Goodbye, Rebel Blue Hardcover (7 page)

BOOK: Goodbye, Rebel Blue Hardcover
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“Maybe she needs a little more time,” Nate says. “I’d hang on to it for a while in case she asks for it.”

I raise my fist and stare in horror at the possessed paper. “I can’t throw this list away, because it won’t let me throw it away.”

Pen takes two steps away from me. “If you’re going to have a psychotic episode, Reb, please don’t do it in my presence.”

“I’m serious.” I proceed to spew. I spew about detention, bucket lists, destiny, chai tea, and police officers worried about suicide. I spew about the cockroach and shy, quiet Macey yelling at me, about the mutant paper crane dog and Superbrat. By the time I spew about the garbage man who drove past the house, I’m hoarse. “And now Mrs. Green insists I keep it. The list, I can’t get rid of it. It’s haunting me.”

Nate stares at me oddly. Pen looks horrified. I don’t need either of them. I spin, but Nate grabs my arm.

“Maybe Kennedy was right,” he says. “Maybe it’s a matter of destiny. Maybe you’re meant to have that list.”

“Why would I need Kennedy’s bucket list?”

“So you can complete it.”

“Stand back or risk me hurling all over your shiny shoes.”

His face is serious. “Maybe there’s something on there that needs to be done, and only you can do it. Maybe the fates chose you.”

“Then the fates have knocked back one too many shots of tequila.”

“Let me see.” Penelope snatches the list. Her eyeballs dart back and forth as she reads every line.

“I agree with Rebel.”

Now there’s a first. “See, Pen doesn’t believe in this fate-destiny crap, either.”

“I don’t think it has anything to do with fate or destiny.” Pen aims the list at my chest as if it were a dagger. “Kennedy Green was a good person who did a lot of good in this world. With this list, she planned on doing more good. She wanted to help people and make this world a better place. The issue, dear cousin, is that you’re nothing like Kennedy Green.” She jabs the list at my heart. “You’re a wrecking ball.”
Stab
. “You cause damage and destruction to everything you touch.”
Stab.
“You hurt people and kill dreams.”
Stab. Stab.
“You’re incapable of doing good.”

My heart pounds against the bag strap slung across my chest, urging me to run, but I can’t move.

Pen’s blistering words melted my flip-flops, gluing them to the sidewalk. With a soft sob, Penelope drops the list and runs to a group of track-team members gathered in the parking lot. The paper floats through the air and lands on my left foot.

“You okay?” Nate asks. “Listen, funerals and deaths do crazy things to people. My Tia Mina laughed for two days when Tio Rogelio died, and two of my mom’s second cousins got into a fistfight at their father’s funeral. They knocked over the altar flowers, and the priest had to break it up.

Funerals can bring out strong emotions in people. I’m sure Penelope didn’t mean to sound so harsh.”

I’m sure she did. Pretty Princess Penelope hated me from the moment I moved into her house.

That first week, she glared at me from across the dinner table when Uncle Bob helped me with my math homework. She threw a fit when Aunt Evelyn took me shoe shopping. She threw away my

Mason jars of sea glass, and when I beheaded her Polly Pockets in retaliation, she declared war.

“You need a ride back to school?” Nate is concerned but calm and in control, like a guy you’d want on hand when the Big One strikes Southern California.

Unlike me. My entire upper body shakes, and the shark teeth on my bag rattle. My skin is hot.

And sitting on my toes is that heinous piece of paper. I want to grind Kennedy’s bucket list into the ground, to run after my cousin and scream at the top of my lungs that she knows nothing about me.

Nothing.

You’re incapable of doing good.

“No. I’m good,” I tell Nate.

You hear that, Penelope? I. Am. Good.

Because as I’ve said all along, there’s no such thing as fate or destiny. Life is one big choice after another. I can choose to do good for the entire world to see. I can choose to decorate the gym with toilet-paper flowers for prom. I can choose to save every stupid turtle in the sea.

I pick up Kennedy Green’s bucket list and look into her heart.

“Are you sure you don’t need a ride?” Nate asks.

I unfasten my cargo pants pocket and jam in Kennedy Green’s bucket list. “I’m good,” I say again. And I can choose to prove that Cousin Penelope is dead wrong.

I POKE MY HEAD INTO THE BIOLOGY LAB. IT’S EMPTY, but then again, it’s 6:30 A.M.

Throwing my messenger bag onto my lab table, I dig out the small paint scraper I found last night in one of Aunt Evelyn’s decorator-supply tubs. Aunt Evelyn goes nuclear when anyone borrows her stuff without asking. Unfortunately for the fate of the Free World, I did not ask, as that would entail explaining Kennedy Green’s bucket list, which is still in my possession although not because of destiny or juju winds. I’m hanging on to Kennedy Green’s bucket list to prove that Cousin Pen is an idiot.

