“Okay, so that,” I told him, “was impressive.”
“One of the bonuses of being a delinquent,” he replied. “Good spatial skills.”
“Really?”
“No,” he said. I felt my face flush, feeling like an idiot. But he just picked up the house, glancing at the bottom of it, then carried it over to the base. “I was just really into model making when I was a kid.”
“Like trains?” I asked, picking up a piece from beside me. It had an A and a 7 on it and I had no idea what to do with it. None.
“Model trains?” he replied. “Are you trying to insult me or something? ”
I looked at him, wondering if he was serious. “What’s wrong with model trains?”
“Nothing, technically,” he said, squatting down by one edge of the base. “I, however, did war models. Battlefields, tanks, soldiers. Aircraft carriers. That kind of thing.”
“Oh,” I said. “Well, that’s totally different.”
He looked over at me, his expression flat, then placed the model on a spot on the base, pressing it down with the heel of his hand. When it clicked, he stood, taking a step back.
“So,” he said after a moment. I could hear someone—or several someones actually, by the chaotic thumping—climbing the stairs up toward us. “What do you think?”
I walked over beside him. Together, we looked down at the tiny house, the sole thing on this vast, flat surface. Like the only person living on the moon. It could be either lonely or peaceful, depending on how you looked at it.
“It’s a start,” I said.
Twenty minutes later, between Dave, me, and the handful of Luna Blu employees impersonating delinquents who’d joined us, the model was looking pretty good. After a few minutes of chaos and complaining all around, we’d settled into a system. Dave and the prep cook Jason—who, it turned out, knew each other from attending some academic camp years earlier—assembled the pieces, and the rest of us matched them to the proper spot where they belonged. So far, we’d managed to get about ten different structures on the upper left-hand corner of the base: a handful of houses, a couple of buildings, and a fire station.
“You know, I think I used to live in this neighbrhood,” Tracey said to me as we secured a long, square building where the diagram indicated. “This is a grocery store, right?”
I glanced down at the building as I pressed it in, waiting for the click I now knew meant it was secured. “I don’t know. It doesn’t say what it is.”
“None of them do,” Leo, the cook, called out from beside one of the boxes where, as far as I could tell, he’d done little other than pop bubble wrap while the rest of us worked. “Which seems kind of stupid to me. How can it be a map if you can’t tell where you are by looking at it?”
“Leo,” Jason said, looking up at him as he fit a roof onto another house, “that is so profound.”
“Oh, for God’s sake, it is not,” Tracey snapped, getting to her feet and crossing the room. As I followed her, she added, “Jason is convinced that Leo is some kind of genius, masquerading as a moron.”
“Like an idiot savant?” Dave asked, concentrating on putting together an office building.
“You got the idiot part right,” Tracey replied. She sighed, then peered over Jason’s shoulder, watching as he assembled something. “Where does that go? Right by the one we just put on?”
He glanced at the directions, which were opened up on the floor beside him. “Yep, think so.”
“I knew it!” She clapped her hands. “I did live over there. Because that’s my old bank and that grocery store next to it is the one I got banned from that time.”
“You got banned from a grocery store?” I asked.
“Oh, I’ve been banned from everywhere,” she replied easily, flipping her hand.
“What she means,” Leo informed us, “is that she was known around town for writing bad checks.”
“They weren’t bad,” Tracey said, taking the building from Jason as he handed it to her. “I just didn’t have any money.”
“I think that’s the same thing,” Jason said, not unkindly.
Tracey bent over the model base. “So if that’s where I shopped, and that was my bank, then my apartment was . . .” She ran a finger down the center of a small strip of road, right to the edge. “. . . apparently nonexistent. I was off the map, I guess.”
“Here be dragons,” Leo said, popping another row of wrap.
We all looked at him. Tracey said, “Jesus, Leo, are you high right now? Because you know what Gus said, if he catches you one more time—”
“What?” Leo said. “No, I’m not high. Why would you think that? ”
“You’re talking about dragons,” she pointed out.
“I said ‘Here be dragons,’ ” he said. When he realized we were all still looking at him, he added, “It is an expression they used to use, you know, back in the day. When they made maps, for the parts that hadn’t been discovered yet. The area they didn’t know. ‘Here be dragons.’ ”