Griffin pointed at all of them. “Rowan. Caesar. Tanner.”
I nodded. “I know who you all are. I mean…everyone does.”
Rowan leaned toward me. “Do they? Why? We’re completely normal. Nothing to remark on or write home about.”
“Um, you’ve been setting things on fire.”
Caesar shoved at his shoulder. “Yes, you have.”
“Like you haven’t been…” He waved his hand. “Good point, we need to be more discreet.” He closed his eyes for a second. “Even when it’s hard.” Having stated that, he lifted his lids. “Are we bothering you, Maci? You can tell us to leave.” He put his arm across the back of my chair. “We’d probably even go.”
Tanner shook his head. “Speak for yourself. I’m going to stay here and get to know Maci. Pretty name.”
“My mother thought she was naming me after the department store. She always thought they had the prettiest shoes, but she didn’t know how to spell it. So…that’s me.”
Caesar lifted an eyebrow. “Great story, actually.”
I couldn’t believe I’d just told it. I never explained my mother’s thinking in naming me. “Listen, I have to… I have to study, then I have to go to work, but I really like talking to you.” Since my best friend Stacy’s mother had committed suicide and she’d gone to live with her grandmother in Iowa, I really didn’t have friends to talk to in a real or fun way. There was the way that I spoke to my teachers, the way that I addressed my superiors at work, and then there was the little I communicated with my mother.
But my peers didn’t talk to me.
Unfortunately, I was just one of the lost trailer kids in town. We didn’t do much or go places and weren’t thought of by most people. Even within that community, they hated my mother and left me alone.
Always alone.
“Where do you work?” Rowan hadn’t moved his arm or indicated in any way that he was going to do as I asked and leave me to study. Even though Griffin had been the one to walk over first, I still got the impression they all took their cues from Rowan. Maybe it was the way each of them looked at him every so often, as though they needed to check for his approval.
Maybe Griffin wouldn’t have come over if he hadn’t already known somehow it was okay with Rowan. I didn’t always get the social cues of large groups—what was said, what wasn’t, and how everyone either understood the rules or didn’t. One-on-one, I did just fine, but I spent so little time in groups, I didn’t have practice with this type of thing.
“Hedge’s,” I answered him, naming the local grocery store. He’d know what I meant. There wasn’t another grocery store for fifty miles, so even the rich people got their food from Hedge’s unless they wanted to drive for an hour every time they ran out of milk.
“I’ve never seen you there,” Tanner said.
Ace nodded. “Right. Me neither, and I go every Wednesday.”
They do their own grocery shopping?I didn’t know why that surprised me, since I did mine as well. I guessed I thought most parents did the shopping rather than the kids. Or their housekeepers or something? Or even have their groceries delivered?
“I’m in the back. I load and unload.” Studying was probably not going to happen. I’d done this to myself by addressing them. Even if they were just doing this because I was a temporary interest to them for a few minutes, I didn’t mind the attention. I was usually so diligent, so this was downright strange behavior from me.
Ace shook his head. “You’re five foot nothing. How in the hell do they have you loading and unloading anything?”
Before I could answer, Griffin groaned. “You can’t say that to her. That’s not polite.”
“Who cares about polite? It’s true. I’m horrified they have her lifting. I mean, how do you get the boxes up high?”
I lifted an eyebrow. “It’s called a ladder.”
They all laughed this time, even Ace, who shook his head at the same time. He looked like he’d like to say more, but Rowan shook his head too, so Ace stopped.Aha. I’m right.They follow his lead, but why?
“So should we all study until she has to go?” Rowan rose and walked over to the table where they had been sitting and came back with everyone’s books. He passed Griffin a bag, from which Griffin pulled out a laptop. It was always crazy to me that people had their own. I had to use the ones at the library, but at least I had a phone. An old one, but it worked.
All of us started to look down at things we had to study. Or at least I pretended to. How was I supposed to concentrate when they were all there with me? Rowan smelled great, Ace kept drawing my attention just by the way that he read, and Griffin typed lightly on his computer, which was actually a comforting sound. I was pretty sure Tanner wasn’t really reading his book but was instead looking at me from under his lids, while Caesar wrote frantically into a notebook.
Suddenly, all of it stopped.
They went terribly still, and Rowan eventually sighed quietly.
“My father is here, isn’t he?” he asked Tanner, who was looking away from us, toward the entrance to the library.