by Sarah Dessen
I started up the steps, rummaging in my pocket for my keys. Inside, all the lights were still off, my dad sleeping in for once.
“Want to know what I think?” Dave called out from behind me.
“No.”
“I think,” he continued, ignoring this, “that you’re scared.”
I just looked at him. “Scared.”
“Of my game,” he explained. “My skills. My—”
I walked closer to him, then reached out, easily knocking the ball from his hands. It hit the driveway, then rolled onto the grass.
“Well, see, I wasn’t in defensive mode just then.” He reached around me, picking up the ball and giving it an authoritative bounce. “Now I am. Bring it on.”
“I told you,” I said, folding my arms over my chest. “I’m not interested.”
He sighed. “Mclean, come on. You live in a basketball town. Your dad played for DB, your mom is married to the current DB coach, and I happen to have personal experieve been with your overhand shot.”
“Yes, but basketball doesn’t have the best associations for me right now,” I pointed out.
“You can’t blame the game for any of that,” he said, bouncing the ball again. “Basketball is a good thing. Basketball only wants you to be happy.”
I just looked at him as he dribbled sloppily around me toward the basket. “Now,” I said, “you sound like a crazy person.”
“Think fast!” he said, whirling around and throwing the ball at me. I caught it easily, and he looked surprised. “Okay, fine. Now shoot it.”
“Dave.”
“Mclean. Humor me. Just one shot.”
“You’ve seen me shoot,” I pointed out.
“Yes, but the blunt force knocked my memory out. I need a replay.”
I sighed, then bounced the ball once, squaring my shoulders. Other than that random Boomerang a few weeks ago, I hadn’t had my hands on a basketball in years. But that morning had been all about doing things I had never planned to do again, so I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised.
At first, on the phone, my mom was wary. She knew I’d heard about her lawyer’s call, and thought I was calling to tell her exactly what I thought of her latest move. It was tempting to do just that. But instead, I took a breath and did what I had to do instead.
“Are you still thinking you’ll be going to the beach a lot this spring?” I asked.
“The beach?”
“Yes.” I looked into the fireplace again. “You did say once the house and the season was done you’d be going there a lot. Right?”
“I did,” she said slowly. “Why?”
“I’ll come for my spring break, next month,” I replied. “If you call off your lawyer, I’ll come that full week and four other weekends as well.”
“I didn’t want to have to get the courts involved,” she said quickly. “But—”
“And I don’t want to spend the rest of high school worrying about court dates,” I replied. She got quiet, fast. “So this is what I’m offering. Spring break plus four weekends before graduation, but my choice of when they happen. Do we have a deal?”
Silence. This was not the way she wanted it, I knew. Too bad. She could have my company and my time, my certain number of weekends and my senior spring break. But she could not have my heart.
“I’ll call Jeffrey and tell him we’ve worked something out,” she said. “If you’ll send me those break dates and the other ones you have in mind.”
“I’ll do it today,” I replied. “And we’ll just follow up as it gets closer. All right?”
A pause. It was like a business deal, cold and methodical. So far from those spur-of-the-moment trips to the Poseidon, all those years ago. But nobody went to North Reddemane anymore. Apparently.
“All right,” she said finally. “And thank you.”
Now, I stood there with Dave, holding the ball. He was grinning, in defensive stance—or what counted as such for him—bent over slightly, jumping from side to side waving his hands in my face. “Just try to get past me,” he said, doing a weird wiggle move. “I dare you.”
I rolled my eyes, then bounced the ball once to the left before cutting right around him. He scrambled to catch up, doing several illegal reach-ins as I moved closer to the basket. “You’ve basically fouled out in the last five seconds,” I told him as he batted at the ball, me, the air around both of us. “You know that, right?”
“This is street ball!” he said. “No fouls!”
“Oh, okay. In that case . . .” I elbowed him in the gut, making him gasp, and moved under the basket. In those few seconds, the net clear above, I remembered all the things my dad had taught me as if they’d been imprinted: watch the hoop, elbows tight, touch light, light, light. I shot, the ball arcing up perfectly.
“Denied!” Dave said, leaping up and batting the ball away.
“Interference,” I called out, grabbing it back.
“Street ball!” he replied. And then, as if to prove this, he tackled me and we both went down onto the grass beside my deck, as the ball left my hands, rolling under the house.
For a moment we just lay there, his arms loosely around me, both of us breathing heavy. Finally, I said, “Okay, so with that, you left the realm of basketball entirely.”
“Full contact,” he said, his voice muffled by my hair. “No guts, no glory.”
“I’d hardly call this glory.”
“You didn’t make the shot, did you?”
I rolled over, so I was on my back, him panting beside me. “You are, like, the weirdest basketball player I have ever seen.”
“Thank you,” he said.
I laughed out loud.
“What? Was that supposed to be an insult?”
“How could it be anything else?”
He shrugged, brushing his hair out of his face. “I don’t know. I think my game is unique, if that’s what you’re saying.”
“That’s one word for it.”
We lay there for another moment. His arm was still next to mine, elbow to elbow, fingertips to fingertips. After a moment, he rolled over, and I did the same, so we were facing each other. “Want to make it best of two?” he asked.
