•••
The next morning Andy nodded at me as he boarded the bus with a bunch of other guys, the ones from his school that he’d sat with at breakfast. I thought he was going to walk right past me, but at the last minute he dropped into the seat next to mine. I thought I looked good. I’d woken up early, even before the alarm I’d set, which gave me time to take a long shower, spritz on peach-scented body mist, and put my hair in hot rollers. Back in the room, I’d spent fifteen minutes rifling through everything I’d packed to find the right long-sleeved white shirt to go underneath my distressed denim overalls (even in the summer heat, the Home Free people had insisted on long sleeves to keep us safe from I wasn’t sure what). I wondered if he’d put any thought into his clothes—a purple T-shirt with the words HOLY CROSS on the front in gold, and a pair of jeans that fit him just right.
“Good morning,” I said.
He turned to me. “Rachel Blum. Bloom like flower, even though it’s spelled blum like plum.” The corners of his eyes crinkled when he smiled.
Pleasure flooded through me. He’d remembered! “Well, clearly, you’ve spent the last eight years thinking of me nonstop.”
“I did take a break every once in a while. For the PSATs. Stuff like that.”
His teasing gave me an excuse to ball my hand into a fist and punch him playfully on his upper arm, which felt as solid as it looked.
“Don’t lie. I’ll bet you were even thinking of me during the PSATs. I’ll bet no other girl you’ve ever met could tell ‘Hansel and Gretel’ as well as I did.”
He shook his head, with the smallest smile on his lips and his thick brows drawn together. “You have a very high opinion of yourself.”
“Not really. I can just tell when a man is obsessed.”
He stretched his long legs into the aisle. I pulled out the tube of sunscreen I’d stuck in the front pocket of my overalls.
“Sunscreen?” I asked. He took it and sniffed.
“Is this peach scented?” He turned the tube around in his hands, frowning at the price tag. “Eleven dollars?”
“Ten ninety-nine.”
He shook his head in mock incredulity, thick eyebrows drawing down, the corners of his eyes crinkling again.
“What, you don’t think I’m worth it?” I grabbed the tube back and squirted some lotion in my palm. “It’s got restorative nutrients. Vitamin E. That’s an important one.”
“Of course.” He watched as I dabbed my finger in the gel and spread it on my cheeks and nose. If I’d known him a little better I would have smoothed the leftover sunscreen on his face, but instead I used it on the backs of my hands. When we reached the work site Andy stood up.
“Time to work, Ten Ninety-Nine.” He took the tube out of my hand and tucked it back into my overalls pocket, and I followed him off the bus.
Our “house leader,” a young woman named Alex, who was taking a year off between college and law school to work for Home Free, gave us an orientation, telling us about the neighborhood, showing pictures of the family who would be living in the house, and then explaining that we wouldn’t actually be building a house in a week. “The majority of the work’s going to be done by actual trained construction workers, which, believe me, is for the best,” she said. “What we’re going to do is get everything ready so that they can come in and do the job fast.”
Getting everything ready meant clearing the lot of trash and debris, sorting screws and bolts into their proper piles, carrying lumber and sacks of concrete from a truck onto the work site, and culling piles of donated clothes and kitchen tools. I was hoping Andy and I would be assigned to the bolt-sorting station, but instead, Alex gave each of us a contractor-sized trash bag and a pair of canvas gloves, signaling that I’d be spending my first day of summer vacation as a trash-picker. When Alex gave us the go-ahead to start, I was careful to position myself right near Andy, so it was natural when we headed off in the same direction.
I was used to Florida heat and humidity, but at least at home everything smelled clean, and you could usually catch a salty breeze from the ocean. On this windless morning the sky was a washed-out blue so pale it was almost white, and the air seemed to hunker down, squatting on your skin, stinking of exhaust. The weedy dirt was full of broken glass, fast-food styrofoam clamshells, and the occasional clump of dog poop.
Andy leaned down, scooping up handfuls of newspaper in his gloved hands. I daintily plucked a coffee cup between my thumb and finger and said, “Tell me everything that’s happened between the last time I saw you and today.”