Chapter 3
It wasn’t like I didn’t hear them. Of course I heard them.
“Yeah, it was last weekend but I didn’t go. I saw it, though,” she whispered.
“It was at the Iota Alpha house. It was crazy!”
“Did the police…”
I closed my rickety laptop and put it into my bag. I didn’t need to listen to this bullshit. “If you stand right behind me, I can hear you even if you whisper,” I said to the two girls.
“Oh, sorry,” one said.
“You shouldn’t gossip about things about which you know absolutely nothing,” I told her. Her eyes widened, like she was scared, but her friend covered her mouth to contain a fit of giggles.
“If you’re going to do the crime, do the time!” she told me before totally dissolving into laughter.
I hadn’t done any crime. I hadn’t done anything terrible, just stupid—but I couldn’t seem to speak at the moment to explain myself, so I only gave her the finger before I walked away. And I wasn’t going to cry about this again, at least not in front of people. I walked to my car and did it there.
No, the police hadn’t gotten involved in my public humiliation.
But they hadn’t needed to broadcast it over their scanners for everyone to find out about it.
We all had phones and it had been fun to repost the video of last Saturday night again and again.
Super fun. Of course, I hadn’t enjoyed it, but it was the kind of thing that people would forget.
I would need to ride this out until it died down. Eventually.
The dying thing hadn’t happened quite yet but at least it hadn’t seemed to spread much beyond the confines of our small, local college, which was lucky. If I moved away, no one in my new home would have heard about it—unless they looked up my name.
I calmed down, eventually, and went to the restaurant, as I always did.
Today, my mom had somehow gotten my sister Morgan to join us, although she had gone into the office instead of doing anything helpful to set up for the lunch crowd.
“At least she’s trying, Molly,” my mom told me when I glanced at the closed door.
When she said my name, it sounded like a balloon letting out its air.
I tried too, really hard, and I managed not to do my age thirteen eye roll.
At that time, I would have followed it with a “come on, Mom!” and capped things off by stomping away in my platform boots.
Those had been really poor-quality and the black color had started to peel away before I’d even made it to age fourteen.
I started working on the crap that needed to get done and I got madder and madder as I did it.
So she had finally shown up? Great, that was step one.
Step two would have been to actually help out!
“Morgan, that lazy little…” I muttered. I realized that I sounded like Dad, and that upset me even more.
I put down the napkin dispenser that I was refilling and stormed over to the office. “Hi,” she said as I yanked open the door.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
She glanced at her phone. “Nothing.”
“Why don’t you do something, then?” I suggested. “There’s always plenty to accomplish around here.”
“I know that, Molly. I’ve worked at Walter’s before.” She stood up and damned if she didn’t look kind of wobbly.
“Come and help me with the napkins,” I said over my shoulder as I stomped out.
I hadn’t seen her out of the half-light of her bedroom for a while now.
We never ate together as a family because at most mealtimes, we were here at the restaurant.
When we weren’t working, we always seemed to be too tired to get to our kitchen table as a group.
But it wasn’t just time constraints, of course, because we actually didn’t like each other.
My schedule was pretty packed and if Morgan was getting up and moving around the house, I hadn’t seen her do it.
But I was seeing her now and I was furious.
She was obscenely pale, like one of those deep-sea, luminescent creatures, and she really was wobbling when she moved—was her muscle tone that bad?
That was what happened when you didn’t get out of bed all day!
You never saw the sun and your damn body atrophied! I shoved more napkins into a holder.
“What made you show up?” I demanded. “After all this time, why now?”
“I don’t know,” she said. She shrugged and pushed back her hair.
Unlike mine, which was basically straight, Max’s and Morgan’s had the curl that had come from my dad’s side of the family and I’d always been jealous of it.
Except right now, her curls were filthy.
Her hair had divided itself into dark, greasy chunks that lay heavy on her head, lifeless and limp.
She had a slight smell, too, not sweat but kind of musty. She smelled dirty.
“Did you want to shower, ever?” I suggested.
