Dooley’s uncle said he would take care of the dishes. He asked Dooley on the sly if he wanted to help out, maybe catch up on things. Dooley said no.
His uncle told him not to worry about it. Dooley thanked Jeannie for the meal, excused himself, and went upstairs to his room.
Sitting at the table, making small talk with Jeannie, had been torture. But he’d done it, not because his uncle had asked him to—well, maybe that had been part of it—but because he liked Jeannie and he didn’t want to hurt her feelings. But even still, he’d had to force himself to pay attention to what she was saying, none of it very important, because all his brain wanted to do was replay what Beth had said: I saw you. With Parker. Jesus, did she mean what he thought she meant?
He sat on the edge of his bed, his stomach churning, until he couldn’t stand it any longer. He pulled out his cell phone and punched in Warren’s number.
“What happened? Why were the cops there again? What did they want?”
“I don’t know,” Warren said.
“Were they uniforms or plainclothes?”
“Plainclothes. I recognized one of them. He was that guy that was on your mother’s case.”
“Randall?”
“Yeah.”
“Did you hear what he said to her?”
“I couldn’t. The door was closed.”
“How long was he in there?”
“I don’t know. At least twenty minutes. I couldn’t hang around and wait, Dooley. I stayed as long as I could, but ... Sorry.”
“It’s okay. You did good,” Dooley said. “Thanks. I mean it, Warren.”
He heard Jeannie leave and his uncle pad up the stairs to his room. Then nothing for a moment. Then his uncle coming down the hall toward his room and a soft knock on the door.
“Yeah?” Dooley said.
His uncle pushed the door open. “I just wanted to thank you for how you behaved at dinner.”
“It’s no problem. I was glad to do it. I like Jeannie.”
“And she likes you.” For a moment, he seemed about to say something else on the topic. He hung in the doorway, studying Dooley. “How’s Beth?”
“Okay, considering.”
“Nothing new?”
Dooley shook his head. He wondered why Randall had gone back to the hospital to talk to her. Whatever the reason, he was pretty sure Beth hadn’t told him anything new. Maybe she’d even been smart enough to insist on the presence of her lawyer. He hoped she’d been even smarter and had kept her mouth shut altogether. Dooley was pretty sure, based on what she had said on the phone, that she wouldn’t have told Randall what she’d told Dooley.
He could drive himself crazy, imagining what might have happened, but imagining wasn’t the same as knowing. The only way he was going to know for sure what happened was when Randall came looking for him again to ask more questions or maybe to slip the handcuffs on him.
When Dooley woke up the next morning, the roof still hadn’t caved in. That’s good, he told himself. Every day that Randall didn’t come after him was one more day he had to figure out what to do. But where to start?
Someone hammered on his door. What the hell? Dooley sat up just as the door burst open.
It wasn’t the cops.
It was his uncle, with a pissed-off look on his face, which was just as bad as if it had been the cops.
“For Christ’s sake, Ryan, you’re going to be late for school.”
Dooley glanced at his clock-radio. Whoa! How had that happened? He jumped up and reached for the jeans that lay in a heap by the side of his bed. His uncle stood in the doorway, harrumphing while Dooley zipped up.
“I’m sorry, okay?” Dooley said. “I had trouble getting to sleep.” He sniffed his armpits and dug in his dresser for a clean T-shirt. His uncle’s shoulders untensed a little.
“I know things haven’t been easy lately,” he said.
No kidding.
“But school’s a non-negotiable.”
“I said I was sorry.” What more did his uncle want?
“What I meant was—”
“I know what you meant.” He shoved his feet into a pair of boots and then did a three-sixty, scanning for his backpack. It was under his desk. He grabbed it and headed for the door.
His uncle was still standing there.
“Why don’t you come by the store after work?” he said. “We can talk.”
“I got stuff to do.”
“Ryan, this thing with Beth—”
“I’m gonna be late.” He started to squeeze by his uncle, but his uncle stepped back and let him pass.
Dooley walked as fast as he could, breaking into a run from time to time, but the bell had already rung by the time he got up the school steps and through the door. Worse, Rektor was standing outside the school office. When he saw Dooley, he waved him over.
“Home form is almost over,” he said. “That makes you late, Mr. Dooley.”
Mr. Dooley. Dooley hated being called that. Rektor called all the other male students by their last names, but as soon as he knew that that was what Dooley preferred, he stuck a Mister in front of it and added a sarcastic little spin when he said it.
Dooley didn’t bother to offer an excuse. The one he had was lame, and he knew that Rektor wouldn’t believe it anyway. He looked at the vice principal, waiting to see what he was going to do.
The bell rang, signaling the end of home form. The hall flooded with students. If Dooley joined the crowd, he would make it to his first class on schedule, with no need for a late pass. He glanced at Rektor and then thought, Fuck it. If Rektor wanted to bust his balls, he could call him down to the office. Dooley took the stairs two at a time, ignoring Rektor’s voice behind him, and was in his seat in math class before the next bell rang.
Math class passed in exquisite suspense. He kept glancing at the door, expecting to see either Rektor or Randall on the other side of the glass.
Neither showed up.
