Page 8 of The Design of Goodbye
Tanner liked to harass Liam during lunch, but I’d never taken the time to pay attention to Liam other than random glances. Maybe I’d missed something obvious. During the two interactions I’d had with Liam today, he’d seemed normal...understandably annoyed with me but normal.
“You really don’t listen to all the gossip, do you?” stated Jules. “If you did, you wouldn’t be asking me that.”
“I thought I did.”
The white dog finished crossing the street, and I was strangely sad when it disappeared around a corner. Maybe I needed to convince my dad to get me a dog. Dogs were loyal and the best of friends, right?
That wouldn’t work, though. Thimble, my cat, would lose his mind if we got a dog. He was terrified of them.
“Did you know Liam—we call him ‘Roo,’ by the way—stopped showing up to school at the end of April and didn’t come back until senior year started? He missed, like, six weeks of school.”
I turned my attention back to Jules. “People wouldn’t stop talking about it, so yeah.” I leaned forward in my seat, curious. “Did you ever find out where he was?”
Her phone pinged with an incoming Whirl notification, and she responded to it before saying, “No one knows. Tanner thinks it was something to do with the law or drugs. Maybe juvie.”
I rolled my eyes. “That’s what everyone thinks when a student misses a lot of school.”
“Maybe.” She paused to type something else on her phone. “But Tanner says Roo came back different. On the first day of school, Tanner slammed his locker, and Roo jumped, like, a mile in the air and almost passed out. Hestilljumps whenever we slam our lockers. Weird, right?”
I took a sip of my latte to hide my frown. “Why do you call him Roo?”
“Remember Roo, the kangaroo fromWinnie the Pooh?” She grinned, pleased. “Funny, isn’t it?”
“Hilarious.” It wasn’t.
“And,” she continued, “he has no friends. If that doesn’t prove he’s weird, I don’t know what does.”
“Hasn’t he only lived in Reed since last December?” When she nodded, I added, “Then, that’s probably why.”
Jules eyed me up and down. “Why are you making excuses for him?”
“I’m not.” I kind of was because making friends was harder to come by than cashmere.
“You’ll be seeing him a lot,” she said. “You can find out for yourself what he’s like. But I’m telling you, he’s weird. And remember, I’m always right.”
chapter four
When I got home from Buzz, I immediately went downstairs to my mom’s sewing room and started counting. It was a game I played: how long would my dad wait until he pried. He said it was simple curiosity; I called it prying. His max was fifteen minutes, but I was guessing he wouldn’t last five.
Sure enough, at three minutes and fifty-three seconds, he knocked.
“Come in,” I called.
He walked in wearing his favorite blue apron, which had a white house and the sayingEverything I Touch Turns to Soldembroidered on it. My dad’s first passion was real estate. He’d been a real estate agent for almost ten years before he opened his own firm, Winter’s Realty.
My dad was an excellent realtor, but it wasn’t because of his passion—it was his talent for reading people. He could spot within minutes what his clients didn’t like about a house, what they loved, and what they needed.
“Hey, Mads. I made—”
My cat bolted into the room, almost tripping my dad as he flung himself onto my lap. I screeched at Thimble’s cold and soaking wet body. I pushed him off, and Thimble tumbled onto the carpet, dejected.
“Did Thimble get into the water again?”
“Yeah,” I said. “He’s soaked.”
“I must’ve left a bathroom door open.” My dad glared at my tiny gray cat. Good thing he was an adorable cat.
Thimble was obsessed with water. The first day we’d brought him home, he’d hidden in the downstairs guest bathroom. When we’d finally found him, he’d been taking a nap in a full sink of water with the faucet still running. It’d taken my dad and me over an hour to clean up.
