Goodbye, Rebel Blue Hardcover (8 page)

With half an eye roll, Nate scribbles on a notebook page and yanks out the piece of paper.

“Here’s my address.”

Oh, goody, now I get to see where Nate keeps his hair gel. I cram the wad of gum into my trash bag and wonder if it’s okay to swear at a dead girl.

“What’s going on in here?” Mr. Phillips stands in the doorway, glaring at me sprawled beside his desk. “And what are you doing down there?”

I lift the bag of ABC gum. “I’m—”

“Stop!” Mr. Phillips takes a step back. “Put down the bag, Rebel.”

“Hey, I’m—”

“And step away from my desk.”

“What? You think this is a bomb or something?”

“Keep your hands out front where I can see them. No sudden movements.”

Nate doesn’t bother to hide a laugh.

“Dammit, I’m trying to do good!”

Two months ago, when I turned sixteen, Uncle Bob gave me a motor scooter that once belonged to my mom. Aunt Evelyn threw a fit. “Rebecca could get hurt,” she insisted. “We can’t afford the insurance. That thing is about to fall apart.”

Uncle Bob is a pasty version of my mother. He has thin, light brown hair pulled over his head in a wispy comb-over, pale blue eyes, and the unassuming voice of a man who’s content to live out his life as an accountant in a tiny cubicle, but when it came to Mom’s Vespa, he wouldn’t budge. “Reb has so little from her mother. She
will
have the scooter.”

My mom bought the scooter secondhand three decades ago. Even back then it had an attitudinal starter and stalled at stoplights. I named the scooter Nova. Once Aunt Evelyn accepted the new two-wheeled family member, she reached into her little decorator heart and splurged on a paint job, celestial blue, and bought me a license plate holder with sparkly stars, suns, and comets.

“Quite fitting for a scooter called Nova, don’t you think?” Aunt Evelyn asked with a clap of her hands.

At which point I informed her, “
No va
means ‘no go’ in Spanish.”

More often than not, Nova sits in the garage refusing to scoot. Today is one of Nova’s good days.

I love riding. I love the salty wind brushing my face, the blur of colors as I sail down a coastal hill, my legs stretched out, feet lifted. I love the idea that my mom rode this same bike through these same streets. Unfortunately, I’m not thrilled with my final destination: Nate’s house.

As I putter away from the ocean, I leave the cottages and condos of the coastal hills and enter an older part of Tierra del Rey with run-down houses and weed-choked sidewalks. Somehow, I pictured Nate living in a seaside mansion. I have no problem with this part of town, but I figured a guy like Nate had it all, including money.

Nate’s house sits at the end of a cul-de-sac. The tiny house has a tiny, neat yard. On the porch stands a sculpture of some holy guy with open arms. Before I get a chance to knock, the door swings open, revealing a girl, ten or so, with a long curtain of black hair and an ivory pillbox hat slung low on her forehead. She wears black leggings and a black sweater set adorned with a double string of pearls.

“I’m here to see Nate,” I say.

She swishes back the gauzy veil of the hat and squints at me, as if she’s looking into the sun or doesn’t understand English.

“Nate?” I say louder, adding more slowly, “Is Nate here?”

“Beautiful,” she says on a whoosh of air. Her breath smells sweet, like cherries.

“Excuse me?”

“Your hair. It’s beautiful.” She reaches for my head.

I duck. “Can you get Nate?”

“How did you get the streaks so blue?” She scrunches her nose and inches closer.

“Visit from the blue-hair fairy. Where’s Nate?”

Another girl, this one older than the pillbox diva, joins us in the doorway. A violin dangles from her right hand. “Are you Nate’s girlfriend?” She pushes her glasses to the bridge of her nose. “You don’t look like the girls he normally brings home.”

“Nope. Definitely not his girlfriend.”

She taps the violin against her leg. “Do you want to be his girlfriend?”

“Hell, no!”

“You shouldn’t swear,” says another little person who appears in the doorway. This one’s a boy, about kindergarten age. He wears underwear covered in dinosaurs.

“Why don’t you want to be his girlfriend?” Violin Girl asks. “All girls who come over want to be Nate’s girlfriend.”