“Why are you being a bitch?”
I practically threw the napkins down and stomped into the kitchen, where my dad yelled at me for something that I didn’t even listen to, something that started with “Molly” and then had a lot of swear words.
I had stopped paying attention to him years before, so I heard the sound of his anger now, but the actual message didn’t sink in.
Then my mom also said my name: “Molly!”
I turned and looked out the pass-through window. She was at the register, but she was looking back at me and smiling. Standing at the counter was Shane Bishop.
“Come up here,” she called, still happily grinning and now waving me forward.
I walked out from the kitchen. “Hi,” I said.
“Hi, Molly,” he answered.
Before my mom could suggest that I “take my break,” as if that was something real, I continued moving into the dining room.
My sister had disappeared, probably into the office, but all the tables looked ready with ketchup, mustard, napkins, et cetera, so she had done something. Not enough, but it was something.
“Where are you sitting?” I asked.
“I’m not,” he answered. “I’m on my way over to Woodsmen Stadium and I thought you might want to go and see how it looks in the off-season.”
“Why would I want to do that?” I asked.
“Aren’t you a fan? When we went to the lighthouse, you spent most of the time talking about the team, when you weren’t telling me how many skeletons must be in these lakes.”
“I wasn’t talking about skeletons! It made sense to discuss shipwrecks that day.” A lot of historical information had come back to me and I’d had more to share than I’d expected. “I don’t remember talking about football at all.”
He looked at me for a moment. “If you don’t want to go—”
“No, I do. Well...” I hadn’t put on the uniform yet and I wasn’t looking forward to the hat. “Hold on for a second.”
I returned to where my mom was pretending to fix the roll of tape in the register. “Did you hear us?” I asked her. We had been about ten feet away, so yes, she had.
“Go ahead to the stadium,” she offered. “That sounds fun. Morgan will help out.”
“Is she really going to, or is she going to hide the whole time she’s here?”
“Go ahead,” my mom repeated. When I didn’t immediately move, she threw an anxious glance over her shoulder at the kitchen, where my dad might have been listening.
So I left. I nodded at Shane and we walked out of the restaurant together, toward where his truck sat in our parking lot. “I didn’t hear back from you,” he noted as we crossed the icy pavement. My dad was supposed to have salted but he had apparently forgotten.
I didn’t have a great response for that statement.
It was true that I hadn’t answered him when he’d texted to say hi and that he’d had a good time at the lighthouse.
But actually, I wasn’t sure if that was true.
Had it been fun? Now that I thought about it, I did remember that I’d brought up the Woodsmen team more than a few times.
Probably a lot of times, and maybe it had been boring for him since that was his job.
Personally, I didn’t like to talk about the restaurant any more than I absolutely had to.
Also, he hadn’t been a great fit in the lighthouse—he’d had to squeeze into rooms and up and down stairs that were meant for a generation of people who weren’t his size.
But he had squeezed without complaint and had read all the various informational plaques around the place. He had also been especially taken by the view at the top of the tower.
“You can see forever,” I had remarked. “It’s that visual you were talking about.”
He had stood for a while, staring through his sunglasses across the cold, dark blue expanse of Lake Michigan, before we’d had to let more visitors take their turn.
That trip hadn’t been his first-choice activity and in fact, it probably wasn’t anywhere on his list of choices.
But he had gone without complaining and had been interested in the history that he’d read off the big cards.
Then he had texted me, not the next day but on Monday, and I hadn’t ever answered.
There was a clear reason for that, which I explained after I buckled my seat belt. “I’m sorry that I didn’t get back to you. I had a really bad week.” Then, to my absolute horror, I started to cry right there in the front seat of his truck, right there in our restaurant parking lot.
“Oh,” he said. He took off his sunglasses and his eyes were wide as he sat looking at me. “Good golly. Here.” He reached into the pocket in his door and handed me a wadded-up napkin.
“Thank you.” I sniffed. “Did you just say ‘good golly?’”
“I don’t like to cuss. Why are you crying? What happened this week?”