Mom laughed. “I don’t know why I let him call me that. I never let anybody call me Katie.”
“Yeah, Uncle Herb got away with murder. You know, he loved being in his eighties, because anytime somebody asked him to do something, all he had to say was…”
Mom chimed in and they said it together: “‘Leave me alone, I’m in my eighties!’”
It was obvious that they could stand around and talk about Herbie all day, and they probably would if I didn’t stop them. “Which boxes are for us?” I asked.
Mom bugged her eyes at me to let me know that I was being impolite.
“Oh, right,” said Darren, looking around. “It’s those three over there.”
He gestured at some large cartons in the corner. They were not made of air, marble, lead, or adult diapers, but they were big enough that I didn’t really see how we could get them home without some kind of van. And even if we got them home, I couldn’t imagine where we’d put them.
“Oh, wow,” Mom said, obviously thinking the same thing I was. “This is … a lot of stuff! Are you sure it’s all for us?”
Darren shrugged. “He wanted you to have it. He told me, ‘Everybody else I like is dead.’ And you haven’t even looked inside yet. Maybe it’s junk. Maybe it’s old newspapers.”
Mom searched for a polite way to say We don’t have room for these boxes or their contents, unless they contain cash, in which case no problem—we’ll just get a bigger apartment. She came up with “This was way too generous of him. Herbie was always way too generous. Between overpaying me, and Emma’s phone…”
Darren laughed. “Tell me about it. He left me this apartment.”
Um. I wasn’t sure why he was calling this four-story building an apartment, when it was practically a mansion. And I really didn’t understand why we were standing around talking about the boxes instead of opening them and seeing what was inside. After nearly two weeks of unusually good luck, I expected to find jewelry, gold doubloons, and a genie’s lamp.
I eagerly ripped the tape off the first carton and opened it. Inside was a trove of unopened electronics, all of them in their original boxes or hard plastic packaging.
“Jackpot,” I said.
I unloaded a few things onto the floor next to me so that Mom and Darren could see. It was like a technology museum in that box. Some of the things in there were so old that I didn’t even know what they were supposed to do. Then there were a bunch of old iPods, old iPads, old iPhones. If it was made before 2015, and you could put an “i” in front of it, it was in that box.
Darren came over to see. He shook his head and looked up at the ceiling. “Uncle Herb, you told me you used these things all the time. You didn’t even take them out of the boxes!”
Underneath the graveyard of unused gadgets were some old photo albums, thick books with plastic-covered pages full of photographs. I took one of the photo albums out and opened it carefully. The spine creaked like the door of a haunted house, and it smelled like, well, oldness.
The first page of the album had black-and-white pictures of two handsome young men in swimsuits on a beach. Something about the setting seemed familiar, or maybe it was déjà vu. The men were laughing, burying each other in the sand, posing like musclemen—generally goofing around and having fun. In the next picture, they were kissing.
“Oh, wow,” said Mom, looking over my shoulder. “Herbie was so handsome.”
What? I squinted at the men. I guessed the shorter one looked a little like the old man-raisin I met at the volunteer party that time. But these men were strong and healthy and they stood tall. Mom took the photo from its protective plastic and turned it over. In brown ink, with old-style penmanship, someone had written Herb & Jack, Fire Island, 1956.
Mom’s eyes widened. “Fire Island.”
Of course. That’s why it looked familiar.
“You’ve been to Fire Island?” Darren asked, surprised. “Isn’t it great? I loved visiting Uncle Herbie on Fire Island. I spent a few weeks there in the summers when I was a kid.”
“My grandma has a house there,” I told him.
“Really?” he asked. He smiled at Mom. “We probably crossed paths there, back in the 1980s.”
I started opening the other cartons. The second box had more albums on top, which Mom started to unload. The third box had metal cans, and something that looked like a small record player. Full Stone Age technology.
“Oh, wow!” Darren looked over my shoulder at the third box. “His old filmstrips! And a slide projector, cool.”
