I bit my lip. Elise had asked us not to blab about how much money her family had settled for, but I made the snap decision that telling my parents was okay. “Umm, Elise said they got five hundred thousand dollars,” I said.
Mom’s head whirled around. “You’re kidding.”
“Nope. I mean, they did lose everything. And their house was nice. But still. Isn’t that a crazy amount of money?”
Dad’s back was to me, so I couldn’t see how my news landed. But he didn’t miss a beat when he said, “That wouldn’t be enough for us to leave. Not even close.”
When he said that, Mom turned her eyes back to the television, blinking every few seconds, her face unfocused.
The forecast was up next.
• • •
Our Lady of the Angels, one of the churches in town, quickly organized a drive to donate supplies to the families who were most in need. I was glad of a chance to do something.
And I figured that donations would be a way to help out my dad’s cause. If people were comfortable, if they had the things they needed, they’d be more inclined to stay in Aberdeen and stand up to the governor with him.
I went into our attic and started grabbing blankets, old sheets that used to belong to my grandma and grandpa, and other useful stuff that people might need. I came upon a couple of boxes packed with my old toys and books and clothes. The clothes were easy to donate, but I weirdly had a harder time with the other stuff. Not that anyone was asking specifically for toys or books, but I figured that when you lose everything, you need everything. I pulled out a teddy bear I’d named Rosebud because her hands were sewn together and she was clasping a little rosebud. She was so soft and cute. Dad bought Rosebud for me when I was five and had my tonsils out. He picked her out at the hospital gift shop and I remember him coming into my hospital room in his dirty work clothes with her for me, looking so scared, wanting to make sure I was okay. He almost forgot to give the bear to me. Mom had to remind him. “Oh! Hey! What’s that in Daddy’s arms?” There was a rattle inside the nubby tail, but I didn’t care if that made her babyish.
I gave Rosebud a hug. She felt weirdly small in my arms.
It was dumb to keep the bear now, especially when there were kids who didn’t have toys anymore who might appreciate her. Rosebud had given me a lot of comfort, even more than the ice cream, and I liked the idea of giving her to another kid to comfort them. But it was still hard for me to put her into the bag. Same for some of my books, like the copy of A Wrinkle in Time that Mom read to me at bedtime. I sat on the floor of the attic and reread the first third of it before Morgan texted that she was on her way to pick me up.
Morgan and I baked chocolate cupcakes at her house, thinking they might cheer people up as well. Making them certainly cheered us up. We fought over licking the bowl. I flicked a little batter at her, and in retaliation, Morgan wiped the entire back of a batter-covered spoon across my face. We laughed so hard we nearly peed our pants. Once the cupcakes were cooled and iced, she drove us over to the church. I kept the plate steady on my lap, a toothpick in each cupcake so the plastic wrap wouldn’t screw up our decorating job. We’d put the icing on extra thick and wrote ABERDEEN 4EVR with a red gel pen, one letter for each cupcake in the dozen. I was starting to get hungry for dinner, and I totally would have eaten one if we hadn’t spelled something out.
And it was nice, not to talk about any of the bad things that were happening around us. We were so focused on each other and talking about the night before, about me and Jesse.
“I still can’t believe you kissed him first, Kee.”
“I know,” I giggled. “Me either. But I did. I totally kissed the hell out of him.”
Morgan could have been bummed. Her heart was still broken over Wes. I knew that. But she wasn’t. She was one 1,000 percent happy for me. She was that terrific of a best friend. She said cheerfully, “I mean, who gets this? Who gets to kiss their first love?”
“Ahem. Who not only gets to kiss their first love, but has their first love basically tell you that they want to spend their last moments with you?” I clarified.
Morgan snorted. “That makes Jesse sound like he’s dying. But seriously. You’ve wanted this forever.”
I smiled. “Actually that’s not true. I didn’t let myself want Jesse, because I never thought I could get him.”
