner by corner. House by house. It’s like you’re mapping your own world. So that’s cool, right?”
There was no answer to this, other than a cough and some shuffling. Once on the landing, I could see Opal, facing a group of about twenty or so teens and near-teens, all of whom looked about as excited as if they were attending a root canal. Opal herself, wearing a black dress and her cowboy boots, her hair piled up on her head, was flushed, clearly nervous.
“And the great thing is,” she continued, talking a bit too fast, “with this many people, doing even a couple of hours a week, we should make really good progress. I mean, according to the directions.” She waved a stapled packet of paper she was holding in one hand. “It’s pretty basic, by the looks of it. Once we get the base down and put it together, it’s just a matter of matching the pieces to the numbers.”
Crickets. And silence.
“So, um,” she saidis ’m really glad so many folks showed up. I mean, I know some of you didn’t have a choice. But if you stick with this, I think you’ll find that we’ll have a good time and do something worthwhile for the community.”
Nothing. I watched Opal’s shoulders sink as she sighed, then said, “Well, I guess that’s all we have time for today. We’ll plan to be back here on Wednesday at four. So if you want me to sign your time sheets . . .”
Suddenly, the entire room was in motion, everyone coming to life with a flurry of movement. Within seconds, Opal was mobbed by out-thrust hands and fluttering pieces of paper.
“Okay, okay,” she said, “one at a time, I’ll get to everyone. . . .”
I stepped around the mob, walking into the room, which had been cleared out and swept, the boxes now lined up against one wall. A few large ones were labeled with big black numbers; the rest had letters, all jumbled up and out of order. I thought of Tracey’s crossword, all those words fitting and not fitting, as I scanned them, another puzzle unsolved.
By now, we’d been in town for three full weeks. It was the longest I’d been Mclean—or at least called myself that—in two years, and I still wasn’t quite used to it. Even hearing Jason say it, moments earlier, had been jarring. It probably said something that my own name sounded weirder to me than the ones I’d chosen to take on over these last few years. But the truth was, I still wasn’t sure who this Mclean was, here. I kept waiting for her to turn up, falling into place as easily as Eliza and Lizbet and Beth before her, but so far it hadn’t happened. Instead, I still felt unformed, like a cake half baked with edges crisp, but still mushy in the middle.
Part of this was because in the last three towns, I’d quickly decided on a set persona: perky rah-rah girl, black-clad drama queen, student government joiner. Faking all of these things was easy, because I could plan them out, selecting the friends and activities that best suited whomever I’d decided to be. At Jackson, though, it was not so cut and dry. I didn’t pick Mclean’s friends. Somehow, they kept picking me.
That day at lunch, I’d come out to the courtyard, planning to take a place along the wall. I wanted to look over my Western Civ notes because there’d been subtle hints at the possibility of a pop quiz, and I hated surprises. I’d just gotten settled and started reading when a shadow fell across my notebook. A gum-popping shadow.
“Got a minute?” Heather said when I looked up at her. She was wearing her fake-fur coat and jeans, a big, red wool knit cap pulled over her blonde hair. Before I could answer, she said, “Good. Come on.”
She turned, clearly confident that I’d follow this command, and started over to the picnic table I now knew was her and Riley’s daily lunch spot. Sure enough, as I watched her go—not having moved an inch—I saw Riley on one side, sipping a Coke and twisting her hair with one hand. Across from her was Dave Wade. It was the first time I’d seen him since I’d decked him with the ball, which probably explained why I felt a sudden rush of embarrassment.
“Hello? ” Heather said from about five feet away. She sounded impatient, as if I had actually agreed to something. “Are you coming or what?”
I just looked at her, not sure how to respond to this. Finally, I said, “I have a pop quiz this afternoon.”
“Come
on
,” she said, and before I could stop her, she’d come back, grabbed my hand, and was pulling me to my feet. I barely had a chance to reach for my bag before I was being dragged over to the table, where she deposited me, my notebook still open, on the bench beside Dave Wade. As he glanced up, I had a flash of him hitting the pavement again, and my face flushed, deeper this time.
“You know Mclean, right?” Heather said, plopping down across from me, beside Riley.
