What Happens to Goodbye(87)

He thought for a second. “The day you hit me with that basketball.”
“That was attractive to you?”
“Not exactly,” he replied. “More like embarrassing and humiliating. But there was something about it as a moment. . . . It was like a clean slate. No posturing or pretending. It was, you know, real.”
We were coming into town now, passing FrayBake, Luna Blu only a few blocks away. “Real,” I repeated.
“Yeah. I mean, it’s impossible to fake anything if you’ve already seen the other person in a way they’d never choose for you to. You can’t go back from that.”
“No,” I said. “I guess you can’t.”
He turned into the Luna Blu lot, parking beside a VW, and we got out and started walking toward the kitchen entrance. “So,” he said, “not to sound pushy or desperate, but you haven’t exactly answered—”
“Yo! Wait up! ” I heard a voice yell from behind us. I turned just in time to see Ellis’s van sliding into the spot beside the Volvo. A moment later, he was jogging toward us, his keys jingling in one hand. “Am I glad to see you g. I thought I was late.”
Dave glanced at his watch. “Actually, we’re all late.”
“By two minutes,” I told him. “I don’t think she’ll flog us or anything.”
“You don’t know that.” He pulled open the back door. As Ellis ducked in, and I followed, he said, “This is Deb we’re talking about.”
“Actually,” I said, stopping in front of my dad’s closed office, “I need to stop in here. I’ll catch up with you guys.”
“Uh-oh,” Ellis said. “She was our sympathy vote.”
“But now we can say it was her fault,” Dave said. To me he added, “Take your time!”
I made a face, and then they were gone, the door that led into the restaurant banging shut behind them. I leaned a little closer to my dad’s door: I could hear him inside talking, his voice low.
“Wouldn’t knock just now,” someone said, and I turned to see Jason standing down the hallway, clipboard in hand, in the narrow room where they kept all the canned and dried goods. “Your dad said no interruptions until further notice.”
“Really,” I said, looking at the door again. “Did he tell you what was going on?”
“I didn’t ask.” He nodded, checking something off his list. “But they’ve been in there for a while.”
I was about to ask him who was with my dad before deciding against it. Instead, I stepped back, thanking him, and headed upstairs.
The restaurant was empty and quiet. The only sounds were the beer cooler humming and the ticking of the fan over the hostess station, turned on too high a speed. I stopped at the end of the bar, looking down the row of tables, each neatly set and waiting for opening. Like a clean slate, I thought, remembering what Dave had said earlier. Even though each shift started the same way, on any given night, anything could happen from here.
It was surprisingly quiet as I climbed the stairs to the attic room, and I wondered if Dave and everyone else had left or something. When I got to the landing, I saw them all gathered around Deb, who was sitting with her back to me on one of the tables, her computer open in her lap. I couldn’t see what was on the screen, but everyone was studying it.
“. . . got to be some kind of joke,” she was saying. “Either that or just a coincidence.”
“I’m sorry, but they aren’t just similar. I mean, look at that one and then that one.” Heather reached forward, pointing at the screen. “It’s the same girl.”
“Different names, though,” Riley murmured.
“Different first names,” Heather said. “Like I said: same girl.”
“What’s going on?” I asked.
Deb jumped, startled, and shut the laptop, turning around. “Nothing. I was just—”
“—updating the Ume.com page for the model and linking our accounts to it,” Heather finished for her, opening it up again. “Imagine our surprise when we put in your e-mail and five profiles popped up.”div  “Heather,” Riley said, her voice low.
“What? It’s weird, we all agreed on that ten minutes ago.” She looked at me as Dave and Ellis turned their attention back to the computer. “What are you, a split personality or something? ”

I felt my mouth go dry as the impact of what they’d discovered finally began to hit me. I stepped forward, my eyes narrowing to the screen on the table, and the list of names there. Five girls, five profiles, four pictures. MCLEAN SWEET. ELIZA SWEET. LIZBET SWEET. BETH SWEET. And at the bottom, just a name, nothing else for Liz Sweet. It was as far as I’d gotten.
“Mclean?” Deb said softly. I looked at her, still very aware of Dave studying the screen only a few feet from me. “What’s all this about?”
I swallowed. They’d all been so honest with me, so open. Dave and his past embarrassments, Riley and her dirtbags, Ellis and the Love Van, Deb and, well, everything. Even Heather had pointed out her house and talked about her dad, the technophobe Loeb fan. With this, they had perfectly good reason to doubt everything I had told them in return. Even if, I thought, looking at Dave, it was true.
“I . . .” I began, but no words came, nothing, just a gasp of breath, and then I was turning back down the stairs, picking up speed as I went. I moved quickly back through the restaurant, past Tracey, who was stacking menus at the bar.
“Hey!” she called out, a blur in my side vision. “Where’s the fire?”