Dave watched her go, then looked at me. “So,” he said. “What exactly are we d here?”
“It’s a model,” I told him, walking over to the A box and pushing the flaps all the way open. “Of the town. Opal got roped into organizing the assembly of it for the city council.”
“And that’s Opal,” he said, nodding at the stairs, where, distantly, we could still hear her voice, ordering all hands on deck.
“Yep.”
He walked over to the model, bending over it, then reached for the directions, which were lying to the side, flipping them open. “Look at that,” he said, turning a page. “Our houses are actually on here.”
“Really,” I said, unloading a few shrink-wrapped stacks of plastic pieces from the box.
“In your yard,” he said, turning another page, “we should put someone lying prone in the driveway, felled by a basketball.”
“Only if we put a weeping girl in a car in front of yours,” I replied.
He glanced at me. “Oh, right. Riley said she saw you last night.”
“I feel bad for her,” I said, pulling out more stacks. “With the cheating and all. She seems like a nice girl.”
“She is.” He flipped another page. “She just has really lousy taste in guys.”
“You two seem really close,” I said.
He nodded. “There was a time when she was literally my only friend. Except for Gerv the Perv.”
I raised my eyebrows as downstairs, a door slammed. “Gerv the what?”
“Just this kid I used to hang out with at my old school.” When he glanced up and saw me still watching him, he added, “I told you I was weird. So were my friends.”
“Friend.”
“Friend,” he repeated. Then he sighed. “When you’re fourteen and mostly taking college courses, it’s not like you have much in common with everyone else in your classes. Except for the other weird, smart kid.”
“Which was Gerv,” I said, clarifying.
“Gervais,” he corrected me. “Yeah. Riley coined his nickname because he was always staring at her chest.”
“Classy.”
“I only hang with the best,” he said cheerfully.
I sat down, taking one of the shrink-wrapped stacks of plastic pieces and ripping it open. “So you and Riley . . . you weren’t ever a couple?”
“Nope,” he said, taking his own stack and plopping down a couple of feet from me. “Apparently, I’m not up to her low standards.”
“You have the same tattoo, though,” I pointed out. “That’s a pretty serious thing to do with someone.”
He flipped over his wrist, exposing the circle there with the thick outline. “Ah, right. But it’s not a couple thing. More of a friend thing. Or a childhood thing. Or,” he said, ripping open the plastic bundle in his lap, “a wart thing.”
“Excuse mont>
“Long story,” he said, shaking out the pieces. “Okay, so where do we start, you think?”
“No idea,” I said, spreading out all my pieces on the floor around me. I’d been thinking I’d take a stab at it without the directions, but as soon as I looked at it closely I knew that wasn’t happening. There were many tabs and pieces, each labeled, making up a crazy quilt of letters and numbers. “This looks seriously impossible.”
“Nah,” he said. Then, as I watched, he collected four flat segments from his own pile, clicked them together, then added a couple of curved ones. Finally, he picked out a thicker, shorter one and pressed it into the bottom with the palm of his hand. One, two, three, and he had a house. Just like that.
“Okay, so that,” I told him, “was impressive.”
