“I can,” Tracey replied. “Did you see them, lined up outside earlier? All smoking and surly with about a thousand piercings among them? God. You could just smell the teen angst, it was so thick.”
Hearing this, I realized it did explain the crowd of people—mostly kids my age, a few older, a few younger—I’d seen clumped around the front doors of Luna Blu on my way in. It was a Monday afternoon before opening, but clearly they weren’t there for food: there was a sense of obligation to their gathering, something forced, not chosen. And Tracey was right, there had been a lot of smoke.
“Hit me with another one,” Jason said now, nodding at Tracey’s paper.
She peered down at it, running her finger along the page. “Okay, how about . . . eight-letter word for fuel, last letter is an e. I put down gasoline, but it’s messing up everything around it.”
“Kerosene,” Jason said, starting on the tomatoes again.
“Holy crap, that’s right, too!” Tracey shook her head, impressed. “You’re wasted here. You should be, like, teaching or something.”
He shrugged, saying nothing, and I took this pause as my exit, thanking them as I headed out of the kitchen and down the hallway. In the restaurant, a girl with yellow-blonde hair and a nose ring was wiping down the bar, while a couple of other waits chatted as they rolled silverware at a table by the window. I headed into the side room, to the stairs that Opal had led me up the day all her boxes had arrived. I’d just started up them when I heard my dad’s voice. Glancing above me, I spotted him and Opal halfway up, talking.
“. . . all for helping the community. But this is ridiculous. We can’t be running a rehab program above the restaurant,” he was saying.
“I know,” Opal replied. She sounded tired. “That’s exactly what I told Lindsay when I went to her office this morning.”
“Lindsay? ”
“Lindsay Baker,” Opal said. “She’s the councilwoman who’s in charge of this whole thing. But she insisted that they’re renovating their offices and the community center is totally booked up. There’s no place that can handle an ongoing project like this.”
“So what you’re saying,” my dad said, “is that there is not a single room in the entire town for this to happen other than ours.”
“No,” Opal replied uneasily. “But that is what she said.”
My dad sighed. Above them,in the attic room, I could hear thumping, footsteps, and voices. “And why did you volunteer for this again?”
“Parking! I did it for parking,” Opal told him. “But when I brought that up today, she totally ran a muddle on me about it. She started in about community responsibility and civic pride and I—”
“Wait, wait,” my dad said. “What did you just say?”
I’d heard it, too. It wasn’t something we could ignore, either of us.
Opal blinked at him. “Community responsibility?”
“Before that.”
She thought back. Above them, in the large room, I heard more thumping. “Oh, running a muddle,” she said finally. “Sorry. It’s just this basketball term. It means when you—”
“I know what it means,” my dad said. “I’m just . . . surprised to hear it coming from you.”
“Why?”
Now it was my dad who had to pause. “Well,” he said after a moment, “I just didn’t realize you were, um, into the game.”
“Oh, God. My dad was a hard-core DB fan,” she told him. “He’s an alum, and so are all my brothers. Basically, I had to go there or I’d shame the entire family.”
“Really.”
Opal nodded. “Although he’s not been happy with the new coach. I don’t keep up with it that much, but apparently there was some kind of scandal. Something to do with his personal life, or—”
“Anyway,” my dad said, cutting her off. I felt my face flush. “Let’s get back to the crisis at hand. What are our options here? ”
“Well,” Opal said slowly, “I think for the time being the best we can hope for is that the councilwoman takes pity on us and finds another room. Which might happen. But . . . not today.”
“Right,” my dad said. “Today, we have a roomful of criminals to deal with.”
“They’re not criminals,” Opal told him. “They just owe community service.”
“Isn’t that the same thing?”
“Well, not—”
There was a loud thud from above them, followed by some guffaws. Opal glanced up the stairs. “I think I’d better get up there. I’m supposed to be supervising.”
My dad looked, too, then sighed, shaking his head. “What did you say that councilwoman’s name was?”
“Baker. Lindsay Baker.”
“Okay,” my dad said, turning to go down the stairs, “I’ll give her a call, see if I can move things along.”
“Oh,” Opal said quickly, “I . . . I don’t think that’s a good idea.”
“Why not?”
Opal swallowed. “Well,” she began, as another thump sounded from the room, “it’s just that she’s kind of . . .”
My dad waited.Mth="1em" align="left">“. . . a force,” she finished. “As in, to be reckoned with. She has a tendency to kind of, um, overwhelm people.”
“I think I can handle her,” my dad said as I moved off the bottom step, out of sight, to wait for him in the dining room. “You just deal with the criminals.”