Mom’s mind was a little too blown for full sentences. “But … I mean … this is…” She turned to Darren. “Shouldn’t you have this stuff? Why did he leave these to me?”
Darren frowned. “I’m not sure. Maybe ’cause I already have a lot of family photos? Or, you know, he did keep telling me he was going to ask ‘the Computer Lady’ to ‘put the pictures in the computer, the way they do now.’”
“Oh!” said Mom. “Okay. He wanted the pictures scanned and digitized. Um…”
She was, no doubt, doing the same math I was: say one hundred pictures per album, ten albums in this box alone, that’s a thousand pictures to take from the albums, scan, and replace. Plus a carton of slides. This job would take approximately two hundred years.
“You don’t have to do anything with them, if you don’t want to,” Darren said quickly, because Darren could do math, too. “I didn’t realize he was going to burden you with this, or I’d have stopped him.”
“Oh, it’s not a burden,” Mom said. “Herbie was never a burden. If Herbie wanted his photos scanned, that’s what I want to do. I’ll scan them, but then I think the photo albums should be yours. I just have to figure out the most efficient way to scan so many photos at once.”
Darren nodded. “Okay. Want to get something to eat while you’re figuring?”
Because Mom was being agreeable, we wound up going to an Ethiopian restaurant that Darren suggested. Ethiopian food, FYI, is just piles of spicy mush, and there’s no forks or spoons or knives—you’re supposed to scoop up the mush with this wet, sour pancake thing and eat it like that. I took two bites and got un-hungry real quick.
I started looking at my phone, like the typical Gen Z postmillennial I am, tuning out most of their conversation. Mom and Darren talked about Herbie, North Carolina, the small party-rental business Darren co-owned, and how funny it was that they both had these ties to Fire Island. At one point when they were talking about places they’d been on Fire Island, I heard Mom say, “My friend Jenny loves that restaurant.”
Loves. In the present tense. We’d been making that mistake for two months, talking about what Aunt Jenny likes, says, wears, thinks, watches, or reads, instead of liked, said, wore, thought, watched, or read.
Mom corrected herself. “I mean, she loved it.”
They decided over dinner that the smartest thing to do would be to bring Mom’s scanner to Herbie’s and do the scanning there, since we had no room for the boxes at our house. Meanwhile, Darren would take the old filmstrips to a place that would turn them into video files.
“I can pay whatever rate Herbie paid for your time,” Darren said. “It really is asking a lot of you.”
“You don’t have to pay me,” Mom insisted. “It won’t get done quickly, but I promise it will get done. You leave tomorrow night, right? Are you comfortable with giving me a key to the apartment so I can get to work this week?”
“That would be great.” Darren mopped up the last of the Ethiopian mush with the sour pancake and wiped his sticky fingers on his napkin. “I’ll be back in two weeks to talk to a real estate agent about selling the place. We can meet up at Uncle Herb’s, and you can show me how it’s going.”
Fortunately, there was no Ethiopian dessert.
After dinner, Darren insisted on walking us to the subway, even though it was only eight-thirty and the streets were full of people. “It’s a Southern-gentleman thing,” he said. “Besides, I need some exercise.�
��
As though he had not been moving furniture all day before we got there.
We stood by the subway stop to say our goodbyes before going down into the station.
“So…” said Mom.
“So…” said Darren.
So? I thought.
“I guess I’ll see you guys two weekends from now,” said Darren. He smiled a goofy smile. “Catch you then, Computer Lady. Good meeting you, Emma.” He waved and walked away.
The second Mom and I started down the subway stairs, I asked her, “So you like him?”
“Sure,” she said casually. “He’s likable.”
I wondered if she was being dense on purpose. “No, but do you like him like him?”
Mom laughed. “How would I know? I just met him! Besides, you heard him on the phone earlier. He’s married, or he has a girlfriend.”
Argh. Right. He and Mom got along so well, I forgot about the woman on the phone—the one who bombarded him with calls and wanted him to come home. Pauline, aka, the dealbreaker. Who needs him? I thought. Him and his great-uncle’s mansion and his sick abs.
