The Heartbreak Messenger (3 page)

Mom was still under the Subaru, so I stepped into the empty garage office and used the office phone to dial Marcus's cell.

“Marcus,” he said after two rings.

“This is Quentin. It's done.”

“How'd she take it?” he asked eagerly.

“Well, she didn't cry.”

“She didn't? That's good, right?”

“Uh, sure,” I said.

“Thanks, man. You saved my life.”

I hung up the phone and went back out to our dinner table in the garage bay. Marcus was happy, Melissa wasn't crying, and I was eating cheeseburgers. Not bad for a day's work.

Mom finally got to a stopping point and came out from under the car. She turned to the sink next to the table and filled her grimy hands full of orange-scented pumice soap. She glanced over at the table. “What's the occasion? And where'd you get the money for that feast?”

“You don't need an occasion to eat hamburgers. And I told you before that Rob's brother is paying me to help him out with some stuff.”

“I don't remember you mentioning getting paid.” She gave me a glance from her mom-eyes. “You're not doing his homework for him, are you?”

I laughed. “Mom, he's a junior in high school. I'm thirteen.”

She scrubbed hard under the running water. “Yes, but it's Marcus McFallen. Even in his high school classes you could pull better grades than he does.”

“I just thought you might like something besides microwave burritos for dinner. But I can eat yours, too, if you don't want it.”

Mom wiped her hands on a shop towel and ruffled my hair with her charcoal crescent fingernails. “Thanks for thinking of me.” She sat down in front of the Big Mac. “Who's turn today?”

“Yours. I picked ‘human cloning' yesterday.”

“That's right.” She thought for a moment. “Let's go with … chocolate bars.”

“Butterfinger,” I said, my mouth half-full of cheeseburger. “That's my favorite. Yours is the plain old Hershey's bar, right?”

“Yep.”

“I've heard, though, that American chocolate is waxy. You have to taste European chocolate to get the real chocolate experience.”

“Where'd you hear that?”

“Don't know. On TV maybe.”

“Hmmph.” Mom looked thoughtful. “I wonder why that is. Don't cocoa beans come from South America? Why don't South Americans have the best chocolate?”

“And we're closer to South America than Europe is. So you'd think that our chocolate would at least be better than Europe's.”

“Well,” said Mom, “we'll have to find an imports store some time and experiment.”

Then we chewed in silence for a moment. But only for a moment.

When Dad left and Mom started working, we didn't have a lot of time to spend together in the evenings. Mom didn't want to waste our time together by eating in silence or getting one-word responses about my school day. So we came up with the Garage Bay Dinner Conversation game. Just two rules: take turns picking the topic, and everybody has to participate. Some topics work out better than others, but mostly we get to laugh a lot and talk a lot, which is probably more than most families do with their plates in front of the TV.

“Why is a plain Hershey's bar your favorite?” I asked. “I mean, there's no peanuts, no caramel, no crunchies. Just chocolate.”

“Waxy chocolate, apparently.” She winked at me. “You really want to know?”

I nodded.

“It was actually your Uncle Ethan's favorite candy bar. I don't know why it was his favorite. He just likes plain things. But when he was in the Navy, I'd send him a big package of Hershey's bars twice a month. He'd keep them in his footlocker and make them last until the next package came. He liked his Hershey's bars, and I liked sending them.

“But Ethan noticed that someone was getting into his footlocker and eating his chocolate. He couldn't figure out who it was, and he didn't want to make a big announcement about it. So he wrote to me and had me get a bunch of chocolate ex-lax bars for him. Then I took the wrappers off the Hershey's bars and wrapped them around the ex-lax bars.”

“What's ex-lax?” I asked.

“It's a medicine that makes you poop. It looks and tastes just like chocolate.”

I laughed. What would they think of next?

“Anyway,” she continued, “I wrapped up the ex-lax so they looked like Hershey's bars and sent them off like I always did. Ethan later wrote and said two of his shipmates spent three days in the head before they finally figured out what had happened to them.”

By then I was laughing so hard I couldn't swallow my fries. Mom laughed, too.

