I unrolled the window and laughed uncomfortably. “Umm, can we please change the subject?” It wasn’t that I didn’t think sometimes about what it would be like to be with Jesse. And it would definitely make for an epic story in the Book of Keeley. But we hadn’t known each other that long. Not really. And the future was so fuzzy. As in, I wasn’t sure if we had one.
I bit my lip. “Do you think he’s expecting that to happen?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know anything about your relationship with him.”
I felt all kinds of hot. “Wait. Is this why you wanted to take this drive? So you could ask me?”
Morgan adjusted her side mirror ever so slightly. “We haven’t really talked about much lately.”
“What do you mean? We talk every day.”
“Yeah, but never about the meaty stuff. I feel like there’s things you’re not telling me.”
I shrugged. “Not at all. I’m living the dream.”
She still seemed frustrated with me. “It’s not just the Jesse stuff. Like, for instance, we haven’t talked about yesterday. How is your mom doing? Like, physically. I saw her fall on the news, poor thing.”
I almost wanted to change the subject back to my sex life, but I forced myself to answer her question. After all, Morgan was my best friend. She was exactly the person I should talk to about this stuff. And I had Levi’s stupid voice in my head, accusing me of pretending that bad things weren’t happening. “It was an accident.” When Morgan didn’t immediately say Oh yeah, of course, I turned to face her. “It was an accident.”
“Keeley, obviously!”
“What other meat would you like to discuss?”
“Okay. Well. Do you know what your dad’s going to do now that the dam has started up? Has he talked at all about a backup plan? I was thinking that the adjusters might give him more money, since he’s, like, the leader.”
It was practically an echo. I realized then that Morgan must have known that her mom had come to talk with my dad. And I was now aware that anything I said would probably get back to her, too.
“He still has a lot of people supporting him. Our phone was seriously ringing off the hook last night. I mean, he’s helped a lot of people get back into their homes, like you and your mom. They kind of owe him this, you know?”
I watched her to see how that landed. Morgan pressed her lips together. “Well, no matter how all this plays out, your mom has our full support.” It took a second for me to notice how carefully Morgan had seemed to choose her words. “Hey, you want to see if Mineo’s finally opened back up?”
Smugly, I settled into my seat. Now she was the one who wanted to change the subject. “Isn’t it still closed?”
“One of my mom’s clients said she saw people moving around inside there yesterday.”
We couldn’t pull up to Mineo’s. That section of Main Street was closed to traffic. Actually, I don’t think it had ever opened up since the initial flood. I remembered Mr. Viola saying how the town might purposely keep the roads closed. I hadn’t noticed as much when I was working with Levi, because those barriers didn’t apply to us. But now I did.
We parked and walked. I held up the caution tape for us both to shimmy under.
From across the street, I saw that the windows of Mineo’s were dark. “Maybe they aren’t doing lunch anymore? Just dinner?”
Morgan walked up to the door and pointed at a sign taped to the window. She read aloud, “ ‘Thank you, Aberdeen, for your loyal service. Stay dry.’ ” Even though the doors had been padlocked shut, she still pulled on the handles. Hard. Then she flopped onto the curb. “I can’t believe I’ll never have a slice of Mineo’s pizza again.”
“Don’t worry. It wasn’t that good anyway.”
I’d said it to be funny, to lighten the mood. But Morgan spun around and glared at me. “I don’t know why you’d say something like that.” She stood up and walked back to her car.
“I was kidding. And you know Mineo’s sucks. Why are you acting like it’s the best pizza in the world?”
“Because it’s my pizza place, in my hometown, where I used to go eat lunch with my best friend. And now it’s gone.”
The pizza place was gone, the town might be too. Our friendship? I really hoped that was still intact.
On our way back to school, I casually said, “Hey. There was something I wanted to talk to you about.”
“What?”
“Did you want to invite Wes to be your date to Secret Prom?”
She froze up. “Are you joking?”
“No. If this were a normal prom, you could bring someone from another school.”
“I don’t know. I mean, he didn’t say two words to me at Elise’s good-bye party.”
“He clearly wanted to talk to you, though. That was obvious.”
“You really think so?”
I tried not to be hurt over how easily she smiled for the rest of the ride back to school. Instead, I hoped I’d just fixed whatever was broken between us before the crack gave way.
29
* * *
Wednesday, May 25
Clear afternoon skies, evening low of 60°F
* * *
Even before our little tiff at the graveyard, I had planned to blow off work with Levi to shop for prom stuff with Jesse. He wasn’t going to be able to go until after dinner, which was fine. But taking the afternoon off would give me time to go home, shower, and make myself look extra cute.
So, after checking that the coast was clear of both teachers and Levi, I hit up my locker.
Inside I found a paycheck for all the work I’d done so far.
I guessed I was fired.
I didn’t tell my mom that when I presented her with the check.
“This is terrific, Keeley. I know it doesn’t seem like much, but a couple hundred dollars will cover your books for a semester.”
“Can I have a little bit of money?” I asked her. “There are some, um, collections happening at school for an end-of-the-year party.”
