Change Places with Me(17)

“She wouldn’t accept payment,” Evelyn had said.

“What—why not?”

“Something about an incomplete reading.”

Rose shrugged this off. “I’ll be home right after brunch.” As if brunch was something Rose did every Sunday and this wasn’t her first time.

Stella Dallas was a coffee shop plastered with movie posters from years gone by. Rose knew some of the famous names, Marilyn Monroe and Jack Nicholson, and didn’t recognize others, Joel McCrea, Molly Ringwald. She took off her coat, one of Evelyn’s—wool, tweedy, with fake fur around the collar—and became the seventh person to squeeze into a booth meant for six, leaving her half on, half off the padded bench next to Dylan Beck, who wasn’t giving an inch, and a couple of guys she didn’t know. Across from her were Selena, Astrid, and a girl she didn’t know either. There’s no room for me here, she thought. I could’ve just been someone passing by, and then had to remind herself that of course that wasn’t true; Selena had specially invited her only hours before.

And Selena immediately focused on her, leaning across the table. “Such a cool party! Everyone’s asking, how about another one next weekend? You can get a DJ then. It’s a lot more fun than a stream.”

“I know something a lot more fun than a stream,” Dylan said.

“Shut up,” Astrid said. She had deep shadows beneath her eyes.

Dylan reached for her, which knocked open a bottle of ketchup on the Formica tabletop. No one moved to clean up the spill, so Rose used her napkin to wipe it up. “I heard a really strange story yesterday, at Belle Heights Animal Hospital.”

“I know that place,” Dylan said. “They put my cat under for an operation and she never woke up.”

Rose thought that sounded awful. Never getting a chance to say good-bye. “It’s not that kind of story. There were these dogs that hated each other. One day, one of them died—”

“Don’t talk about that!” Selena cried. “I had a schnorgi. I loved her so much. She died last year.”

“What’s a schnorgi?” asked the girl Rose didn’t know.

“Half schnauzer, half corgi, and all a-dog-able.”

“That’s the stupidest thing I have ever heard from you,” Astrid said.

Selena looked like she might cry.

“Don’t be such a baby,” Astrid said.

“You’re calling me stupid! Meanwhile she’s telling us some horrible story about dead dogs!”

“That’s just it,” Rose said. “The dog wasn’t dead—it was alive the whole time, and somehow the other dog knew it and dug him up. But even after that, they still hated each other. Actually, I don’t like the ending to this story; this experience should’ve changed them on the deepest level, brought them closer together—”

“Stop! I miss my schnorgi.” Selena held her hands over her ears.

Rose remembered doing that as a kid. Holding her hands over her ears, pressing hard, shutting her eyes tight—anything to blot out the world, make it go away.

Across the room, near a poster for a movie called Ball of Fire, Rose saw a girl with a long, ropy braid down her back, sitting at the crowded counter. Kim was here! Rose could bring Kim over to the table and squeeze her in, too. But there were older people on either side of Kim, maybe an aunt and uncle.

“I was meaning to tell you,” one of the guys next to Rose said. “Your mom is hot.”

A waiter came to their table. Rose looked up to see a short kid in a black T-shirt and black jeans, with frizzy, curly hair and bushy eyebrows that were almost a unibrow—the kid from the cafeteria scanner. Kim had mentioned his name—what was it? “It’s . . . you,” she said.

“It’s me, all right.”

“You work here, too?”

“My parents own the place. Weekends are busy, so I help out.”

“I guess they like movies, huh?”

“That’s an understatement. My mom’s from Korea and my dad’s from the Dominican Republic. Their families thought they couldn’t possibly have anything in common, but they did.”

Everyone else at the table was ignoring them, talking to one another. Rose gestured to the poster across the room. “What’s Ball of Fire?”

“A screwball comedy from 1941, with Gary Cooper and the lovely Barbara Stanwyck.”

Rose remembered that he’d told her she looked like Barbara Stanwyck. “What’s it about?”

“There’s this nightclub singer who has to hide out because her mobster boyfriend is in trouble with the law. She ends up in a house with eight professors writing an encyclopedia—”

“Can we order, already?” Astrid asked.

“In a second,” Rose said. “I want to hear this. Go on.”

“These professors never really leave the house, so she helps them write part of their encyclopedia about the slang of the day. It’s actually based on ‘Snow White and the Seven Dwarves.’”

“No kidding! My dad used to read that to me all the time. I practically had it memorized. But you said there were eight professors, not seven?”

“Gary Cooper is the prince.”

“Oh.” He had amazing eyes, she noticed, brown with flecks of green.