“So when I eat a Hershey's bar, I think of Ethan. I guess that's why I like them.”

I paused in my laughing to take a breath. “So do they still sell chocolate ex-lax?”

Mom gave me a warning look. “I'm not going to answer that. By the way, Abby called to remind you of her art show tonight.”

“Like she's given me a chance to forget in the past two weeks,” I said as I crumpled up my burger wrappings.

“It seems like she's always so busy,” Mom said. “I'm surprised she has time to do everything.”

“Yeah, that's Abby.”

“Does she hang out with anyone besides you and Rob?”

“What do you mean? We're her best friends. Why would she want to hang out with anyone besides us?”

“No, I mean, is she seeing anyone?”

I shot her a look of disbelief. “Mom! She's not even fourteen yet. Why would she be seeing anyone?”

“Just curious. I don't know when kids these days start pairing up. Abby's the ambitious type. I could see her being interested in that.”

“Trust me, Mom. Nothing is further from her mind. All she's thought about for six weeks now is the art show. And if I don't get going, I'm going to be late. Then I won't hear the end of that for another six weeks.”

I tossed my trash and hit the sidewalk. Even as I heard the clanking of tools in the garage bay echo across the street, I couldn't help but wonder why Mom was asking those kinds of questions about my best friend. Abby going out with somebody would have been as ridiculous as me having a girlfriend. Sure, there were kids in our classes who did that, but Abby? Me? I laughed out loud. Where did Mom come up with this stuff?

I turned down Robles Drive and headed for our apartment in the cool evening air.

 

Chapter 5

I found the only button-up shirt I owned under my bed. It was a little wrinkly, but it smelled okay, so I put it on. Rob met me out on the sidewalk. He wore slacks, a collared shirt, and a navy blue bow tie.

“What's with the tie?” I asked. “Abby didn't say anything about wearing a tie, did she?” She had given Rob and me specific instructions for the event, right down to what we were supposed to wear.

“No. But I told Marcus I was going to a cultural event and he let me wear it. I tried to talk him into letting me wear the shiny vest that matches it, but he said I already looked like a geek.”

“Sounds like good brotherly advice.”

Rob fingered the bow tie. “Do you think it's too much?”

“Rob, you're asking me about clothes? I'm not even sure if I wore matching socks yesterday.”

“Yeah, I don't think you did.”

As we headed down the street, Rob quietly pulled the bow tie from his collar and stuffed it into his pocket when he thought I wasn't looking. I tried not to smile.

“Hey, how'd that thing with Melissa go?” Rob asked.

“Mission accomplished. Not too many tears. You missed out on an easy twenty bucks.”

Rob shrugged.

It didn't take long to walk down to the community center. It didn't take long to walk to a lot of places in our part of town, although to get to the east side was a different story. Our side of town still had a small-time feel to it: big enough that you didn't know all the kids you passed on the street, but small enough that their moms probably knew your mom. But the east side had a bunch of new subdivisions and business areas that kept growing and growing. They had opened a new middle school the year before, and filled all the nooks and crannies at the high school with portables. There were people everywhere.

“What are all these people doing here?” Rob asked. Dozens and dozens of people milled around the front lawn of the community center, shaking hands and talking. They were dressed in coats and ties or fancy gowns—and each one of them was way older than my mom. It looked like bingo night for the rich and famous.

I rubbed my hands down the front of my shirt, trying to smooth out the wrinkles. “Maybe Abby didn't tell us quite enough about what we were supposed to wear tonight.”

Rob smiled as he pulled the navy blue bow tie out of his pocket and clipped it back onto his collar.

We worked our way to the front entrance, clinging to the building to make ourselves as invisible as possible.

“Are you sure we're in the right place?” Rob asked after an older lady wearing too much makeup patted him on the head as she walked by.

“Well, isn't it usually old people that like to go to art galleries?”

“Quentin! Rob!” As we neared the front entrance, Abby hurried toward us. She wore a soft purple dress and her shoes had little heels on them. I'd never seen her wear shoes with heels on them before.

