“I’d love your help, Brayden,” Josie answered. “You know, I have to say, it would be really good for all of us if you and Jake came back and participated.”
“Yeah,” Brayden said. “I think you’re right. So, put me to work…”
And he smiled. He had a movie star smile.
I don’t know that I’d ever seen him smile before.
I’d seen him laugh. In a mean way. But this was something new. This, I realized, was the smile he gave girls.
“You guys don’t need me then,” I said.
“I guess not,” Josie said.
She turned away from Brayden, breaking his gaze. Her eyes were twinkling, though. And she seemed flushed.
“Let me show you what I was thinking of doing, Brayden,” she said, going into the dressing room.
I got the hell out of there.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
MY FOOD AISLE AT NIGHT
Josie and Brayden worked hard all afternoon and by the evening free play period, they had new sleeping quarters for us all.
Josie led the little kids over. They rushed in to the dressing rooms. There was hooting and hollering from inside, but Niko and I stopped to look at the area right outside the dressing rooms.
Josie and Brayden had made it into a living room.
The floor was carpeted and they had laid down a bunch of throw rugs over it. They had brought over the beanbag chairs from the Media Department and added some more furniture. There were two futon couches, a fake-fur butterfly chair and two coffee tables and a desk. A lava lamp gently oozed on one of the coffee tables. There was a mini-fridge and a case of water bottles next to it. They had tricked it out to an absurd degree.
Right next to the furniture, there was a small clearing, with three card tables and seven folding chairs distributed among the tables. A table lamp stood on each table and two bookshelves had been stocked with what looked to me like one each of every book in the Book Department.
It was a kind of work area. Like a library.
“Downright homey,” Niko said to me.
Was that a joke? I glanced at him. Couldn’t tell.
So I just repeated him. “Downright homey.”
The kids were going berserk, so I stepped inside to see what all the racket was about.
Brayden had neatly removed the wall between the men’s and ladies’ dressing rooms so it was now one big bunker, with a hallway running down the middle and berths off to either side.
Josie and Brayden had Sharpied the names of the kids on the doors.
Chloe grabbed my hand.
“I found your bedroom,” she said. “I’ll show you.”
Chloe dragged me down the hall to one of the dressing rooms in what had been the men’s side.
Sure enough, it read “Dean” on the door.
Inside it was smallish. Four by eight. A hammock had been slung end to end. A locker stood on the floor. On top of the locker, a small lamp.
Above the hammock, running along the wall, there was a shelf.
And on the shelf were books.
An assortment of the paperbacks from the Book Department. Some mysteries, some cyborg fiction, five cookbooks. I laughed at that.
“Do you like your room?” Josie came up behind me.
“I really do.”
“You can, like, customize it any way you want. I just put some stuff here because I thought you’d like it.”
“I like it,” I said.
“If you don’t like the hammock, you can stick with your air mattress, though I’m not sure it will fit in here.”
“I like it just like this,” I said.
From the hallway outside my door I heard Max and Ulysses speaking. Ulysses said something and Max laughed.
“What’d he say?” Chloe demanded.
“Ulysses says it’s like a train!” Max announced.
“It is just like a train!” Chloe declared.
Our bedrooms, the dressing rooms at the Greenway, had just been given their new name: the Train.
The Train and its architects, Josie and Brayden, were all the talk at dinner.
Josie sat with Jake and Brayden, which was an entirely new arrangement. And the three laughed and palled around all during dinner.
At one point Brayden stretched and put his arm across the back of the booth. Oldest move in the book. And Josie leaned right back into him.
Niko took his tray and sat at the table next to them. He kept trying to get into the conversation.
“You know, once, in Scouts, we took a trip to Yosemite. It got so cold at night we had to build makeshift lean-tos. We were out there at three in the morning, scraping up pine needles and leaves for insulation.”
“Wow,” Brayden said dryly. “Great story.”
And they laughed.
“But the funny thing was that then when we started the campfire, these pine needles kept falling in the fire and flaring up!”
“Oh man,” Jake interrupted, turning to Brayden. “You remember when Fat Marty lit that grease bomb?!”
“It was so funny, Josie,” Brayden said. “He saved, like, a month’s worth of bacon grease. He wanted to show us how to make a grease bomb.”
“And then he lit it and instead of exploding, it just gave off this horrible smoke.”
“And his mom came in screaming and she grabbed this fire extinguisher and doused us all.”
“It was crazy,” Brayden said. “Took us like five hours to clean it up.”
And Josie laughed. She was eating it up. Brayden’s rough-guy, laid-back charm.
Niko sat there, trying so hard to be cool. Smiling, laughing at the right places.
But I could see that every time Brayden touched Josie or nudged her or said her name, it was like a knife in his gut.
There was another person who didn’t seem to be so thrilled with the budding romance between Josie and Brayden: Sahalia.
She was acting extra-insolent and slouchy. She had nearly thrown down her tray with her food and now she just sat there with her arms crossed, staring daggers at Josie.
After we all settled down in our plush new accommodations, I realized I’d left my journal in the Kitchen.
The lights had already dimmed automatically, which meant it was after ten, but I could see, sort of, so I went to get my journal.
Approaching the Food aisle, I heard a voice.
More specifically, I heard hushed laugher. Astrid’s.
I walked slowly, quietly. I didn’t want to scare her off.
