What Happens to Goodbye(40)

“Which was Gerv,” I said, clarifying.
“Gervais,” he corrected me. “Yeah. Riley coined his nickname because he was always staring at her chest.”
“Classy.”
“I only hang with the best,” he said cheerfully.
I sat down, taking one of the shrink-wrapped stacks of plastic pieces and ripping it open. “So you and Riley . . . you weren’t ever a couple?”
“Nope,” he said, taking his own stack and plopping down a couple of feet from me. “Apparently, I’m not up to her low standards.”
“You have the same tattoo, though,” I pointed out. “That’s a pretty serious thing to do with someone.”
He flipped over his wrist, exposing the circle there with the thick outline. “Ah, right. But it’s not a couple thing. More of a friend thing. Or a childhood thing. Or,” he said, ripping open the plastic bundle in his lap, “a wart thing.”
“Excuse mont>
“Long story,” he said, shaking out the pieces. “Okay, so where do we start, you think?”
“No idea,” I said, spreading out all my pieces on the floor around me. I’d been thinking I’d take a stab at it without the directions, but as soon as I looked at it closely I knew that wasn’t happening. There were many tabs and pieces, each labeled, making up a crazy quilt of letters and numbers. “This looks seriously impossible.”
“Nah,” he said. Then, as I watched, he collected four flat segments from his own pile, clicked them together, then added a couple of curved ones. Finally, he picked out a thicker, shorter one and pressed it into the bottom with the palm of his hand. One, two, three, and he had a house. Just like that.
“Okay, so that,” I told him, “was impressive.”

“One of the bonuses of being a delinquent,” he replied. “Good spatial skills.”
“Really?”
“No,” he said. I felt my face flush, feeling like an idiot. But he just picked up the house, glancing at the bottom of it, then carried it over to the base. “I was just really into model making when I was a kid.”
“Like trains?” I asked, picking up a piece from beside me. It had an A and a 7 on it and I had no idea what to do with it. None.
“Model trains?” he replied. “Are you trying to insult me or something? ”
I looked at him, wondering if he was serious. “What’s wrong with model trains?”
“Nothing, technically,” he said, squatting down by one edge of the base. “I, however, did war models. Battlefields, tanks, soldiers. Aircraft carriers. That kind of thing.”
“Oh,” I said. “Well, that’s totally different.”
He looked over at me, his expression flat, then placed the model on a spot on the base, pressing it down with the heel of his hand. When it clicked, he stood, taking a step back.
“So,” he said after a moment. I could hear someone—or several someones actually, by the chaotic thumping—climbing the stairs up toward us. “What do you think?”
I walked over beside him. Together, we looked down at the tiny house, the sole thing on this vast, flat surface. Like the only person living on the moon. It could be either lonely or peaceful, depending on how you looked at it.
“It’s a start,” I said.
Twenty minutes later, between Dave, me, and the handful of Luna Blu employees impersonating delinquents who’d joined us, the model was looking pretty good. After a few minutes of chaos and complaining all around, we’d settled into a system. Dave and the prep cook Jason—who, it turned out, knew each other from attending some academic camp years earlier—assembled the pieces, and the rest of us matched them to the proper spot where they belonged. So far, we’d managed to get about ten different structures on the upper left-hand corner of the base: a handful of houses, a couple of buildings, and a fire station.
“You know, I think I used to live in this neighbrhood,” Tracey said to me as we secured a long, square building where the diagram indicated. “This is a grocery store, right?”
I glanced down at the building as I pressed it in, waiting for the click I now knew meant it was secured. “I don’t know. It doesn’t say what it is.”
“None of them do,” Leo, the cook, called out from beside one of the boxes where, as far as I could tell, he’d done little other than pop bubble wrap while the rest of us worked. “Which seems kind of stupid to me. How can it be a map if you can’t tell where you are by looking at it?”
“Leo,” Jason said, looking up at him as he fit a roof onto another house, “that is so profound.”
“Oh, for God’s sake, it is not,” Tracey snapped, getting to her feet and crossing the room. As I followed her, she added, “Jason is convinced that Leo is some kind of genius, masquerading as a moron.”
“Like an idiot savant?” Dave asked, concentrating on putting together an office building.
“You got the idiot part right,” Tracey replied. She sighed, then peered over Jason’s shoulder, watching as he assembled something. “Where does that go? Right by the one we just put on?”
He glanced at the directions, which were opened up on the floor beside him. “Yep, think so.”
“I knew it!” She clapped her hands. “I did live over there. Because that’s my old bank and that grocery store next to it is the one I got banned from that time.”
“You got banned from a grocery store?” I asked.
“Oh, I’ve been banned from everywhere,” she replied easily, flipping her hand.