“He’s short,” I said. “And he has awful taste in food.”
And with that the subject was dropped.
Seven
When I got to school that Monday, it was obvious that Something Big had happened over the weekend. Clusters of people were standing around, exclaiming over something on their phones.
It must have involved Dakota’s group, since they were the most excited. Tyler Hoff was showing off something on his phone that made the girls shriek with laughter even louder than usual. It did not sound like happy, fun laughter. It sounded evil, like a convention of Disney villains.
I walked up to Brooke, Harrison, and Geneva, as I did every morning these days. They were clustered around Lewis, looking at his phone.
“What’s going on?” I asked, trying to see what Lewis was showing everyone.
Brooke looked up at me nervously. “Um…” she said. “Are you sure you want to know?”
I got a bad feeling in my stomach. “Yes. Tell me. What is it?”
Lewis turned the phone my way and showed me a picture. It was Savvy. She was topless.
I literally wanted to puke.
My heart started pounding and I burst into a cold sweat. “Delete it. Delete it, Lewis. I’m serious—you have to delete it. Please. Please, Lewis.”
“It’s too late,” he said. He gestured at the crowds of kids on the sidewalk, all looking at the picture of Savvy’s exposed chest.
Oh my God. This was a nightmare. This had to be a nightmare. Savvy is sleeping over, and for some reason I am having her nightmare. Except I was wide awake.
I whipped my head around to see if Savvy had arrived yet. She hadn’t. I wondered if she knew that her pic was going around school, and that’s why she wasn’t there yet. I wondered whether her moms knew and, if so, whether Ava had started skinning her alive yet. I tapped out a text to Savvy, fingers shaking.
Are you okay?
The answer, apparently, was no, because she never showed up at school. I surreptitiously checked my phone every three seconds all day, and I didn’t get a reply.
By lunchtime, the teachers knew there was something going on. Everybody was too excited and distracted to pay attention in class.
Shortly before seventh period there was an announcement over the loudspeaker. “Tyler Hoff, report to Mr. Kelly’s office.”
The entire class went “Ooooooooooh” as Tyler packed up his book bag and left the room. He smirked like he didn’t care, but I knew he was nervous from the way he looked at Lewis.
Tyler wasn’t there in eighth period, and he wasn’t outside after school, so nobody knew for sure what happened at the dean’s office, but I assumed it wasn’t good. I went to rehearsal, where I completely ignored Lewis. I wanted to squish him in my fist like an origami frog.
Afterward, I was running out of the auditorium when Lewis caught up to me.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “Okay? I shouldn’t have showed the picture around. But it was already out there anyway!”
I didn’t want to talk to Tyler’s right-hand man. “Whatever,” I muttered, walking faster.
Lewis tagged along behind me. “But you have to admit, it was dumb of her to send Tyler a pic like that. It’s kind of her own fault.”
I turned around to face him. “It was a private picture! She’s not the one who spread it everywhere! Why did he have to do that?”
Lewis threw his hands up, frustrated. “Because that’s what people do! Everybody knows that!”
Okay, these are facts. We’d had a special assembly back in September to talk about online privacy, and one of the points they kept making was “Never send nudes, or everyone will see them and you will be in huge trouble.” They tried to scare us by saying we could face criminal charges for having nude pictures, even of ourselves, because we’re minors. I remembered how Lewis scoffed at that. Now I hoped it was true. Then I could find a policewoman and tell her, This kid has a topless photo of an underage girl on his phone. Please lock him in the darkest cage you have for all eternity.
He continued to follow me as I went down the stairs. “Why are you even defending Savvy?” he asked. “She doesn’t care about you. When Dakota said she should stop being friends with you, she stopped. She told everybody that you liked Tyler. She showed us all your texts about him. And then she made out with him, even though she knew you liked him.”
Oof. So my worst fears were true. “So what? I don’t care,” I said, walking faster, trying to get away from the unbearable things he said. Savvy showed everyone my texts about Tyler? That was even worse than her making out with him. How could she have sold me out like that? Lewis had to be lying. I was humiliated and betrayed, but I wouldn’t let him see the tears in my eyes.
