Today Tonight Tomorrow
“As weird as it is to talk about book reports on the last day of school, it’s kind of perfect,” he says. “The only question is, should it be The Old Man and the Sea or Great Expectations? Or wait, I’d love to see what you do with War and Peace. Unabridged, naturally.”
“So many mediocre white men to choose from.”
“And yet there’s a reason they’re called classics.” McNair turns in the seat and sticks out his hand. “To mutually assured destruction,” he says, and we shake on it.
Despite our matching height, our hands aren’t the same size, which I had no reason to notice until now. His hands are slightly larger, his skin warm, freckled fingers woven between my pale ones.
“You really do have a lot of freckles.”
He withdraws his hand from mine and glances down at it in mock astonishment. “Oh, that’s what these are.” Then he drops his hands to his lap. “I’ve always hated them.”
“Why?” I know he gets embarrassed when I tease him about them, but I don’t think they’re unattractive or anything, though of course I’d never say that to his face. They’re just plentiful. “They’re… interesting. I like them.”
A pause. A lifted eyebrow. “You… like my freckles?”
I roll my eyes and decide to play along. “Yeah I do. I’ve always wondered if you have freckles everywhere.”
It’s nearly automatic now, the way I can make him blush like this. He really is so sensitive about them. Still, he clucks his tongue and says, “Some things are better left a mystery.” He runs a hand up and down his bare arm. “Get ahold of yourself, Artoo. We’re teammates now. If you can’t handle all these hot, hot freckles, then we might be doomed.”
It must be talking about them that makes me stare at his face a moment longer than I normally would. Because the thing is, I have wondered if he has freckles everywhere. In a purely scientific way, the same way you’d wonder when the next big earthquake will hit Seattle or how long it takes chewing gum to decompose. Given they’re just as densely dotted on his arms as they are on his face, he must, right?
He has to know I’m not being serious. I don’t want him to think I’m calculating his ratio of freckled to unfreckled skin. Even if it’s in a purely scientific way.
“Your glasses are crooked,” I say, hoping this will return us to normal, and he adjusts them.
There. Except normal isn’t Rowan versus Neil; it’s Rowan and Neil versus the rest of the senior class.
This is probably a really bad idea.
* * *
Over a slice of what McNair declares is Seattle’s best pizza, we strategize. Well—first we argue. I start to pay for my food, but he insists on doing it since I’m the one driving us around. Then I begrudgingly agree to share my photo of the gum wall as long as he shares his photo of an umbrella. Until this point, we’d been equal. And I suppose we still are.
I’d love to decipher every clue right now, but McNair thinks it’s a waste of time. He wants to focus on what we know and figure out the rest along the way.
“There’s such a thing as planning too much,” he says, shaking red pepper flakes onto his pizza. Upper Crust is not the best pizza in Seattle, in my opinion. My slice has too much gooey mozzarella, not enough sauce. “Need I remind you of the summer reading incident?”
I grimace. Our junior English teacher had sent out a list of titles the week school let out, and I decided to read all five as quickly as I could so I could read what I wanted t
he rest of the summer. The day I finished, she emailed to let everyone know she’d sent the wrong list and “surely” no one had started yet.
“That was an anomaly.” I play the car card: if he wants to walk, he’s welcome to take off as soon as we finish eating, but I’m staying here until I figure out a few more. He relents.
At least we agree on a few of the more specific clues. Ice cream fit for Sasquatch is probably the yeti flavor at Molly Moon’s, Seattle’s most popular ice cream shop. And we’re pretty sure a place you can find Chiroptera, the scientific name for a bat, is the Woodland Park Zoo’s nocturnal exhibit.
“Do you have any idea what ‘a tribute to the mysterious Mr. Cooper’ could be?” he says. “It’s so vague. I googled ‘Seattle Cooper’ and only came up with a towing company, a car dealership, and a bunch of doctors. Or this one—‘a place that’s red from floor to ceiling’?”
“The Red Hall in the Seattle Public Library downtown,” I say without missing a beat. My parents have regular story times at the library, and I’ve explored nearly every inch of it. The hall is eerie but fascinating, a quirk in a building full of quirks. The Mr. Cooper clue, though, is as much a mystery as he apparently is. “Now I know why you were so eager to team up,” I say, shoving some of the excess cheese off my pizza. “You don’t know any of the hard ones.”
“Not true.” He points to something local, organic, and sustainable. “The compost system you introduced to Westview.”
Despite myself, I snort-laugh. “Please, I’m eating.”
It’s odd, though, eating pizza with Neil McNair. The window of the pizza place is semi-reflective, letting me almost see what it looks like, the two of us in public together. His red hair is slightly windblown, while my bun left windblown and leaped to natural disaster a couple hours ago.
After a few more minutes of bickering, we’re still stumped on the mysterious Mr. Cooper, but we’ll deal with that later. Our first stop as a team will be nearby Doo Wop Records for Nirvana’s first album.
We drop our plates into the compost bin (naturally) before leaving Upper Crust. Neil pulls out his phone to map the record store. In addition to all the regular social media and messaging icons, there are more than a few dictionary apps on his home screen.