“We’ve met,” he said, keeping his eyes on me. As I shifted beside him, trying to organize my notes in my lap, I realized that really, this was the most mundane encounter we’d had: no secrets kept, police chasing, or flying basketballs. Yet, anyway.
“She’s graciously agreed to be our tiebreaker,” Heather told him.
“Oh, God.” Riley rubbed a hand over her face, and I realized her eyes were kind of red. She’d been crying. “Just when I didn’t think this could get any more embarrassing.”
“We’re all friends here,” Heather told her. “And besides, so far you’ve gotten completely conflicting advice. There’s mine, which is actually, you know, what you should do. And then there’s his”—she cocked a finger at Dave, who raised his eyebrows—“which is not.”
“Would you believe,” Dave said to me, “that this is her actually trying to be unbiased?”
“Okay, here’s the situation,” Heather said, ignoring him. “Riley’s been seeing this guy, and she just found out he cheated on her. He says he’s sorry. Does she hear him out or kick him out?”
I looked at Riley, who was now directing her full attention to picking at a spot on the table. “Um,” I said. “Well—”
“I said she should give him the boot. Like, literally and figuratively,” Heather explained. “But Eggbert over here is telling her to be all codependent.”
“Whoa, whoa, whoa,” Dave said, holding up his hand. “Actually, what I said was she should get his reasons for doing what he did, and then proceed from there.”
“He cheated on her,” Heather said flatly. Riley flinched, picking harder. “What reason could possibly make that okay?”
“People do make mistakes,” Dave pointed out.
“Look,” Riley said, waving a hand between them, “I appreciate this town hall approach to my problem. But I can handle this, okay?”
“You said that last time, though,” Heather pointed out.
Now Dave looked surprised. “Last time? Wait, he’s done this before?”
Riley looked up at him. “Well . . . yeah. There was this other thing, a couple of months ago.”
“You didn’t tell me about that,” he said.
“You were. . . .” Riley glanced at me. “Busy. At the time.”
“Oh,” Dave said.
“He got arrested,” Heather explained to me. Now Dave flinched. “What? It was one beer. I got busted for that in
middle
school, it’s so basic.”
“Heather.” Riley’s voice was a bit sharp. “Remember when you said I should tell you when you’re crossing the lines of what’s conversationally appropriate?”
“Yeah.”
Instead of replying, Riley fixed her with a flat, hard stare. I could almost feel the weather changing around us, it was so severe. “Fine,” Heather said after a moment, picking up her phone. “Make your own choice. It’s your funeral.”
We all just sat there for a second, nobody talking, and I looked longingly over at the spot on the wall, where I’d been able to sit alone and worry about something small and easy like the whole of western civilization. I was just working up a way to get back over there when Dave said, “So. Mclean. How’s the entry been?”
“Entry?” I repeated.
“To this,” he said, gesturing with a flip of his hand at the courtyard. As he did so, I noticed for the first time the tattoo on his wrist. It was a black circle, in the same spot and the same shape as Riley’s. Interesting. “Our fine educational establishment.”
“Um,” I said, “it’s been . . . fine, I guess.”
“Glad to hear it,” he said.
“Of course it helps,” Heather said, tugging her hat down over her ears, “that she fell in with the right crowd.”
“And who would that be?” Dave asked.
She made a face at him. “You know, there are actually people who would
love
to have the chance to hang out with me.”
“Oh, right. How is Rob these days?” he said.
“He’s history, not that it’s any of your business.” To me she said, “He can say what he wants, but he knows the truth. Me and Riley, we’re the best thing that ever happened to this boy.”
“Cut out the first two words of that sentence and I’ll agree with you,” Dave said. Heather rolled her eyes, but Riley looked up, giving him a wan smile.
“Oh, for God’s sake,” Heather said. “I wish you two would just go out, fail miserably as a couple, and get it over with.”
“Well,” said Dave, sitting back, “it’s nice to know we’d have your blessing.”
Just then, I felt someone on my left. I glanced up, just in time to see Deb, her purse tucked tightly to her side, passing beside me. As our eyes met, her face brightened with recognition; when she saw I wasn’t alone, though, she bit her lip and kept moving.
I don’t know what possessed me to put in motion what happened next. It was impulse or instinct, the best or worst thing under the circumstances. Regardless, before I knew it, it was done.

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