I take a deep breath and ask the pint-size trio, “Where’s Nate?”

“Try the sunroom at the back of the house.” This comes from a gray-haired woman in a red-sequin dress who struts across the entryway in red high heels.

I escape down a hall painted cheery yellow. Aunt Evelyn would call it something like Sunbeams in a Fondue Pot. In the kitchen I find a boy at the counter, a replica of Nate but three or four years younger.

“Oh, good,” the kid says. “I’m glad you’re here.”

“I’m here to see Nate.” I need a megaphone, a giant billboard, anything to get my message across to these people.

“First I need you to try my flan.” Nate the Younger sticks a plate in my face. On it jiggles a flat, cream-colored pyramid oozing with shiny brown sauce. “I’m in charge of dinner tonight.”

“I don’t eat brown things that jiggle.”

For a moment he looks heartbroken. Then he slaps his thigh. “Come back next week, and I’ll make you flan with raspberry sauce.”

Waving off the plate, I wander through a maze of more brightly colored rooms. At last I see a bunch of white plastic birds on a table in a sunny room overlooking the backyard. Another freaky religious statue, this one with angel wings and a large sword, stands in one corner.

I sit on the sofa far away from the saint and plop my messenger bag at my feet.

“Nooooo!” The plump, gray-haired woman with the slinky red dress wags her finger at me from a giant arched opening in the wall. “Purse! Get purse off floor.
Pronto!
”

I jerk my bag and feet off the floor. “Why? What?”

“If you keep purse on floor, all money walk off.” She clucks her tongue as if I should know better and walks away.

I rub the center of my forehead where a tiny ache has settled. This house is strange and the people stranger.

Finally, Nate strolls into the room but comes to a stop when he sees me cowering on the sofa.

“What are you doing?”

I unfold my body and pry my bag from my chest. “Desperately trying to keep my money from walking away.”

“You must have met Tia Mina.” Nate chuckles as he tosses a stack of newspapers onto the table.

“She’s a character.”

“Are there any more
characters
with whom you share DNA that I need to be warned about?”

“Probably.” He unfolds the newspaper and covers the table. “I have a big family.”

“Including those little people.” I don’t hide a shudder.

“My brothers and sisters? I have to keep an eye on them once a week after school when Tia Mina goes to dance class and my parents are at work. Sometimes they can be a little annoying, but they’re good kids.”

Kids are not good. Aunt Evelyn signed up Pen and me for a course in babysitting when we were eleven. Pen got extraordinarily high marks while I failed everything but finger painting. I think it’s because I was never around other kids growing up.

I join Nate at the table and pick up a plastic bird, which looks like an anemic rubber chicken without feet. “So for this 100 Club, is there some type of paperwork I need to fill out to officially become a centurion?”

Nate distributes the birds around the table. “Technically, you can’t be a centurion until you hit one hundred hours of community service for the year, but you can participate in activities and—”

“Wait.” I aim the bird at his chest. “Are you telling me I need to spend one hundred hours painting ugly birds?”

“You need to spend one hundred hours doing some type of community service. We have about twenty more hours to get the nesting site ready for the sea swallows. We need to set up the decoys and fencing, prune back vegetation, and make the chick shelters.”

I scratch my chin with the bird’s beak. “And this is a hard-and-fast rule, this hundred-hour service requirement?”

“It’s the
only
rule.”

My fingers wrap around the bird’s neck. I’m a girl who doesn’t like rules, but Kennedy does.

None of her bucket-list items are of the rule-breaking variety. Most of the items are about do-gooding, so by the time I finish them all, I’ll probably be close to triple-digit goodness. I toss my bird onto the table. “Where’s the paint?”

As I help Nate set up the paint and brushes, more members of the 100 Club arrive. Most perform a double take when Nate introduces me. Bronson, Nate’s no-neck sporto friend from biology, squints at me, his face morphing from dumb jock to dumb,
confused
jock. “You realize this is a
service
club, right?”

“Oh, no!” I grab both cheeks. “I thought this was the quilting club.”

The veins in Bronson’s neck bulge. Nate steps between us, handing out photos of a bird with a black cap, gray and white body, and orange bill. “Here’s what the swallows look like. Start painting.”

