Chapter 10
My trip to the doughnut shop was both a revelation and a restorative. A restorative, because Evie accepted my peace offering of the honey dippers, and we’re officially now speaking again. A revelation, because now I can’t stop obsessing over my new Lucky theory.
And I have plenty of time to ponder over it at work the next couple of days at the Nook, where we are steadily busy but not so slammed that I can’t think. Evie and I do pretty much everything in the shop except the detail-y management stuff. We ring up customers. Cash out drawers. Pull returns. Yell at stupid punk kids to stop trying to steal graphic novels. Find books for customers who only have a vague idea what color the cover is, but they know for sure they saw it mentioned on a morning news show last week. Threaten to call the cops when elderly “Tugs” McHenry comes into the store, before he can try to masturbate on books in our restroom.
Again.
“I need to know everything you know about Lucky 2.0,” Itell Evie as I stand next to the Nook’s printing press while she’s bent over a rolling metal book cart near the romance bays in the Nook’s fiction section. “I’m interested in everything that happened to Lucky after we left town.”
“Aren’t we the curious cat.…” Cradling two books against a T-shirt emblazoned with a design of two mummies kissing, she still wears the gauze wrap around her arm from her car accident, matching fashion to injury.
“Basically, fill me in on ages thirteen to seventeen, but mostly the last year or so,” I continue, trying not to look out the window toward Nick’s Boatyard. “Who his friends are. What he reads when he comes in here. Why he’s been in detention so much. Who you know for a fact he’s dated. No rumors. Only first-hand knowledge.”
A slow smile spreads over her face. “My,thisis interesting. Perhaps the Saint-Martin curse is racing through your veins? Are you having erotic dreams that end in bloodshed?”
I hold up one finger. “No. Stop this. Don’t even joke, Evie.”
“We did warn you, cuz. Did you not just witness what happened to me? Accident. Hospital. Ex-boyfriend, who is now recuperating at home for the rest of the summer when he should be in Cambridge.Thatwas the curse in action.”
Talk about the curse almost shakes me for a moment, but then I realize she’s teasing me. I think. I hope.…
“My interest in Lucky 2.0 isn’t for romantic reasons,” I insist. “It’s research.”
“For seduction purposes.”
“Exactly. I mean, no!” I look around the books displayed on the printing press to make sure Mom is still at the register and not listening to us. “Just for research purposes.”
“I’ve got some books you can read … for research purposes. Hold on one second. Erotica section, let’s see … Anaïs Nin is always a classic. Hmm … Did I already get you to readFanny Hill??”
“It was sort of ridiculous,” I admit. “Too many plump, fleshy thighs and large machines.”
“Ha!”
“Stop,” I plead, laughing when she pokes my side to tickle me. “And no erotica. This is serious research.”
“Fi-i-i-ne,” she says, picking up a book to shelve. “But I don’t really know anything. I missed Lucky’s early teen years. We were in Boston for my dad’s job.”
That’s right. I forget she missed some of the same Beauty years that I missed when her parents relocated to the neighboring state.
“Plus, you guys are two grades behind me,” she says, reaching above her head to straighten a section of falling-over books. “I only really knew him as the kid across the street that I’d sometimes see when I came to visit Grandma. I was a junior when he was a freshman. He hung with a different crowd.”
“What crowd?”
“Let’s see … he hung out with a guy from Argentina named Tomas. But he moved to Toronto last year. Oh, and he dated KasiaPainter right after Tomas left. For a few weeks, maybe? I used to see them eating lunch together my senior year. I think there were a few other girls—just like casual dates, here and there.”
“So you don’t know for a fact that he’s knocked anyone up?” I ask, squatting down next to the metal book cart to look for any romance books that need to be shelved.
“The Bunny thing?”
“Besides that. The Bunny thing has been disproven.”
“Interesting,” she says, thoughtful. “No. I don’t know for a fact about anyone else.”
I pull out two paperbacks from the cart and hand them to Evie. “What else do you know about Lucky? Like maybe why he’s had so much detention?”
She thinks for a moment. “I know for sure that he’s been in trouble for spouting off in the classroom. Saying smart-ass things. Correcting teachers in class, that kind of thing.”
My mind wanders back to when he borrowed my notes in class and corrected everything I’d written down wrong. “He’s always been kind of a smart-ass.” And I always kind of liked it.