Morgan swatted me. “And you’re supposedly the smart one. You know, maybe you need to go to beauty school and I should be gunning for a scholarship.”
On a surface level, our conversation was a duplicate of the car ride after we’d stacked sandbags, or all the conversations about what to text Jesse and what not to text Jesse that we’d had in the school parking lot. Except this one was me and Morgan, together like the old days, just the two of us.
I loved Elise. I really did. I missed her when she finally left Aberdeen, and I still miss her. But in that moment, I didn’t. Not at all.
We were just about at the church when Morgan said, “Hey, so I think Elise is going to stay with me while her family’s in the hotel. It’s too far for her parents to drive there and back every day, especially when her brothers still go to Saint Ann’s. This way, she’ll get to spend more time here with all her friends.”
“Oh. Cool.” Though what struck me was not the practicality, which did make complete sense, but that there’d been conversations about those plans, probably a few, that I wasn’t around for. “Do they know when they’re leaving for Florida?” That I didn’t already know this reinforced that feeling.
“They’re not sure.”
We pulled into the parking lot. I put the plate of cupcakes on the dash and got out with Morgan to start unloading her trunk. That’s when a woman came walking out briskly through the rectory door to meet us. She shook her head and called out to us, “Don’t bother, girls. We’re not taking any more donations.”
Morgan said, “But there are signs up everywhere.”
“We’ve already gotten way too much stuff. Or should I say, junk,” she explained curtly. “People beginning to clean out their houses, unloading their garbage on us. We were very specific with the kinds of things we were looking for, but now we’re being treated as a dumping ground for things they aren’t going to want to take with them when they leave.” The church lady was grumbly, peering past us into our bags. She spotted Rosebud and rolled her eyes. “You know, the church is going to have to pay to dispose of this stuff now, which is really unfair and the opposite of the spirit intended when we organized this drive.”
The stuff I was giving wasn’t junk. I didn’t want to give it up in the first place, but I thought it was a nice thing to do.
“Not to mention that the families we wanted to help, the ones who were in the most dire situations, will likely all take the relocation money. So . . .” She lifted her hands up only to let them drop like dead weight. “What’s the use?”
I wondered exactly how many families had taken deals already. And if my dad knew.
Morgan closed her trunk and we climbed back into her car. The church lady wanted to take the cupcakes we’d baked, I knew by the way she was eyeing them, but I was like hell no and ignored her as I put them back on my lap. I figured we could bring them with us to school, whenever school started back up again. Even if they were a little stale, the kids would gobble them up.
• • •
At home, I found a list of things Mom wanted me to pick up from Viola’s Market. It was mostly ingredients for dinner, but then she added a few other random things at the bottom, like batteries, bottled water, some nonperishables. The forecaster had said we were only expected to get an inch or two of rain, nothing that would trigger another flood, but I guessed Mom wanted to be ready just in case.
Viola’s Market was our local grocery store. Most people did their big weekly shopping at the Walmart twenty minutes down the highway, but Viola’s was perfect if you didn’t want to drive far or needed something last-minute, like a roll of toilet paper, or if you had a cravi
ng for ice cream. It was family owned, a small and clean white box with a black-and-white linoleum floor, a couple of parking spaces in the rear, and hand-painted signs on butcher paper that told you the specials for the week.
I’d heard there’d been some damage to Viola’s Market, and sure enough, there was a big sheet of plywood nailed over a broken window. You could see that the water had gotten in, because the bottom shelves in every aisle were empty. The freezer section was pretty bare too, probably because of the power outages. But otherwise, it looked good. The floor was mopped. They had plenty of milk and bread, veggies, eggs.
I bumped into Levi Hamrick in the cereal aisle. He was there with a big gallon jug of milk in the crook of his arm, deciding between a huge box of Lucky Charms and a huge box of Cheerios.
I would have been inclined to ignore him, but I needed a box of Lucky Charms myself. So I reached around him and casually said, “When picking a breakfast cereal, always go marshmallows. Always.”
