What Happened to Goodbye(70)
Author: Sarah Dessen

It was just a tiny moment. Not a kiss, not even real contact. But for all the things it wasn’t, it meant so much. I’d been running for years: there was nothing scarier, to me, than to just be still with someone. And yet, there on that dark road, going home, I was.

Eventually, after dropping Deb at her car, Ellis pulled up in front of my mailbox. “Last stop,” he said as I yawned and Dave rubbed his eyes. “Sorry to break up the moment.”

I flushed, pushing myself out onto the curb, and Dave followed. “Thanks for driving,” he said. “Next time, it’s all me.”

“That car is a safety hazard,” Ellis told him. “We’re better off in the Love Van.”

“Yeah, but it needs to hold up for the road trip,” Dave replied. “Gotta take care of her, right?”

Ellis looked at me, then nodded and hit a button. The back door slid closed, like the curtain at the end of a show. “That’s right. Later!”

Dave and I waved, and then Ellis was driving away, bumping over the speed humps. As we started walking, he reached down, sliding fingers around mine. As he did, I had a flash of that night he’d pulled me into the storm cellar, when he’d taken my hand to lead me up to the world again. It felt like second nature then, too.

We weren’t talking, the neighborhood making all its regular noises—bass thumping, car horns, someone’s TV—around us. The party house had clearly watched the game as well. I could see people milling around inside, and the recycling bin on the porch was overflowing with crumpled beer cans. Then there was my dark house, and finally Dave’s, which was lit up bright, his mom visible at the kitchen table, reading something, a pen in one hand.

“See you tomorrow? ” Dave asked when we reached our two back doors, facing each other.

“See you tomorrow,” I repeated. Then I squeezed his hand.

The first thing I did when I got inside was turn on the kitchen light. Then I moved to the table, putting my dad’s iPod on the speaker dock, and a Bob Dylan song came on, the notes familiar. I went into the living room, hitting the switch there, then down the hallway to my room, where I did the same. It was amazing what a little noise and brightness could do to a house and a life, how much the smallest bit of each could change everything. After all these years of just passing through, I was beginning to finally feel at home.

I left Opal reconsidering her yellows, then headed upstairs to the attic room, where I found Deb and Dave already hard at work. This time, though, they weren’t alone. On the other side of the room, sitting in a row of chairs by the boxes of model parts, were Ellis, Riley, and Heather, each of them engrossed in reading a stapled packet of papers.

“What’s going on over there? ” I asked Dave, as Deb bustled by, a clipboard in her hands.

“Deb has shocked them into silence,” he told me. “Which is really hard to do. Believe me.”

“How’d she do it?”

“Her POW packet.”

I waited. By this point, it was understood that if you said one of Deb’s acronyms, you usually had to then explain it.

“Project Overview and Welcome,” Dave said, popping a roof onto a house. “Required reading before you can even think about attempting a sector.”

“It’s not that strict!” Deb protested. I raised an eyebrow at her, doubting this. “It isn’t. It’s just . . . you can’t come into an existing, working system and not educate yourself on its processes. That would be stupid.”

“Of course it would,” Dave said. “God, Mclean.”

I poked him again, and this time, he grabbed my finger, wrapping his own around it and holding it for a second. I smiled, then said, “So, Deb. How’d you manage to double our workforce since yesterday? I didn’t hear you doing the hard sell last night.”

“I didn’t have to sell anything,” she replied, checking something off the top sheet on her clipboard. “The model spoke for itself. As soon as they saw it, they wanted in.”

“Wow,” I said.

She puttered off, clicking her pen top. Beside me, very quietly, Dave said, “Also I might have told them that the sooner this thing is done, the sooner I can up my hours at FrayBake for the road-trip fund. This way they can pitch in during spring break next week, and we can really knock some stuff out.”

“You guys aren’t doing anything for spring break?”

He shook his head. “Nah. We thought about it, but figured we’d just save the money for the real trip later. What, are you taking off or something?”

“With my mom,” I said. “The beach.”

“Lucky you.”

“Not really,” I said as I walked over to my current sector, reacquainting myself with it. “I’d rather be here.”

“You know,” Heather called out to him from across the room, “when you talked me into this, you didn’t say anything about it being like school.”

“It’s not like school!” Deb replied from the other end of the model, where she was checking off things on another one of her lists. “Why would you say that?”

“Because you’re making us study?” Ellis asked.

“If you guys just plunged in, it would totally throw off the SORTA,” Deb told him. “I’m having to completely rejigger the STOW as it is!”

“What?” Heather asked. “Are you even speaking English?”

“She’s speaking Deb,” I said. “You’ll be fluent in no time.”

“I’m done,” Riley said, getting to her feet, her packet in hand. “All fourteen bullet points and the acronym overview.”

“Good,” Heather said, getting up as well. “Then you can explain them to me.”

“This is just like school!” Ellis said. Heather elbowed him, hard. “Hey, don’t get mad at me. You’re the one who can’t even make it through the POW packet.”

“You can take it home tonight, and really go over it then,” Deb assured Heather.

“Oh, okay,” Heather replied. “Because that’s not like school at all.”

“Great!” Deb clapped her hands, picking up her clipboard. “If you’ll all just follow me over to our top sector here, I’ll start your guided tour.”

Ellis got up, then followed Riley and Heather, who was dragging her feet, as they fell in behind Deb. “Are there going to be snacks?” he asked. “I do my best work with snacks.”