Mom gave me fifty dollars. Which was way more than I expected. I had planned to spend some of it on Secret Prom. I didn’t want to think of it as a joke prom. It was going to be my prom. My prom with Jesse Ford.
• • •
I had dinner that night with just Mom, since Dad was out. “He’s installing a new set of stairs to someone’s house,” she’d said. And I wondered what she knew about his petition, if he’d gotten many signatures today.
Mom cleared dishes and said she was going to take a quick nap. She’d pulled a double shift almost every day since the flood, and she devoted any free time left over to helping her patients deal with the aftermath. There were a bunch of seniors who had no local family around to help them. Some of these were people my mom had known her whole life. Old teachers from when she was a student at Aberdeen High, friends of her mom and dad, my grandma and grandpa. Mom helped them clean and pack, assisted in getting their paperwork in order, made them appointments with the adjusters.
I took a shower and then tried to find something cute to wear. Since it was finally starting to feel like spring, I went with a white sleeveless blouse with blue and yellow flowers and my favorite jeans, light blue with an authentic hole in the knee. Except I didn’t find the jeans. I had put them into the laundry weeks ago but they hadn’t made their way back into my drawer.
I peeked into Mom’s bedroom, but it was empty.
When I went downstairs, I traced a circle through the living room and into the kitchen and craned my neck into the pantry.
It wasn’t until I was in the living room again, leaning over the back of the couch toward the picture window to see if her car was still in our driveway, that I saw the top of her head bobbing up and down between the front cedar hedges.
I walked outside. She had a mat out for her knees, her garden tools, and a few empty plastic bags. I watched her carefully lift out a bulb with cupped hands, tendrils of roots cascading down like exposed veins. She placed
it gently in a plastic bag.
“Mom?” It seemed like a crazy thing to be doing at night.
She looked startled, then, seeing it was me, sat back on her heels. “I thought you’d left.”
“Do you remember washing my favorite jeans? The light blue ones?”
Her eyes went up to the sky, thinking. “I think so. Check the basket near the dryer. Actually, check the dryer itself. They might have been in the last load.”
“What are you doing?”
“Your grandmother Jean gave me these freesia bulbs. Transplanted them from her garden to mine when your father and I were married.”
I already knew that, of course. My mom always looked forward to when they would bloom white flowers in the summertime. She liked opening the front window and letting the smell into our living room.
“Why are you digging them out?”
She leaned forward, her hair hanging in her face. “Some of the girls at work were saying how all the rain was going to rot their garden bulbs.” And then, either to remind me or shut me up, she nudged her chin back toward the house. “Check the dryer.”
• • •
It was dark when Jesse picked me up about an hour later. I wondered if we might be going to Walmart alone, but Julia was with him.
“Sorry. My mom’s still working. Which is good, she’ll be able to give us her discount.”
I ignored him. He didn’t have anything to apologize for. Instead, I said, “Hey, Julia. You sure you don’t want to stay in the front seat?” while she unbuckled, climbed over the middle console, and tumbled into the back.
“Nope.”
“So, do you have a list?”
Jesse gave me the eye, like I was crazy. And then he held up his phone to show me a very detailed and organized list. Some of the stuff I expected. Plastic champagne flutes. Tea light candles. Other things were totally random.
“A kiddie pool?”
Jesse put his hands over Julia’s ears and mouthed, To keep all the beers on ice!
“How much beer are you getting?”
Jesse wagged his eyebrows. “You only throw a party like this once in a lifetime! We gotta go all out!”
We had a blast going through the aisles together. Jesse pushed Julia in the cart. A few times he’d let go and send Julia flying toward a display of soup cans or books. Julia screamed so loud—not a scared scream, a happy, delighted squeal—and Jesse would grab the cart at the very last second and keep her from crashing. Most of the time, I hung off the front of the cart like a mermaid carving on a Viking ship.
“Oooh! Can we please get one of these for our dance floor?” I said when I found a portable disco ball. The box said it had four speeds and could be mounted on any wall. “We are having a dance floor, right?”
I noticed red creeping up Jesse’s neck. His eyes narrowed to little slits. I had never, ever seen him angry before, not even on the soccer field when Aberdeen was getting their asses beat. It was so intense, so brooding. He didn’t even hear my question. I stepped alongside him and tried to see what he was staring at over Julia’s head.
His mother was talking to a man at the accessory counter. It was clear this guy wasn’t just a customer, though. There was a familiarity, a flirtiness to them. His mother was leaning forward on her cash register, trying to slide a pair of hot-pink sunglasses onto his nose. The man kept turning his head at the very last second until she gave up. Then, while she pouted, he turned around and rested his back against the counter and twirled the display screen on her register around and around like a carousel.
Though Jesse had never told me anything about him, I knew this man was probably his father. Jesse didn’t look like him as much as he did his mother, but they both had the same wide, mischievous grin.
I turned to him and whispered, “Are you okay?”
But Jesse was gone.
I looked left, then right, then left again.
“Where’s my brother?” Julia asked.
“I’m not sure,” I said, then pushed the cart down the end of the aisle and looked both ways. “Umm, I bet he probably went up to the register.”
Jesse wasn’t there, either. I texted him, but he didn’t write back.