He found Warren at lunch time. The poor guy was nodding off over a pair of peanut butter sandwiches.
“Hey,” Dooley said, nudging him gently.
Warren’s head shot up. There was a look of panic on his face, as if he’d been caught snoring in class.
“You need to get some sleep,” Dooley said.
“Tell me about it.” Warren picked up a sandwich. “It’s the schedule. It’s crazy. I haven’t been able to figure out the formula. Sometimes you work three shifts and get three shifts off. Or they give you four shifts and three shifts off. Then all of a sudden they hit you with six shifts straight with only two shifts off to recover. It doesn’t make any sense.”
“You doing six now?”
Warren nodded. “Five down and one to go. Then I get two glorious nights to catch up on my sleep—after I catch up on my homework.” He bit into his sandwich. From the look on his face, it might just as well have been a shitwich.
“How’s Beth?”
“If you think I look tired, you should see her.”
She’d looked exhausted when Dooley had talked to her in the coffee shop. She’d looked even more drained when he had caught a glimpse of her in Emerg. He ached to hold her.
“Is she still at the hospital?”
“She was when I left at six this morning. But I heard she has to make a court appearance. After that, I don’t know.” He blinked at Dooley from behind his glasses.
“What?” Dooley said.
“Nothing.”
“You were going to say something, Warren. What is it?”
“It’s nothing. I’m tired, too. That’s all.” He started to raise his sandwich to his mouth again. Dooley caught his hand and lowered it to the table.
“What is it, Warren?”
Warren shrank back a little.
“It’s that guy.
“What guy?”
“The one I told you about. The guy who comes around all the time.”
“Nevin?” Jesus, he hated Nevin. “What about him?”
“He shows up all the time with Beth’s mother. She really likes him, doesn’t she?”
What? What was Warren telling him?
“Beth’s mother, I mean,” Warren said quickly. “She’s crazy about the guy. He comes to the hospital with her all the time, and he’s always rushing around, getting her coffee, taking her down to the food court and making sure she eats something, telling her it’s okay, he’ll keep Beth company if she has to go to work, all that kind of stuff.”
“Yeah, I know.”
“You do?”
“Yeah. It’s okay.” Dooley let go of his hand.
“If it’s any consolation,” Warren said, “I don’t think Beth likes him as much as her mother does. She talks to him like a friend, but it’s nothing like the way she talks to you.”
For the first time in a long time, Dooley felt a surge of hope in his heart.
“Thanks, Warren.”
School ended for the day, and the roof still hadn’t caved in. He was on his way out when his cell phone rang. He checked the display. It was the store. Boy, it had better not be Kevin.
It was Linelle.
“There’s a girl here asking for you,” she said.
“What girl?”
Dooley heard Linelle ask the girl for her name.
“Ellie Davis,” came the answer.
“She’s there now?”
“Yeah.”
“And she asked for me?”
“You ever known me to bullshit you, Dooley?”
“No.”
“Well then?”
“Tell her I’ll be there in ten minutes. Ask her to wait.”
There was a pause while Linelle relayed the information.
“She says she’ll be in the Greek place across the street.”
“How will I recognize her?”
Another pause.
“She says she’ll recognize you.”
Dooley ran most of the way.
When he pushed open the door to the restaurant, he was thinking, how do all these girls I’ve never met know what I look like when I couldn’t pick a single one of them out of a lineup if my life depended on it?
In Ellie’s case, it turned out to be no mystery.
She was the girl who had been with Rachel Silverman at the ballet school.
She was sitting at a table for two near the back. He ordered a Coke on his way to her.
“I’ve been calling you,” he said as he sat down across the table from her.
She looked startled.
“I didn’t get any messages.”
“I didn’t leave a message. I’ve been calling your home phone. No one ever answers. I was beginning to think you were out of town or something.”
“Sula doesn’t answer any number that isn’t on the list.”
“List?” he said. Sula? he thought.
“The housekeeper. My mom doesn’t let her answer unless the person who’s calling is someone we know. Anyone who’s not on the list has to leave a message and my mother decides whether or not she wants to call back.”
In that case, Dooley was doubly glad that he hadn’t left a message. He could imagine some uptight mom who, if you asked him, desperately needed a hobby, listening to whatever message he might have left.
“How did you find me?” he said.
“I heard Nevin say one time that you worked at that video store.”
Dooley bet that there’d been a sneer in his voice when he said it. He bet old Nevin would rather die than work in a video store. If he ever did a job like Dooley’s—fat chance—he’d be fired on his first day for being condescending to the customers.
“What did you want to talk to me about, Ellie?”
A waitress appeared and put a Coke in front of Dooley. She glanced at Ellie’s coffee cup to see if she wanted a refill, but it looked to Dooley like she hadn’t touched what was already in there. Ellie waited until the waitress had left.
“Beth has always been nice to me,” she said. She was looking at Dooley’s Coke, not at Dooley. “Rachel doesn’t like her. I don’t really know why, except that Rachel doesn’t like a lot of people.”
Dooley bet the feeling was mutual.
“That’s just the way she is,” Ellie said.
