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 tr
ains?” 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.”
“Oh, for God’s sake, it is not,” Tracey snapped, getting to her feet and crossing the room. As I followed her, she added, “Jason is convinced that Leo is some kind of genius, masquerading as a moron.”
“Like an idiot savant?” Dave asked, concentrating on putting together an office building.
“You got the idiot part right,” Tracey replied. She sighed, then peered over Jason’s shoulder, watching as he assembled something. “Where does that go? Right by the one we just put on?”
He glanced at the directions, which were opened up on the floor beside him. “Yep, think so.”
“I knew it!” She clapped her hands. “I did live over there. Because that’s my old bank and that grocery store next to it is the one I got banned from that time.”
“You got banned from a grocery store?” I asked.
“Oh, I’ve been banned from everywhere,” she replied easily, flipping her hand.
“What she means,” Leo informed us, “is that she was known around town for writing bad checks.”
“They weren’t bad,” Tracey said, taking the building from Jason as he handed it to her. “I just didn’t have any money.”
“I think that’s the same thing,” Jason said, not unkindly.
Tracey bent over the model base. “So if that’s where I shopped, and that was my bank, then my apartment was . . .” She ran a finger down the center of a small strip of road, right to the edge. “. . . apparently nonexistent. I was off the map, I guess.”
“Here be dragons,” Leo said, popping another row of wrap.
We all looked at him. Tracey said, “Jesus, Leo, are you high right now? Because you know what Gus said, if he catches you one more time—”
“What?” Leo said. “No, I’m not high. Why would you think that? ”
“You’re talking about dragons,” she pointed out.
“I said ‘Here be dragons,’ ” he said. When he realized we were all still looking at him, he added, “It is an expression they used to use, you know, back in the day. When they made maps, for the parts that hadn’t been discovered yet. The area they didn’t know. ‘Here be dragons.’ ”
Jason shook his head, smiling, and popped a roof onto another building. “Man,” he said, “that is seriously deep.”“Will you stop with that shit? ” Tracey said. “He’s not a genius! He’s functioning on, like, half his brain cells on any given day.”
“At least he’s got half,” Dave told her.
“Such the optimist,” I said as I passed behind him. He looked up at me and grinned, and again, I felt this strange urge to smile back. And I was not someone who smiled a lot. Especially lately.
“Hello, hello!” I heard Opal, sounding entirely too cheery, call out as she came up the stairs. “Everyone ready for the paparazzi? ”
Tracey rolled her eyes. Then, under her breath she said, “She always gets so stupid when she’s nervous.”
Jason shushed her, which she ignored, then tossed her the house he was holding. As she and I bent down over the model again, Opal emerged, a woman in jeans and clogs behind her. A curly-headed guy with a camera around his neck, who looked half asleep, brought up the rear.
“So, here you see a group of our local youth volunteers, working away,” Opal said. “We’re only at the very start of the project, but I think you can still get a really good idea of what the end result will look like. Basically, it’s a representation of the downtown area. . . .”
The reporter had pulled out a pad and was making notes on it as the photographer moved around the model, popping off his lens cap. He squatted down right beside Dave, who was putting a roof on a house, and snapped a couple of frames.
“I’d love to talk to a couple of the kids,” the reporter said, flipping to a fresh page on the pad. “Why they’re here, what about this project interested them . . .”
“Oh, of course!” Opal said. “Yes! Well, let’s see . . .” We all watched her make a show of scanning the room as if there were, in fact, multiple options, before looking squarely at Dave. “Maybe, um . . .”
“Dave,” I said under my breath.
“Dave,” she continued, “could, um, speak to that point?”
The reporter nodded, then moved closer to where he was sitting, her pen at the ready. “So, Dave,” she said. “How’d you get involved in this?”
Oh, dear, I thought. But Dave played along, saying, “I was looking for a good volunteer opportunity. I’m in a place right now where I just felt I needed to give back to the community.”
“Really,” the reporter said.
“Really?” Tracey said to me.
“Community-service requirement,” I told her, my voice low.
She nodded knowingly. “Been there.”
“Anyway,” Opal said, her voice still entirely too high, “I think we’re all really excited about having this chance to show our town in a way we haven’t seen it before—”
“Small and plastic?” Tracey asked.
“—and,” Opal shot her a look, “provide an interactive, lasting representation that can be enjoyed by generations to come.”
The camera was clicas the photographer moved around us, getting shots of me and Tracey, then Jason, then Dave again.
“Hello? Anybody home?”
I saw Opal, who was standing by the stairs, visibly flinch at this sound. Her face flushed as she turned, calling over her shoulder. “Lindsay, hello,” she said. “We’re up here.”
There was the sound of footsteps—footsteps in heels—coming closer, and a woman emerged. She was tall and thin, with china-doll features and blonde hair falling in a perfect bob right to her shoulders, and was wearing a black suit and high heels. She smile
d at us, her teeth incredibly straight and white, then strode across the floor like a beauty queen working the runway. Confidence just wafted off of her, like a strong scent.
“Check it out,” Tracey whispered as I struggled to breathe. “Opal’s nemesis.”
“What?” I said.
“Since high school,” she replied. “They competed over everything.”
“Maureen,” the councilwoman said, extending a hand to the reporter, who shrank back a bit before accepting it. “It’s so great to see you again! I was just commenting to the mayor about your piece on the waste-treatment center options. Very thought-provoking, although I do wonder where you got some of your statistics.”
“Oh,” the reporter said, sounding nervous. “Well, um, thanks.”
“And thanks, also,” Opal jumped in, “for coming by! I think it’s so good for our volunteers to see how this project is really about the entire community, all the way up to our representatives.”
“Of course! I was thrilled to be asked. How are you, Opal? ” The councilwoman reached out, giving her a quick, one-shoulder-pat-and-done hug, which Opal reciprocated in an identical fashion. “The restaurant looks great. I heard you’ve actually been kind of busy lately!”
Opal forced a smile, her lips pressed together. “We have. Thanks.”
The councilwoman turned, scanning all of us working on the model with narrowed eyes. From off to the left, I heard Leo pop another bubble. It was the only sound until she said, “So . . . is this your entire group?”
“Oh, no,” Opal said quickly. “We just had, some, um, scheduling issues today. But we wanted to go ahead and get started anyway.”
“Great!” The councilwoman took a slow stroll around the entire model, her heels clicking. The reporter took a few shots of her, then turned back to Dave, who was the only one still working. “Well, it’s hard to tell from the outside, of course. But I’m sure you’re making a good start.”
Opal winced, then said, “We are! We’re thinking it will actually move pretty quickly once we get all our people in place.”
“And when do you plan to have it completed?” the reporter asked, flipping another page on her pad.