What Happens to Goodbye(39)

“Plus the walk-in conked out at some point last night, so we lost half our meat and all of the fish. On the day of the Defriese game! The repairman can’t get here until this afternoon and he’ll charge double overtime, and all the suppliers are totally out of everything because everyone else ordered so big for game day.”
That explained my dad’s text, at least. Sure enough, as we passed the main door to the kitchen, I could see him in the walk-in, poking at something with a screwdriver. Jason the prep cook was standing behind him with a toolbox, like a nurse handing off instruments during surgery. It was not the time to interrupt—you never wanted to bug anyone when they were doing hardware repair on old kitchen equipment—so I continued following Opal and Dave through the restaurant and to the stairs that led to the attic.
“The last thing I was worried about,” Opal was saying now as she started up the stairs, “was not having enough delinquents for this freaking photo op.” She stopped, suddenly, both walking and talking, and turned back to look at Dave. “Oh. Sorry about that. I didn’t mean to call you—”
“It’s okay,” he told her. “Kind of comes with the community-service requirement.”
She smiled, relieved, and turned back around. “Seriously, though. I had such a turnout on Wednesday, and now today nobody shows up? I don’t get it.”
“Did you sign their sheets?” Dave asked her.
Opal paused. “Yeah, I did.”
“Oh.”
She looked back again. “Why?”
“Well,” he said, “it’s just that I’ve heard that once some people get a signature, it’s easy to just copy it. The court office is usually too busy to do more than double-check the name matches.”
Opal looked appalled. “But that’s so wrong!”
Dave shrugged. “They are delinquents.”
“So, wait.” She narrowed her eyes at him. “Does that mean you’re just here for one day and a signature, then?”

“No,” he said. Then he glanced at me, like I was going to vouch for him, before saying, “I’m not a true delinquent. Just did something stupid.”
“Haven’t we all,” Opal said, sighing.
“Opal?” someone yelled up the stairs. “There’s a reporter at the front door asking for you.”
“Oh, crap,” she said, taking a panicked look around the attic space. Behind her, I saw the boxes had all been opened, and someone had constructed the rest of the model’s base around the one piece I’d put down. Everything looked ready to begin, except for the fact that we had only one delinquent. Or sort-of delinquent. “She’s early. What am I going to do? It’s supposed to look like I have a whole crew here!”
“Two isn’t a crew?” Dave asked.
“I’m not part of this,” I said. “I just came to see my dad.”
“Oh yes, but, Mclean,” Opal said, desperate, “you can just pretend, right? For a few minutes? I will owe you big.”
“Pretend to be a delinquent?” I said, clarifying.
“You can do it,” Dave advised me. “Just don’t smile, and try to look like you’re considering stealing something.”
I actually had to fight not to smile at this. “It’s that easy?”
“I hope so,” Opal said, “because I’m about to recruit everyone I can get my hands on. Can you guys please start taking some stuff out and just, you know, make it look like it’s in progress? ”
“Sure,” Dave said.
“Bless you,” she replied, setting her coffee cup down on a nearby table with a clank. Then she was bolting down the stairs, announcing, “I need anyone here under thirty upstairs, stat! No questions! Now, now!”
Dave watched her go, then looked at me. “So,” he said. “What exactly are we d here?”
“It’s a model,” I told him, walking over to the A box and pushing the flaps all the way open. “Of the town. Opal got roped into organizing the assembly of it for the city council.”
“And that’s Opal,” he said, nodding at the stairs, where, distantly, we could still hear her voice, ordering all hands on deck.
“Yep.”
He walked over to the model, bending over it, then reached for the directions, which were lying to the side, flipping them open. “Look at that,” he said, turning a page. “Our houses are actually on here.”
“Really,” I said, unloading a few shrink-wrapped stacks of plastic pieces from the box.
“In your yard,” he said, turning another page, “we should put someone lying prone in the driveway, felled by a basketball.”
“Only if we put a weeping girl in a car in front of yours,” I replied.
He glanced at me. “Oh, right. Riley said she saw you last night.”
“I feel bad for her,” I said, pulling out more stacks. “With the cheating and all. She seems like a nice girl.”
“She is.” He flipped another page. “She just has really lousy taste in guys.”
“You two seem really close,” I said.
He nodded. “There was a time when she was literally my only friend. Except for Gerv the Perv.”
I raised my eyebrows as downstairs, a door slammed. “Gerv the what?”
“Just this kid I used to hang out with at my old school.” When he glanced up and saw me still watching him, he added, “I told you I was weird. So were my friends.”
“Friend.”
“Friend,” he repeated. Then he sighed. “When you’re fourteen and mostly taking college courses, it’s not like you have much in common with everyone else in your classes. Except for the other weird, smart kid.”