You’re a wrecking ball. You cause damage and destruction to everything you touch. You hurt
people and kill dreams. You’re incapable of doing good.

I take great delight in being extraordinarily bad, but Cousin Pen is wrong. I can do good, and I can complete every item on Kennedy Green’s bucket list, including the first:
Perform one random act
of kindness every day for one year.

Percy is my first victim.

I first met him my freshman year during a pep rally when he found me in the maintenance closet near the gym with my hands over my ears. The entire student body had gathered for a mandatory
rah-rah
session celebrating the football team’s homecoming win. Since I’d been homeschooled and knew nothing about football fever, I wasn’t prepared for shaking bleachers, blaring trumpets, and four thousand screaming classmates. After he found me hiding in the closet, Percy reached into a box on one of the shelves, took out a small plastic bag, and handed it to me. Inside, I discovered a pair of earplugs. “For when you need to turn off the world.”

I still have the earplugs, because sometimes the world is still too loud.

The biology room is wonderfully silent as I search under the first stool and scrape off a bulbous pink glob with teeth marks. Stool number two is clean, as are three and four. At chair five I hit the mother lode, four wads, including a minty fresh one. After wishing the owner a root canal for his next birthday, I swipe the gum into my trash bag, but it clings to the scraper.

“Need some help?”

I jump, and the scraper falls onto my toe. “Will you stop sneaking up on me?”

“I didn’t sneak,” Nate says. “I called your name, but you didn’t hear me.”

“I was focused.” I lift the scraper, and the gum hits my elbow.

“Let me help you”—Nate wrinkles his nose and then dispenses a crinkly paper towel from the wash station—“
un
focus.”

“I don’t need help.” I shoo him away with the scraper, and a string of gum migrates to my hair.

“Sure you don’t.” Nate swipes at the gooey chain of gum that had traveled to my knee. Tucking in the paper towel as he goes, he tackles my flip-flop. Even bent over my foot, his wavy hair stays in place. “Did Mr. Phillips get tired of your snarky comments about his ugly ties?” Nate asks.

My right eyebrow shoots skyward.

“One of Lungren’s detention assignments?”

Left eyebrow.

Nate’s fast, efficient, and manages to get every speck of gum off me and the floor in the time it takes me to de-gum my hair. He wads the paper towel and lobs it into the trash can. Score another one for Nate the Great. He settles his butt against my lab table and stares.

“Don’t you have hordes of other pretty people to go hang out with before school?” I throw away my gummy paper towel.

“I’m tutoring this morning.” He stretches out his legs and crosses his ankles. “This is about the bucket list, isn’t it?”

I duck under the next lab stool.

“I’m impressed,” he says grudgingly.

“Don’t be. This has nothing to do with honoring the dead or being moved by destiny.”

Nate continues to study me, as if I’m a wet bacterial culture under one of Mr. Phillips’s microscopes. He’s probably picturing me blubbering about possessed bucket lists or, worse, remembering Pen screaming. Pen can be annoying and mean, but I’d never seen her so angry, almost out of control. I wedge the scraper against the underside of the stool, and a wad of gum flies across the room, hits the fetal-pig jar, and rolls under Mr. Phillips’s desk.

Nate reaches into his backpack and pulls out a notebook. “By the way, we’ll meet today at my house at four.”

I squat before Mr. Phillips’s desk and search for the wad of gum. “I’m currently passing biology with a lovely C-minus, so I don’t need tutoring.”

“This isn’t about tutoring but making the sea-swallow decoys.”

“The what?” I grope under Mr. Phillips’s desk, my palm sliding along crunchy, dusty things.

“The sea-swallow decoys, fake birds. Some of the club members will be painting them at my house after school today.”

“Club?” The nail on my index finger digs into something squishy. Please let this be a wad of gum.

“You’re [email protected], right?”

“Yeah. Are you some kind of stalker?”

“No. I’m the president of the Del Rey School 100 Club, and you e-mailed me last night wanting to know when our next meeting is. We’re meeting at my house to paint bird decoys, which we’ll set up on the beach later in the week. It’s part of our community service project to protect and enhance the swallows’ nesting grounds in Tierra del Rey.”

Now everything makes sense, or as much sense as anything to do with Kennedy Green does. Item number two on her bucket list is
Become a centurion for the Del Rey School 100 Club
. According to the school website, the 100 Club is some kind of community service club, and I figured I’d need to pay dues and learn the secret “centurion” handshake. But apparently it also involves going to Nate’s house and painting fake birds. “I’ll have to check my calendar. You know how it is for us social butterflies. I might have, I don’t know, a cotillion or something.”

BOOK: Goodbye, Rebel Blue Hardcover
9.49Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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