Ms. Klein lifts her chin in the direction of the lab benches. “Sure thing,” she says, and her voice is very even. “Have a seat.”
Twenty-Five
Weekend afternoons are notoriously slow at Niko’s if there isn’t a bridal shower or a christening booked in the sunroom, which is bad news for tips but good news in that it’ll give me four long, boring hours’ worth of chances to try to smooth things over with Chloe. We’ve been avoiding each other since we got back from break—or, more to the point, Chloe’s been avoiding me. On the rare occasions I’ve made it into the cafeteria, she’s been eating with some girls from the drama club. We’ve been putting the next issue of the Beacon together entirely via a string of extremely tense, polite emails.
When I get to the restaurant though, I find Chloe’s monosyllabic cousin Rosie rolling silverware at the wait station instead, chunky rings on every one of her fingers and a diamond stud glittering in her nose.
“She changed up her schedule,” Steve explains when I ask about it, looking vaguely uncomfortable. “Some new club she’s in.”
I sincerely doubt that—after all, it’s Saturday—but it’s not like I’m about to argue with her dad of all people. I shuffle my way through my shift, then swing by Sunrise with two plastic clamshells of baklava tucked under my arm. I drop one with Camille at the nursing station and bring the other into Gram’s room, where we sit on the love seat with the window cracked to let a tiny bit of cold, fresh air in, brushing flakes of puff pastry off our laps.
“Oh, you know what, Marin?” she says suddenly, getting up off the sofa and heading for the closet, surprisingly spry in her cardigan and khakis. “I’ve got something for you.”
I raise my eyebrows. “You do?”
“I do!” She stands on her tiptoes and rummages along the top shelves for a moment; when she turns around she’s holding a fabric-covered storage box, the kind you buy at craft supply stores. We must have moved a hundred of them from her house in Brockton, full of old papers and mementos and slightly creepy locks of hair from when my mom and uncles were little kids. When she brings this one back to the love seat and pulls the top off though, I see it’s full of old photos—and not the ones from the seventies that I’m used to seeing, my mom with pigtails riding her bike and my uncles’ hair curling down over their collars. These are older: my grandpa at his high school graduation, looking grave and serious even as a teenager. The narrow brick apartment building in the North End where my grandma grew up. And—
“Is that you?” I ask, grabbing a faded photo out of the pile and holding it up to get a better look.
“Damn right it’s me,” Gram says with a laugh. Her shiny brown hair is longer than I’ve ever seen it. She’s standing in a crowd in a leafy green park, dressed in bell-bottoms and huge sunglasses and a sleeveless white T-shirt, a clunky beaded necklace nestled in the deep V of the collar. She looks ferocious, her arms flung in the air and her mouth opened in a howl.
“What is— I mean, what are you—” I break off, not even sure which question to start with. “Is this in the city?” I finally ask.
She nods. “Right on Boston Common,” she says. “I took the bus in with a bunch of girlfriends for a civil rights demonstration. Your grandfather almost lost his mind.”
“He didn’t want you to protest?” I ask, ey
ebrows raised.
“Well, I wouldn’t say that, exactly.” Gram takes the picture from my hand, gazes at it appraisingly. “But he was worried about me, I think.”
“Well, if this was when you got arrested, I guess he was right to be.”
Gram waves a hand. “Oh, please,” she says with a smirk. “First of all, this wasn’t the protest where I got arrested. Second of all, maybe worried isn’t the right way to put it. We were coming from different places, that’s all. He didn’t always understand why certain things were important to me, or why I reacted to things the way I did.” She smiles at the picture, almost to herself. “He tried though. And that was the most important thing.”
I think of Gray then. He and I haven’t talked much either, the last couple of days, and I feel crummy about the way we left things outside Bex’s classroom. I know he just wanted to take care of me, back in Bex’s classroom. I didn’t know how to explain how important it felt for me to take care of myself.
I’m about to ask Gram what she thinks I should do about him when Camille knocks on the door, poking her head in. “That baklava is delicious,” she reports with a smile. “How are you ladies doing in here?”
“We’re great,” Gram says, beaming, the box of photos still balanced in her narrow lap. “My daughter is visiting.”
“Granddaughter,” I remind her gently.
“Of course,” Gram says. “My granddaughter. Ah . . .” She trails off then, a flash of panic skittering across her face; I can see she’s lost her train of thought.
“Marin,” I say, trying to keep my voice casual. She’s never forgotten my name before. It’s a fluke, that’s all. “But Camille and I know each other already, remember?”
“We’re old friends,” Camille says. She’s smiling, but her tone is slightly wary, her gaze flicking from me to Gram and back again. “You girls just yell if you need me, okay?”
“We will,” I promise, and smile back.
I’m waiting in the bio lab Monday morning before first period when Gray appears in the doorway, looking around the empty room and back at me with confusion written all over his face. “Hey,” he says. “Am I early?”
I shake my head. “Nope,” I say. “Right on time.”
Gray nods slowly. “There was a note taped to my locker this morning,” he says, the faintest of smirks appearing at the very edges of his mouth. “Said there was an emergency book club meeting before first period. You wouldn’t happen to know anything about that, would you?”
I tilt my head to the side for a moment, pretending to consider. “It’s possible,” I admit, holding up the Dunkin’ Donuts box I picked up on the way in this morning, “that you’re pretty much looking at it.”