I was practically running from him. He stopped chasing me.
“Emma,” he called after me. “I said I’m sorry!”
I ignored him and burst through the door.
I didn’t notice until it was too late that Dakota, Naturi, and Sierra were waiting for me outside on the sidewalk. Suddenly, I was surrounded by the last people I wanted to see.
Dakota grabbed my arm and got right in my face. “You told on Tyler,” she growled. “Now you’re going to pay for it.”
“I didn’t tell!” The words came out squeaky. “I didn’t, I swear!”
Naturi chimed in. “Who else would do it? Who else would take Savvy’s side? She has no friends but you.”
“You’re in so much trouble,” said Sierra.
Dakota smiled. “We’re going to make your life hell.”
Already done, I thought.
Melanie the Playwright came out the front door, wearing her earbuds and frowning at something on her phone, until she saw me surrounded by the mean girls. Dakota dropped my arm and put on a fake smile as Melanie approached.
“Hey, Emma,” said Melanie, ignoring everyone else. “You ready to go get a latte with me?”
“Yep.” I wiggled away from my tormentors. They looked at me with narrowed eyes. They weren’t able to get me today, but they wouldn’t stop trying until they did.
Melanie and I walked side by side in silence for a block. I tried to get my heart to calm down, but I felt really shaky. I was going to thank her for stepping in like that, but she started talking like everything was normal.
“I think we’re in good shape for the show, if Carter ever learns his lines. I mean, at least he’s trying…”
I wasn’t listening. I was trying to comprehend the events of the day and what they meant. If Savvy really showed everyone my texts, she’d betrayed me more than I could have ever imagined. But then her new friends betrayed her even worse. I couldn’t help feeling protective of her. Maybe it was habit, built up over five years of best friendship, or maybe it was my incredible Penguin-level degree of loyalty, but even after what Savvy did to me, my anger was nothing compared to how bad I felt for her.
; Melanie continued her monologue. “And I thought about expanding the Julian character, but I’ll have to save that for another version…”
I also felt terrible for myself now that Dakota’s group was officially out to get me for supposedly ratting on Tyler. So unfair! I didn’t even get the joy of ratting on him, and I was taking the punishment for it. But maybe if I could find out who really snitched, they’d leave me alone.
“I thought Ms. Engel was crazy when she suggested Lewis, but he’s not half-bad, lucky for us…”
I bit my tongue so I wouldn’t say what I was thinking: the words “luck” and “Lewis” did not belong in the same sentence, unless “luck” was attached to the words “horrible,” “miserable,” or “worst ever possible.”
Melanie and I reached the coffee place. I didn’t want anything, so I got us a table. At the counter, she ordered some very complicated coffee drink, with a lot of extra instructions: “And can you make the milk very hot, please? And can I get cinnamon on top, but just two shakes…”
The beverage was produced, and she carried it to the table. “So,” she said to me as she sat. “What was up with your friends back there?”
I cringed. “It’s nothing. They just hate me.”
“Why?”
It had been a while since I had someone to talk with about this kind of stuff, so I wound up telling Melanie the whole story about Savvy: how she’d been hot and cold to me for the last few weeks, how she hung out with the devil and hooked up with my crush. It was a relief to get it all out.
Eventually, I got to today—the topless pic and Tyler’s punishment. “So now they all think I snitched on Tyler,” I said. “And I didn’t. I almost wish I did, since they hate me for it anyway.”
Melanie nodded with understanding. “I know a few things about being hated,” she said.
“Yeah?” I was surprised. Melanie had plenty of friends, as far as I could see, and now she was an award-winning playwright. Who wouldn’t want to be friends with Melanie?
“Sure,” she confirmed. “And eighth grade was the worst. You know why I wear all black? Because my hope for the human race died in eighth grade. That’s when my ‘best friends’ told me I should kill myself because I was so depressing. They said everyone would be happier because nobody wanted me around.”
Lucky Little Things Page 6