He shrugged and put his Lucky Charms back on the shelf. “It’s for dinner, actually. I don’t know how to cook, so . . .”
“You don’t have to know how to cook to eat better than cereal for dinner, Levi. I mean, didn’t anyone teach you how to make spaghetti?” As soon as the words came out, I remembered that Levi’s mom had died a few years ago, when I was a freshman. It was just Levi and his father. So maybe no one had. “Umm, all you do is boil water, add noodles, cook for seven minutes, and boom. Dinner is served.” I did a little flourish with my hand.
“Plain spaghetti. Sounds . . . appetizing. Think I’ll stick with the Cheerios.”
We tried to politely excuse ourselves, except we were both headed to the registers, so we had this awkward moment of racing to get away from each other in the same general direction. I stopped and flipped through a magazine so he’d go ahead of me, since he only had, like, two things.
“Keeley. I’ll ring you up here.”
Mr. Viola waved me over to the customer service counter. My mom had given me forty dollars. But some of it was in change. Her note said, We can live without the orange juice and those cookies Daddy likes if this isn’t enough. Just make sure you get batteries. Even taking those items out, the total was getting close to that.
And though I’d talked to Mr. Viola before about him hiring me for the summer as a cashier, I thought I might be proactive. Why wait for summer? I could start tomorrow, work a few hours every day after school. Definitely on the weekends.
“Sorry to have to tell you this, Keeley, but I’m not going to be able to hire you.”
“Wait, Mr. Viola. Are you serious?”
“I haven’t told many people this yet, but . . .” He tossed his hands up in frustration. “We worked so hard to open back up, restock the shelves. Hardly anyone’s coming in! They’re cleaning out their pantries, eating what they’ve already got, in case we all do have to leave. Either that, or there’s still too many roads closed and they can’t park close enough to do a big shopping.”
“I’m sure they’ll get the roads open soon.”
He gave a dismissive snort. “I wonder. If something underhanded is going on like your dad says, then they aren’t going to hustle to make getting around town any easier for us.” He tapped his head. “Think about it. Anyway, tomorrow wouldn’t be soon enough for me. My insurance is already telling me they don’t want to pay for the damage. The next flood, they won’t give me anything. Every day I stay open, I’m risking everything. And for what? To sell a couple of gallons of milk a day?”
Mr. Viola was all fired up as if I were the insurance company, the governor, and everyone who hadn’t come back to Viola’s in the last week. I glanced over at the cashier. Her head was down and she was fiddling with the register. She probably got the brunt of this too.
“Are you saying you’re going to close?”
He shot me a look. “Don’t make me sound like a traitor! You know how long my family’s owned this business? I was born in the back room!”
I started sweating. I wasn’t trying to call him a traitor. Nervously, I joked, “That was only like twenty years ago, though. Right, Mr. Viola?”
He didn’t even crack a smile.
I was acutely aware of Levi stepping through the doors so I chose my words carefully. “Things will hopefully go back to normal soon. There are a lot of people working to make that happen. We just have to stick together.”
“I wish your dad luck, Keeley. I know he’s working hard. I saw him on my neighbor’s roof yesterday evening, hammering shingles in the dark. Impressive, considering his injury. But he’s going to need to do more than just get up on his ladder if he wants to save Aberdeen. Someone needs to do something big, and do it quick. Otherwise, we’re all going under. I personally can’t risk my livelihood to see how it turns out.”
I walked out of there feeling whiplashed.
No one in their right mind would cry over a stupid grocery store job, but there I was, getting hot behind the eyeballs. I kept thinking of my mom’s face that morning, when I told her how much Elise’s family had received, like hearing your next-door neighbor won the Powerball lottery. I regretted saying anything.
Where was I going to work if everything was closing?
I felt for my dad, too, of course. He was working so hard. I hated to think it would all be for nothing.
Levi stood outside unlocking his bike. He had it chained to a parking meter.