Abby grinned as she grabbed each of us by an arm. “Can you believe this? The community center got double-booked somehow. The Sixty-Five-Plus Club is having their annual social tonight, and lucky for us they loved the idea of having their social at our show. Isn't that awesome? They're expecting over two hundred guests—and they'll all see our artwork. Come on!”

Abby's energy practically shot through her fingertips into my arm. I couldn't help but smile to see her so excited. She was like a bag of microwave popcorn when she got like that. Just press
START
and watch her go.

We passed through the foyer and into the main hall of the community center. It wasn't a huge place—I doubted the whole Sixty-Five-Plus Club could have all fit, even if it hadn't been set up like an art gallery. Moveable half walls blocked off sections of the hall into several smaller rooms to display the artwork. People—not all of them old, I was glad to see—moved slowly between the walls. At the front of the room sat half-a-dozen refreshment tables stacked full of sugar, fat, frosting, and whatever the other food groups are. They were like heavy cargo ships ripe for plunder.

Abby squeezed our arms. “Remember, you promised to behave yourselves tonight. Act like gentlemen and at least pretend to be interested in the artwork. And don't go crazy on the food—there's going to be a lot of people here. Oh, Quentin…”

She reached up and flattened my collar out. “Couldn't you have at least ironed your shirt?” She said it with a half smile, like she already knew the answer.

“Are you kidding me?” I said. “I have a really good memory and you said nothing about ironing.”

Abby rolled her eyes and gave Rob the once-over. “Nice tie. You might as well get some refreshments—I know you're dying to—and then meet me over on the far side there. I need to go find somebody first.”

Rob and I waited until Abby was out of arm's reach before sprinting toward the tables like gentlemen pirates.

The spread was even more impressive close-up. I doubted that the art club had that kind of budget. It made me look forward to the day I was sixty-five-plus. Rob and I sampled from several of the tables as we piled up our foam plates. We ate the goods down to an Abby-approved portion before grabbing cups of punch and heading off to look for her. As an afterthought, I grabbed an extra cup for her and balanced it between my arm and chest.

Abby waved to us from the far side of the makeshift gallery. She stood next to someone I was sure I had seen before in the hallways at school. I figured he was probably an eighth-grader. He was tall, with dark hair and thick eyebrows. He said something and laughed. Abby laughed, too.

“Hey, guys,” Abby said, still smiling. “This is Justin Masterson. He's in the art club with me.”

“Rob and Quentin, right?” Justin nodded in our direction. “Abby's told me all about you two. I didn't think either of you liked art much.”

His tone of voice immediately rubbed me the wrong way. I shrugged. “Who doesn't like art?”

“Yeah.” Rob nodded. “I mean, I draw sometimes. Doodles. And stuff.”

Justin's smile didn't move. He had very white teeth. “Cool. Then I'm sure you'll like our show.” He motioned toward the nearest wall. “Do you want a tour?” He started forward without waiting for a response.

“Oh,” I said, pushing one of the cups of punch toward Abby. “I got this for…” It was then that I realized she was already holding a drink.

Both of our eyes darted back and forth between the cups.

“Oh,” Abby finally said. “Thanks. Um … Justin brought me some just a minute ago.” She raised her eyes from the cups to look at me. “That was nice, though.” Then she followed after Justin and Rob.

I looked at the two cups and the plate of goodies I was juggling in my hands. With a sigh, I balanced the plate on my forearm and took one of the cups in my free hand. I drained it in a single chug. Grape. Stacking the full cup into the empty one, I followed the group.

“We've been studying different modern art movements,” Abby was explaining as I caught up. “And then we tried to copy the style of the artists we've studied.”

Justin raised his hand toward the paintings on the wall. “Like this. Our Impressionist paintings.” He took a deep breath, as though smelling the paint.

I looked closer at a painting of a doorway and chair. It seemed blurry, as if it had been soaked in a tub of water. “This one looks like it's a little out of focus to me.”

“Guess it's time for glasses, Quentin.” Abby laughed.