Dooley wondered why Ellie, who seemed nice enough, would hang out with someone like Rachel. Low self-esteem, maybe. She’d been like a shadow the first time he’d seen her, letting Rachel do all the talking. And now she looked flat-out uncomfortable, like she was afraid that if she looked at Dooley, he would bite her.
She drew in a deep breath. Her eyes came up to meet Dooley’s.
“It’s all my fault,” she said. Her focus jumped back to the tabletop.
“What’s all your fault?”
“Everything,” she said, so quietly that Dooley had to strain to hear her. “I ... I feel terrible. If it hadn’t been for me ...”
“What do you mean, everything?”
She stared resolutely at the tabletop for long enough to make Dooley lose his patience. But he forced himself to wait.
“I was on Parker’s team,” she said.
She was talking about the trip.
“Parker wasn’t even interested in her.”
“In Beth?”
Ellie nodded.
“He was sort of dogging this other girl on our team. He was like that. He’d set his sights on some girl and then go after her, you know, until he got what he wanted. It was like a game to him.” Some game. “Anyway, after the first day, Beth came up to Rachel and me at suppertime and asked if she could sit with us. Rachel was going to say no, but I said sure.” She glanced up at Dooley. Her cheeks turned pink. What was going on? “Nevin was on her team,” she said. Her voice took on an even softer quality when she said his name. “I thought maybe if she sat with us at supper, Nevin might sit with us, too.”
Maybe what they said was true. Maybe there really was someone for everyone, even old Nevin.
“He tried to join us,” Ellie said. “He came over and asked if he could sit with us. But Beth said no. She said the other chair at our table was already spoken for, even though it wasn’t.”
Oh?
“Then Rachel said, no, it wasn’t. She invited Nevin to sit down. I could see Beth was upset, but she did her best to hide it.” She ventured another glance at Dooley. “She’s like that. She’s nice. She doesn’t like to hurt people’s feelings.” Her eyes shifted away again. “When I got up to leave, she came with me. She told Nevin we had something we had to do. We walked away. Then she told me that she didn’t understand why Nevin was acting the way he was.”
“What way was that?”
She hesitated.
“He was hitting on her,” she said at last. “She said he should have known better. She said he knew she had a boyfriend.” Her eyes met Dooley’s fleetingly, and her cheeks turned pink again. “She told me a little about you. She said you weren’t at all the way most people thought you were. She really loves you.” There was a touch of awe in her voice that made Dooley sit a little taller in his chair and made him ache all that much more for Beth. “That’s when I made a suggestion.”
“Suggestion?”
“I said I would talk to Parker. I said maybe we could arrange to switch teams. That way Nevin wouldn’t be able to bother her so much. And, well, I thought ...”
“You like Nevin, huh?” Dooley didn’t understand it. He thought Nevin was an over-privileged, overly pampered, conceited little weasel. But what did he know about the kids in Beth’s life, other than that they lived in a different world from his? A world where, apparently, shy girls with a shortage of selfesteem developed serious crushes on twits like Nevin.
Ellie confirmed it with a nod.
“I talked to Parker that night.”
He tried to imagine it—mousey little Ellie trying to pry a favor out of hotshot Parker.
“He didn’t act like he was even remotely interested. I tried to tell him—I said she had this boyfriend back home and that Nevin was buggin
g her and that she just wanted to be able to get through the week without being harassed. Finally, he said he would think about it. I was sure he was going to say no. But first thing the next morning, he went to talk to Mr. DeLisle—he was in charge of the project—and he arranged for Beth and me to switch teams. I was really surprised. I didn’t think he’d been paying attention to what I was saying.”
“Why the change?”
Ellie shrugged. “But Beth sure was grateful to him. And he really turned on the charm, you know?”
Dooley didn’t, but he sure could picture it.
“I could tell that Beth liked him,” she said. “But it wasn’t the same way that she likes you.” This time when she looked at him, she held her gaze steady. “I was at the party that last night after we finished the project. I didn’t see her go into the house with him, but someone who did said they were holding hands.”
“Do you remember who that was?”
She thought for a moment.
“Rachel told me that that’s what she heard, but I don’t know where she heard it. I could ask.”
“It’s okay,” he said. He already knew who it was.
He remembered what his uncle had told him after he’d talked to a cop friend of his. Parker had insisted that Beth had gone willingly up to his room. He’d insisted that he hadn’t done anything that she hadn’t agreed to. And, his uncle said, it was going to be hard for Beth to prove otherwise because there was only one witness who saw them go up. And that witness said they were holding hands.
Annicka.
Annicka had told Dooley that she had seen Beth and Parker together. She was the one who had seen them go up the stairs. She was the one who had seen them holding hands.
“You know a girl named Annicka?” he said.
Ellie nodded.
“You know her last name?”
“Charles.”
“You know her phone number or where she lives?”
She shook her head.
He stood up abruptly.
Ellie cringed in her chair, as if she were afraid of what he was going to do.
“How’d it work out for you, anyway?” he said, partly to get that scared look off her face, partly because he was curious. “With Nevin?”
“It didn’t,” she said. “He wasn’t interested in me. I should have known. I should never have suggested that Beth switch teams with me.”
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