“It’s not that strict!” Deb protested. I raised an eyebrow at her, doubting this. “It isn’t. It’s just . . . you can’t come into an existing, working system and not educate yourself on its processes. That would be stupid.”
“Of course it would,” Dave said. “God, Mclean.”
I poked him again, and this time, he grabbed my finger, wrapping his own around it and holding it for a second. I smiled, then said, “So, Deb. How’d you manage to double our workforce since yesterday? I didn’t hear you doing the hard sell last night.”
“I didn’t have to sell anything,” she replied, checking something off the top sheet on her clipboard. “The model spoke for itself. As soon as they saw it, they wanted in.”
“Wow,” I said.
She puttered off, clicking her pen top. Beside me, very quietly, Dave said, “Also I might have told them that the sooner this thing is done, the sooner I can up my hours at FrayBake for the road-trip fund. This way they can pitch in during spring break next week, and we can really knock some stuff out.”
“You guys aren’t doing anything for spring break?”
He shook his head. “Nah. We thought about it, but figured we’d just save the money for the real trip later. What, are you taking off or something?”
“With my mom,” I said. “The beach.”
“Lucky you.”
“Not really,” I said as I walked over to my current sector, reacquainting myself with it. “I’d rather be here.”
“You know,” Heather called out to him from across the room, “when you talked me into this, you didn’t say anything about it being like school.”
“It’s not like school!” Deb replied from the other end of the model, where she was checking off things on another one of her lists. “Why would you say that?”
“Because you’re making us study?” Ellis asked.
“If you guys just plunged in, it would totally throw off the SORTA,” Deb told him. “I’m having to completely rejigger the STOW as it is!”
“What?” Heather asked. “Are you even speaking English?”
“She’s speaking Deb,” I said. “You’ll be fluent in no time.”
“I’m done,” Riley said, getting to her feet, her packet in hand. “All fourteen bullet points and the acronym overview.”
“Good,” Heather said, getting up as well. “Then you can explain them to me.”
“This is just like school!” Ellis said. Heather elbowed him, hard. “Hey, don’t get mad at me. You’re the one who can’t even make it through the POW packet.”
“You can take it home tonight, and really go over it then,” Deb assured Heather.
“Oh, okay,” Heather replied. “Because that’s not like school at all.”
“Great!” Deb clapped her hands, picking up her clipboard. “If you’ll all just follow me over to our top sector here, I’ll start your guided tour.”
Ellis got up, then followed Riley and Heather, who was dragging her feet, as they fell in behind Deb. “Are there going to be snacks?” he asked. “I do my best work with snacks.”
Dave snorted. Deb, though, either ignored this or didn’t hear it. “Now, once you’re confident you understand the system, you’ll be assigned a sector. Until then, though, you’ll share one. This one is relatively simple, perfect for beginners. . . .”
As she kept talking, I looked up at Dave, working away across from me, his hair falling into his eyes as he attached a roof to the building in his hands. “Hey,” I said, and he glanced up. “You know that building, behind our houses? The abandoned one?”
“Yeah. What about?”
“It’s on here, but not identified. I realized the other day.” I pulled the building out of the pile I’d assembled beside me, showing it to him. “So I went to the library, to see if I could figure out what it was.”
“Did you?”
I nodded, realizing, as I did so, how much I wanted to tell him. I wasn’t sure why this had been so important to me, only that it seemed fated somehow, that just as things began to feel real and settled, I’d moved onto the part of the map that represented my own neighborhood. There was my house, and Dave’s. The party house, Luna Blu, the street where I caught the bus. And in the middle, this blank building, its anonymity made even more noticeable as it was surrounded by things that were clear and recognizable. I wanted to give it a face, a name. Something more than two faded letters on a rooftop, and a million guesses about what it used to be.
I put the building down in its spot, the tape catching and sticking. Then there was a click, the sure sign it was there to stay. “Yeah,” I told him. “It was—”
“Oh my goodness! Would you look at this.” I turned my head, just in time to see Lindsay Baker, dressed in black pants and a tight red sweater and smiling wide, appear on the landing. My dad, looking markedly less effervescent, was right behind her. “I assumed you all would have made a lot of progress. But this is really impressive!”
Deb, across the model, beamed. I said, “We appointed a good leader. Makes all the difference.”