“You didn’t score,” I pointed out.
“Details,” he said. His mouth was just inches from mine. “We big thinkers choose not to dwell on them.”
Suddenly, I was just sure he was going to kiss me. He was there, I could feel his breath, the ground solid beneath us. But then something crossed his face, a thought, a hesitation, and he shifted slightly. Not now. Not yet. It was something I’d done so often—weighing what I could afford to risk, right at that moment—that I recognized it instantly. It was like looking in a mirror.
“I think a rematch is in order,” he said after a moment.
“The ball is under the house.”
“I can get it. It’s not the first time.”
“No? ”
He sat up, choosing to ignore this. “You know, you talk this tough game and everything. But I know the truth about you.”
“And what’s that again?” I said, getting to my feet.
“Secretly,” he said, “you want to play with me. In fact, you need to play with me. Because deep down, you love basketball as much as I do.”
“Loved,” I said. “Past tense.”
“Not true.” He walked around my deck, grabbing a broom there and using the handle to fish around beneath. “I saw how you squared up. There was love there.”
“You saw love in my shot,” I said, clarifying.
“Yeah.” He banged the broomstick again, and the ball came rolling out slowly, toward me. “I mean, it’s not surprising, really. Once you love something, you always love it in some way. You have to. It’s, like, part of you for good.”
I wondered what he meant by this, and in the next beat, found myself surprised by the image that suddenly popped into my head: me and my mom, on a windy beach in winter, searching for shells as the waves crashed in front of us. I
picked up the ball and threw it to him.
“You ready to play?” Dave asked, bouncing it.
“I don’t know,” I said. “Are you going to cheat?”
“It’s street ball!” he said, checking it to me. “Show me that love.”
So cheesy, I thought. But as I felt it, solid against my hands, I did feel something. I wasn’t sure it was love. Maybe what remained of it, though, whatever that might be. “All right,” I said. “Let’s play.”
Eleven
“Hi,” the librarian said, smiling up at me. She was young, with straight blonde hair, wearing a bright pink turtleneck, black skirt, and cool red-framed eyeglasses. “Can I help you?”
“I hope so,” I replied. “I’m interested in looking up some town history. But I’m not sure where to start.”
“Well, no worries. You have come to the right place.” She slid back in her rolling chair, then got to her feet, coming around the desk. “We just happen to have the most extensive collection of newspapers and town-related documents in town. Although don’t tell the historical society I said that. They tend to be a little competitive.”
“Oh,” I said. “Right.”
“Are you looking for anything in particular?” she asked, motioning for me to follow her through the main reading room. It was full of couches and chairs, most of them occupied by people absorbed in books, laptops, or magazines.
“I’m trying to find a maphat might detail downtown, like, twenty years ago,” I said.
“We’ve definitely got that,” she replied, leading me into a smaller room with shelves on all four walls, a row of tables in between them. It was empty except for someone in a parka, the hood up, sitting facing the wall. “This is from the seventyfive-year anniversary of the town’s incorporation,” she said, easing a large book out. “They put together a commemorative record of the town, with maps and all the history. Another option is looking at the tax and land records for, say, ten years back to see who owned them, and when they were bought or sold. Usually they’re searchable by address.”
I looked at the stack of books as she put them on the table beside me. “This should be a good start,” I said.
“Great,” she replied. “Good luck. Oh, and just FYI, you might want to keep your coat on. The heat barely works in this room. It’s like a meat locker.”
I nodded. “Will do.”
She left, and for a moment I just sat there, watching her as she wound her way through the reading room, picking up discarded books from a few tables along the way. There was a fireplace—a real one—crackling in the next room, and it was only as I looked at it that I realized, suddenly, how chilly it was where I was sitting. I pulled my coat closer around me, zipping it up again, and bent over the town history, beginning to turn pages.
In the two weeks since Deb’s first day of involvement on the model, it was more on track to actually being finished than I’d ever imagined possible. And that was despite the fact that, even though she’d made several phone calls, Opal couldn’t rally any more delinquents to help us. Luckily, Deb had a plan. Or several plans.
First, she had incorporated multiple systems to increase our overall working efficiency. Besides CAA, there was STOW (Same Time Owed Weekly, a written schedule that insured one of us was at the model every afternoon), PROM (Progress Recap Overview Meeting, held every Friday), and my personal favorite, SORTA (Schedule of Remaining Time and Actual). This last one was a large piece of poster board detailing all the work we still had to do alongside the days that were left before May 1, the councilwoman’s deadline.
Deb had also created a Listserv for the model project, as well as a blog that documented the progress as we put it together. Her e-mails were just like Deb herself: cheerful, concise, and sort of relentless, landing in my inbox on an almost daily basis. There was one thing about the model, though, that I wanted to do on my own.
“Mclean? ”
I blinked, then looked over at the table beside me. Sitting there, in his parka with a book in his hands, was Jason, the prep cook from Luna Blu. “Hey,” I said, surprised. “When did you get here?”