I quickly turned my back to him and wiped away my tears with my hand. God, it was so embarrassing. I felt like I had to say something, because Levi was clearly aware that I was crying, again.
I forced a laugh. “Okay, this is going to seem like a regular thing for me, but I swear it isn’t.”
“Here,” he said, gesturing for my two bags.
“I’m fine, Levi. They’re not heavy.”
But he took them from my hands and put them into the crate he’d attached to the back fender of his bike.
We walked for a while in silence. While I had to snake through blocked streets on my way into town, Levi just nodded to whichever cop was standing in front of the barriers. That cop would then nod back, and we’d be allowed to pass through.
I was thinking about what Mr. Viola had said. Was the town actually working to open up the streets so we could drive on them again? It didn’t seem like it.
There was a lot of activity going on. At the houses that were empty, the front doors were open and workers were carrying out things like toilets and light fixtures and tossing them into Dumpsters.
“This is crazy. Are all the people on this block already gone?”
“I think so. The houses were in bad shape. I bet they made deals quickly.”
I looked to the other side of the street. There was one house with cars in the driveway. A man and a woman sat on their front stoop, watching the chaos around them go down. Their house had suffered damage. A tarp was covering part of their roof and a pile of garbage furniture was mounded on their front lawn. Leaned against that pile was a dining table on its side. And on it were spray-painted the words HELL NO WE WON’T GO.
The woman saw me and pointed me out to her husband. They both waved.
They knew who I was because of my dad.
I waved back. I felt instantly lighter.
“Not everyone’s going to make this easy, Levi,” I said, feeling a surge of pride.
Levi shrugged. “What choice do they have?”
I didn’t answer because I didn’t know. I was just hoping there would be a choice, that my dad would figure something out, because people were counting on him.
“I heard your conversation with Mr. Viola. I might know of a job opening. Temporary work, but it pays well.”
Skeptical, I asked, “Who? Where?”
“The town. They want the houses that are vacated to be inspected. Make sure all the possessions are cleared out, that the gas and electricity are turned off.” He didn’t look at me when he said, “They could probably use someone else, if you were intere
sted.”
“Levi, that sounds like the most depressing job ever. Right up there with gravedigger.”
His lip curled. “It’s actually an important job, okay? Because if the gas isn’t turned off, and one of these guys rips out an oven, there could be an explosion. But forget it. Never mind.”
“What do you need to work for? I thought you were . . . um . . . going places.” It was too good, I couldn’t help myself.
He groaned. “That stupid article. I wasn’t asking to be portrayed like that. Anyway, a full ride isn’t always a full ride. You’ll see.”
“Don’t tell me that. Your grades were perfect, I’m sure.”
He didn’t dispute it. But after a few more steps, he said, “Well, there was one black mark . . . No Mock Congress championship.”
I whipped around so hard, I had to pull strands of my hair out of my mouth. He had a grin on his face, but it only lasted a second, because he could see that I was fuming. “Is that supposed to be funny?”
Levi put a hand up. “Hey. Don’t be mad at me. I was only kidding. And you were the one who quit on us.”
• • •
We had reached the semifinal round, which was way further than anyone thought we would get. But instead of it pumping us up, it scared the crap out of us.
Bundy ordered our team into one of the empty conference rooms at the hotel to go over our debate points. We’d been assigned to take the position against the passage of a proposed bill to eliminate advertising in schools.
It was a gift from God.
The Mock Congress bills before felt like playacting. Climate change or voter registration or mandatory jail sentences. None of that stuff affected our lives. But this one did. It was easy for a wealthy school to be all like, “No thank you, evil advertisers! We want to be pure!” But if Coca-Cola built us a new scoreboard so long as we sold their drinks? Or if Minute Maid offered to give our school a TV studio to broadcast morning announcements if we played ads for their orange juice?
We were the have-nothings up against the have-everythings.
We were really nervous, like puke nervous, because everything we were going to say was personal. And everyone would know it, because we were from the small town in the least-affluent district.