I wasn’t sure what to do.
“Can we go see my mom now?”
“Maybe in a little bit.”
Julia started kicking her feet. Not a full-on tantrum, but her frustrations were clearly brewing. “Why are we just standing here?”
“Miss!” I looked up. A sales associate was flagging me toward her lane. “Excuse me, miss! This lane is open!”
“Come on, Julia. Help me put things on the belt, okay?”
As I watched the stuff get scanned and loaded into bags, and especially when I had to pay, I had pangs of regret. A lot of it was stupid junk. Like water guns and maracas and crap like that. Also, we were supposed to be getting his mom’s employee discount. I actually had to put some stuff back to get it under fifty bucks.
I pushed Julia to the store entrance and lingered close to the automatic glass doors, so that if Jesse had slipped outside, he’d be able to see us.
“Ladies!”
Jesse came running from the side, where the fast-food nook was, three slushies in his hands. “Where have you guys been?”
I was annoyed with how flip he was. “Waiting for you. Where’d you go?”
“I thought you were following me.” He looked at our cart. “Wait. You already checked out? I went running up and down all the lanes but I didn’t see you.”
I forced a smile. “Didn’t you get my texts?”
He patted himself down. “Ugh. Left my phone in the car.” Except I knew he had his phone with him. That was where he’d written his list.
“Do you want to go see your mom?” I said, knowing what his answer would be.
“Nah. It’s fine. I walked over to her counter, thinking she could have you guys paged, but she’s pretty busy.”
We went back to his car and he clicked open the back hatch and loaded the stuff in. “I had to put back the disco ball and the piñata and the tiki lights. I didn’t have enough cash.”
“Oh, dang. I was going to use my mom’s credit card. Don’t worry. I’ll bring cash for you tomorrow.”
After making sure Julia was buckled up, he drove me home. The music was louder than it needed to be, maybe to keep me from talking. I watched him out of the corner of my eye, trying to see if he was okay. I had so many questions, things I wanted to ask him.
It bothered me that he so obviously was lying, but I also understood the impulse. Something difficult was happening here. Something intimate. And even though he was pushing me out of it, I still felt closer to him than I ever had, simply because I had been there. And the way he gripped my hand on the ride home, I knew he was happy I was with him.
We were getting closer. That was a good thing.
30
* * *
Thursday, May 26
Windy, high of 70°F
* * *
If Levi hadn’t already fired me before he stuck my paycheck in my locker, I figured blowing off work on Wednesday would definitely have done the trick. But apparently I was wrong about that. He came by my locker right after homeroom. I was on the floor, cleaning it out. Tomorrow was graduation and the last day of school.
“Hey, Keeley.”
I didn’t look at him. I was still angry about what he’d said to me in the graveyard caretaker’s house. “Hey, Levi.”
“Umm, when you bailed on me in the middle of the work day, was that you officially quitting the job?”
“Pretty much. Was that check you stuffed in my locker yesterday a sign that I was fired?”
“Pretty much,” he said sheepishly. “But here’s the thing. I really need your help today.” He explained that since the dam construction began, the pace of work had picked up significantly. “Okay, so you know how normally we have about six to eight houses to clear after school? Well, yesterday they wanted us to do twelve—and I only
got through eight—and today they want us to do eighteen.”
“Eighteen is totally impossible.”
He crouched down. “I know. But maybe fifteen is possible, if we bust our humps?” He must have seen me frowning because he pleaded, “Just help me get caught up and then you can quit. Remember, you owe me. You needed a job, I gave you a job. And I haven’t worked you hard at all. I’ve basically let you do nothing.”
“I don’t know,” I said, keeping him dangling. I liked him begging me.
“What if I give you my pay too? You’ll make double today.”
Fifteen houses at twenty bucks a house was three hundred bucks for the day. And since I’d spent all my money yesterday at Walmart, I said, “Fine.”
“I’ll see you after school,” he said quickly. And then walked away. I wondered why he’d made such a quick escape, but then Jesse came up.
“What’d Hamrick want?”
“For me to work today.”
“Please, Keeley! Quit that stupid job already!”
“Think of it like this. So long as I stay on Levi’s good side, there’s no way he’ll tell his dad about our Secret Prom.”
Jesse nodded. “Good point. But after that, just quit, okay? We’ve only got so much time left. I don’t want you blowing it with Hamrick.”
I kissed him. “Promise.”
• • •
I think I would still have been annoyed with Levi if I hadn’t seen the work wearing on him. Not in the same way it wore on me, which was directly tied to my dad. But his own stress. He wanted to please his father. And he was worried about his graduation speech. He kept mumbling lines of it to himself. Whether or not he wanted to admit it, he had to have feelings about graduating. There was no way he was going to Secret Prom, so Friday would be the end of Aberdeen High for him.
So, for his sake, I tried to be a better worker. I bagged up people’s discarded possessions faster. It wasn’t even that hard, because I was less interested in the things I found. I had long since stopped counting points for weirdness. It was all trash, trash that was sinking my dad’s efforts, and the faster I threw it away, the less it got to me.
The Last Boy and Girl in the World Page 26