“Actually, I’ve been here.” He smiled. “I was just being antisocial. I didn’t realize that was you who was talking to Lauren until I turned around a minute ago.”
“Lauren? ”
He nodded at the reference desk, where the librarian who’d helped me was now typing away at a computer, her eyes focused on the screen. “She’s the best when it comes to hunting down information. If she can’t help you find what you’re looking for, no one can.”
I onsidered this as he picked up his own book—a worn paperback of something called A Prayer for Owen Meany—opening it again to his place. “So you hang out here a lot?”
“I guess,” he replied. “I worked here for a while when I was in high school. You know, summers and after school.”
“Wow,” I said. “That must have been different from the kitchen at Luna Blu.”
“Nothing is like working at Luna Blu,” he agreed. “It’s like contained chaos. Probably why I like it so much.”
“Dave said you went to Harvard,” I said.
“Yep.” He coughed. “But it didn’t really work out, so I came back here and took up cooking for a living. Natural career progression, of course.”
“It sounds like it was a lot of pressure,” I said. He raised his eyebrows, not sure what I meant. “The school you and Dave went to, and the college courses you took, being so driven academically.”
“It wasn’t all bad,” he replied. “Just not what I wanted, eventually.”
I nodded. Then he went back to his book, and I turned my attention to the one open in front of me. After looking through some tiny-typefaced documents and a few sketches, I turned a page and there it was: a map from twenty years earlier of the area of downtown that included Luna Blu. I leaned in closer, scanning the pages until I found my street, and my own house, identified only by a parcel number and the label SS DOM: single-story domicile. I ran my finger over it, then over Dave’s next door, before moving back across the page to the square behind it. There it was, the shape familiar, and also listed with a parcel number. Above it, it said only HOTEL.
Weird. I’d been expecting something other than a house, but for some reason this was a surprise to me. I grabbed a pen and an old receipt from my purse and wrote the parcel number of the hotel on it, as well as the official address, then folded it away and stuffed it in my pocket. I was just stacking the books into a pile when my phone beeped. It was a text from Deb.
STOW REMINDER: YOU’RE SCHEDULED 4 TO 6 TODAY! ☺
I looked at my watch. It was 3:50. Right on schedule. I picked up my bag, sliding the phone into it. As I got to my feet, Jason turned around again.
“You going to the restaurant?” I nodded. “Mind if I walk with you?”
“Not at all.”
We left through the reading room, passing Lauren, who was helping an older woman in a baseball cap at the computers. “Thanks for your help with the catalog system earlier,” she said. “You’re a genius!”
Jason shook his head, clearly embarrassed, as I followed him out the main doors and onto the street. We walked a little bit and then I said, “So it’s not just Tracey and Dave who think so. You are brilliant.”
“Three people does not make a consensus,” he said, pulling his hat down over his ears. “So. Did you find what you were looking for?”
“Sort of,” I told him. We kept walking, crossing the street. A few blocks ahead, I could see Luna Blu, its signature azure awning in the distance. “I’m closer than I was, at any rate.”
We walked another short block. The snow was still on the ground, but gray and dirty looking now, hard and slippery beneath our feet. “Well, that’s a start,” he said. “That’s good, right?”
I nodded. This was true. But anyone can begin. It was the part with all the promise, the potential, the things I loved. More and more, though, I was finding myself wanting to find out what happene
d in the end.
“There you are!” Deb said as I came up the stairs. “We were getting worried! I thought you were coming right at four.”
“It’s only five after,” I pointed out.
“Yes, but, Mclean,” Dave, who was sitting cross-legged on the floor, said, “you know that the STOW waits for no man. Or woman.”
“Sorry,” I said, flicking him as I passed. “I had something to do. I’ll make it up, I promise.”
“Yes, you will,” he said.
Deb, over at the table, began rummaging through some pieces, humming to herself as I bent down over my sector. For a long time, we worked in silence; the only sounds were distant voices from the kitchen downstairs. Hearing them, I kept thinking about Jason, what he’d said to me about Harvard and the choices he’d made. Amazing how you could get so far from where you’d planned, and yet find it was exactly where you needed to be.
About a half hour later, there was a loud knock from the bottom of the stairs—BANG! BANG! BANG!—and Deb and I both jumped. Dave, though, hardly looked fazed as he called out over one shoulder, “Yo. We’re up here.”
A moment later, the door creaked open, the sound followed by a sudden, bustling rush of voices and footsteps. Then Ellis appeared at the top of the steps, with Riley and Heather behind him.
“Oh my God,” Heather, who was in a red jacket and short skirt with thick tights beneath it, said, “what is this place?”
“It’s called an attic,” Ellis told her. “It’s the top floor of a building.”
“Shut up,” she replied, smacking the back of his head.
“Enough,” Riley said in a tired voice. Then she looked at Dave. “I know we’re early. But being stuck in the car with both of them was about to make me insane.”
“Understood,” Dave replied. “I’ll be done here in a sec.”
“So this is where you’ve been spending all your time,” Ellis said, sliding his hands in his pockets as he walked along one side of the model. “Reminds me of all that action-figure stuff you used to play with.”
“It was war staging,” Dave said loudly, “and very serious.”