Two girls, including one I recognize from AP English, plaster themselves on each side of Nate as he takes a spot at the head of the table. Mr. In Charge and Charming wears an easy grin as they chat about endangered birds and erosion of natural habitats. Bronson tosses his bird onto the table, knocking over a jar of gray paint that conveniently trickles my way.

I grab the paint before my bird drowns. “Watch it.”

Bronson plops down on the couch and turns on a small television. “Sorry.”

The puddle spreads toward the edge of the table. “Come clean this up.”

“I’ll supervise.” He scrolls through the channels.

A boy next to me grabs a handful of paper towels and tosses them over the paint, but I wave him off. “Get your ass over here,” I tell Bronson. “You made the mess.”

“It was an accident.” A baseball field appears on the TV screen, and he sets down the remote.

“I’m all thumbs when it comes to artsy-fartsy stuff.”

“I’m sure you have enough athletic prowess to wield a paper towel,” I say. The chatter around the table stops.

“I said, I’ll supervise.” Bronson tucks a throw pillow under his head.

I drop my bird and step in front of the television. “And I said, clean up the mess.”

“Why is it such a big deal to you?”

“Because the paint is all over my spot at the table.”

“So why don’t
you
clean it up?”

“Because I didn’t spill it. I have no idea why we’re even having this asinine conversation. You make a mess, you clean it up. Ever hear of personal responsibility?”

“Ever hear of Prozac?” Bronson asks. Giggles rise from all four sides of the table.

I jam my hands into my two back pockets. I’m on edge because I don’t know how to deal with people like this, which is why I don’t join clubs like this.

“Leave him be, Rebel,” says the girl from AP English. “Seriously, he can’t paint, so we don’t want him anywhere near the table.”

“Then why is he here?” I ask with raised palms.

“I need another thirteen hours before I hit a hundred,” Bronson says.

“Wait. Let me make sure I understand this.” I point both hands at Bronson. “You’re earning service hours watching TV while we paint the birds.”

“Sounds like a plan to me.”

I spin toward Nate. “Isn’t this in violation of the one club rule?” Not that I care about rules. The blatant-dishonesty thing is what boggles my brain.

Bronson crooks a finger at me, inviting me closer. “Here’s a little secret a wallflower like you may not know. Nate will handle everything. He aces every class, every assignment, and he likes things done his way.” He fluffs the pillow beneath his head. “He’d probably repaint my bird anyway. Isn’t that right, Nate-O? No worries?”

We both turn to Nate, who is as still as the saintly statue in the corner. He stares at me as if I’m wearing underwear with dinosaurs. At last he walks across the room and switches off the TV. “Rebel’s right. If you want the hours, you need to paint. Now let’s get to work.”

With Nate the Efficient at the helm, everyone in the room, including Bronson, starts painting. I pick up my paintbrush and study the jars of paint. Drama isn’t my thing, and stuff like these power plays exhausts me. Art, on the other hand, is something I know and love. This gray paint is too dark for the feathers and not natural looking. I drop a dab onto my forearm and then add white and black until I get a nice, variegated gray. For community-service hours, there could be worse things than painting. I’ll have to take a picture when I’m done and show it to Miss Chang, my art teacher. When I reach for my bird, I notice that everyone has stopped painting and is staring at me.

“What?” I ask.

The girl from English looks at me as if I have an orange beak sprouting from my forehead. “Most of us stopped painting ourselves in preschool.”

“I’m mixing paint.”

“Interesting … um … technique.”

I dab my brush back into the paint on my arm. “Works for me.” Sometime later, I go to dip my brush into the orange paint to finish the beak when Bronson grabs the jar. “I’m not done with it,” I say.

“You’ve had it for five minutes,” Bronson says.

“Ten,” adds the girl from English. She taps her brush against her bird’s unpainted beak.

“We can share. Bring your birds down here.”

“They’re wet.”

“Okay, let me finish one thing.” I aim my brush at the paint, and Bronson jerks it away. An arc of orange sails across the table and splats the face of the girl from English.

She swipes the orange from her eyes and mouth and stares in horror at her hands, as if she’s dripping blood. “Look what you did!”