I ate vegetable fried rice with a plastic spoon at a table in front of the Chinese restaurant window as flies buzzed around me. I bit into an egg roll and suddenly felt the urge to find Jean and talk to him in person. It was more than just wanting to repair the cracks in the Unlikelies. I had grown to adore Jean with his beard and his sketching and his quirky one-liners and passion for life despite everything he had endured.
I wove through the Tiny Art Camp parking lot searching for Jean’s van. When I didn’t see it, I took a chance and went to his house. It was starting to get dark and his tree-lined street was quiet, almost eerie. I parked in front. There were no lights on, no signs anyone was home. I climbed through the tangled bushes, shimmied against his neighbor’s fence, and tiptoed behind the house. A single light shined through the blinds in Jean’s room.
I’m outside your window, I texted. I waited a few seconds and then tapped on the glass. I waited a few more seconds and tapped harder.
Jean pulled the blinds apart and peered out. It was still light enough for him to make out my grinning face. I waved. He shook his head, opened the blinds, and pulled up the window.
“What the hell are you doing?” He was not amused. “Do you know what would happen if somebody like me tried this shit?”
“A short, bearded person?”
“Are you just going to keep pissing me off?” He didn’t crack a smile. “What is it, Sadie?”
“I really only want to talk to you for a minute. Please, Jean?”
“Fine. Whatever.”
I crawled through the window and landed on his bed.
The room was cluttered with sketch pads and masks in various stages of completion. Jean was doing what Jean did, escaping the world in his art room.
“You don’t have to talk. I just want to tell you that there is no excuse for saying what I said.”
He sat on the desk chair turning a chisel over and over in his hand.
“I never shared those drawings with anyone before you. Not even Umi.” I watched his hands move as he talked. “So, yeah, it felt pretty shitty when you said what you said.”
I stood in front of him, sick to my stomach as the full awfulness of what I had said enveloped me. I felt my lip tremble.
His face softened.
“I guess I shouldn’t have yelled at you for whining about your nasty feet,” he said.
I smiled, still not 100 percent sure he was offering an olive branch.
“Did I ever tell you that my great-grandmother, also named Sadie Sullivan, had both her feet burned off in a fire while successfully saving seven children?”
Jean laughed. “You are such a pain in the ass, Sadie Sullivan junior.”
“Can you please forgive me? I am so, so sorry.” I picked up a carved mask painted black and white. “And this panda bear mask is freaking adorable.”
He wiped his hands on his pajama bottoms and took my hand. He hugged me and then we took a selfie of us smiling cheek-to-cheek and texted it to everyone.
Val texted, Aww. So sweet.
Gordie texted, Um. Why is my girlfriend in your bedroom, might I ask?
Alice didn’t text anything at all.
As I was leaving, this time through the front door, Jean said, “Oh, and you’ve told us about your great-grandma burning off her feet no fewer than a million times.”
“Good. As long as you know.”
I watched TV all night with my parents, something we hadn’t done in a long time. Between Shay back-to-normal texts, and group texts (most of them joking about my “hookup” with Jean, all of them ignored by Alice), and Can’t wait for tomorrow Gordie texts, I scrolled through chat rooms literally flattened by our avatar. Gordie had figured out how to code the “sniffing” so it could tell the difference between My mom is bitching at me and Taylor is an ugly bitch. He even took down the book trolls, the ones who thought it was cool to bully fictional characters. OMG. Hermione is SOOOOO annoying was replaced with five masked Union soldiers. BAM.
The craziest part was that other people were creating copycat avatar masks to take down bullies, assholes, and trolls all over cyberspace. There were articles popping up about chat rooms full of bullies being driven out by people posting Come to the light over and over and over again. Kids who were struggling talked about how You’re one of us now just appeared on their social media pages out of nowhere.
I almost felt bad for the bullies and the trolls, the gadflies and the ruffians, sitting alone in their rooms, banging their keyboards in utter frustration.
When Dad turned on the eleven o’clock news, a caption read THE UNLIKELIES REACH THE EAST END.
“Wait, I know that girl,” I said. It was Meghan Rose Sharp, the one who always laughed when people were mean to Greg O., the one who thought it was hilarious when Greg O. hit himself out of humiliation, the one who received one of the very first asshole care packages.
The news lady with the bleach-blond bob stuck a mic in Meghan Rose Sharp’s face. “They left a package on my deck a while ago. There was a candy necklace in it and a note that said choose kindness or something like that, signed the Unlikelies. My mom wouldn’t let me eat the necklace in case it was tainted with poison. It wasn’t in any sort of packaging.”
“What a dumbass,” I mumbled.
“Is she a friend of yours?” Dad asked.
“No.”
“Have you been following this Unlikelies story? It’s all over the place. They’re some sort of vigilante network. They uncovered a huge drug operation in the city.”
“Yeah. It’s pretty cool.”
My heart raced. I said good night and ran upstairs.
Meghan Rose Sharp is on the news talking about the care package. They’re coming out of the woodwork, I texted.
Val texted back, We were on the Today show. They’re gonna come out of the woodwork!
TWENTY-SEVEN
ALICE’S DAD ANSWERED the door when I showed up unexpectedly at eight a.m. on Saturday with breakfast sandwiches and coffees.
“Sadie, hi. Alice is still sleeping.”
“Sorry I’m here so early. I have to work, but I wanted to check on Alice. She hasn’t been answering our texts.”
He held the door open. “We think all the Izzy stuff is finally hitting her hard. We’ve been letting her sleep, but, honestly, it’s time to get her up. Go ahead. Just yank the comforter off her.”
“Uh. Okay.”
I ran up the stairs and burst into Alice’s darkened room. She was all the way under the covers. “Alice, it’s me. Wake up, Pooch.”
“Hey.”
“I have breakfast sandwiches and coffee. How about we go to the duck pond for a quick little morning walk?”
She said yes.
She threw on leggings and an old T-shirt, grabbed her vegan bag, and climbed into the passenger side of the Prius. As I drove away, I noticed her dad watching us through the living room curtains.
“I apologized to Val,” she said, between sips of coffee. “What I said was awful. I hate that I said those things.”