The Mystery of Hollow Places(16)
“Never. Come on, Jeremy will be there. It’s important.”
“Finding my dad is important. Eating hash browns while you sit on Jeremy White’s lap? I’m thinking less so. I just want to go home and be alone and read the file.”
“With Lindy kicking down your bedroom door? Come eat. Have fun, you know? Experience, like, joy? And Chad will drive us home and you can spend the night reading in peace. I’ll help you. Or okay, I won’t bug you. Whatevs.”
I accept the mini hairspray.
“Fab!” She beams. “Just one more thing . . .” Jessa digs Mrs. Masciarelli’s keys out of her coat pocket, pulls open one of the stall doors, and hangs the key ring on the purse hook mounted inside. “HIS is just down the hall. She’ll find them on her next bathroom run.”
I admit, Jessa has a mind for detective work. She knows how to get what she wants, and get away clean. As far as accomplices go, I could do worse than Jessa Price.
To meet Chad and Jeremy we walk down to Boston Common, a little ways from Good Shepherd, toward the Park Street station. Road salt, foot traffic, and a few warm days have whipped the sidewalk snow into gray foam. It isn’t warm tonight, not even for February, and it’s dark outside already. But there are people everywhere. Mostly couples. A pale boy and girl in matching lavender skinny jeans hold hands on the platform at Park. On the red line to Kendall Square, a curvy girl in a pink Sox sweatshirt sits on her boyfriend’s lap, her hair a slick purple-black curtain around their faces, and though the seat next to them is perfectly good, no one wants to sit in it, thank you very much.
Jessa’s watching them, her face a mask of vague horror. All I really care about is the file weighing down my bag, but if there’s anything you should read only in a special place and not in a T car smelling of Chinese food and wet clothing, it’s this. To stop myself from pulling it out, I read a poster warning riders to report “mysterious packages” four times before departing the train in Cambridge.
The Friendly Toast is a short, cold walk from the Kendall stop. It’s one of Dad’s favorite places in Boston. We used to go after sessions, and now we stop by after a movie or music on the Common. The walls are lime green, decorated with old movie posters and cuckoo clocks, tin signs for funny-sounding beers, and life-size ratty-haired Barbies. I’m not dumb or desperate enough to think I’ll find Dad with a drink at the bright pink bar, but I can’t help looking while we stomp the slush off our shoes. No dice.
Across the restaurant, Chad and Jeremy wave at us from one of the big laminated tables under a giant, mustachioed plastic cheeseburger wearing a sombrero.
We spent so long in the stacks that we’re late in arriving and the boys have their huge plates of greasy breakfast food already. Jessa tucks herself into a chair beside Jeremy White. I hug my bag and perch restlessly on the seat next to Chad, who smiles at me, his mouth tiled with impossibly square white teeth, his lightly freckled nose scrunching. “What’s up, Imogene?” he says in his deep voice, gravel-low.
A sophomore at BU, Chad Price is pure blond, white blond, with long, nearly white eyelashes and pale green eyes. You’d think he’d be a ghost with hair like that, but his face is winter tanned from ranging the Marple Slopes, where he works part-time as a ski instructor when he’s not studying organic chemistry and preparing to take the MCATs next year. Once I asked Chad why he wanted to be a doctor. He shrugged and said he likes working with his hands, which are blond-furred and big-knuckled and generally divine. We’ve played countless games of Super Smash Bros. on the WiiU in the Prices’ basement, and sometimes when he knocks my Kirby off into space, he cackles gloatingly, reaches over, and shakes me by the back of the neck. After which I’m so flushed, I’m easily punted out of bounds the moment I’m reborn. Does this make me pathetic? Très. It gets worse, because then I walk home and spend the night cultivating a case of longing so vigorous, I’m almost proud of it.
So I have a crush. A crush is not a contract. I am obligated to do nothing more than feel all my feelings and then close them up and put them back on the shelf, to be taken out and revisited like any familiar story that feels safe precisely because the ending never changes.
“Im doesn’t want to talk to you, Chadwick,” Jessa scolds. “She’s, like, preoccupied.”
He lifts an eyebrow paler than his skin. “On a Saturday night?”
“And she’s sleeping over, so don’t bother us.”
“Sleepover?” Jeremy snakes an arm around Jessa’s waist. “But I didn’t bring my toothbrush.”
Chad reaches over to smack Jeremy, who karate-blocks Chad to protect his ’do: a stiff black faux-hawk like the bone ridge on a dinosaur’s skull.
They’re Best Friends for Life, or whatever the boy equivalent is. I’ve never understood it. Chad records every episode of How It’s Made and will describe the creation of a crayon in the same reverent tone you’d use to talk about the miracle of flight; Jeremy watches YouTube compilations of the world’s worst car crashes. But buddies they are, and if Chad objects to Jeremy dating his sister, it’s never stopped them. Not since Jessa was a bright, shiny sophomore and Jeremy the senior soccer captain. Jessa can never decide if she loves or hates Jeremy. At this nanosecond in time they’re broken up, have been since Jeremy went on a two-week Caribbean Christmas cruise with his family and didn’t bother telling Jessa, and only brought her back a puka-shell bracelet from the airport newsstand. Jessa and Jeremy fight easily and often. But by the moony look in her eyes as she plucks a potato wedge from his plate, I’m fairly certain she’s cycling around to love. They’ll be back together by June, just in time for the holy of holies (Sugarbrook High’s prom, which I’m pretty set on not attending).