“Junk,” Meg tells us, as if this illuminates something.
Meanwhile, a short distance away, Alexa has started digging. Meg asks Bev to use the camera, and Bev takes it off of her shoulder, hands it over, and leaves to walk along the edge of the water, picking up pieces of driftwood. Soon she comes back toward me with her arms full.
“Can I have the keys?” she asks.
I hand them to her, and when she grabs them some wood falls out of her arms. I ignore her for a little while, but it takes too much effort to stare out at the water as if I don’t notice her picking up and dropping the wood, so I stop faking aloofness and take some wood out of her arms. We start up the path to the van together.
“This is perfect for carving,” she says.
Bev takes things from real life and makes them small. Three-inch-tall people, centimeter-long books, every detail precise and perfect. Her senior project was the whole school: every student, every teacher, every classroom. People were touched. For weeks they crowded around the display in the library, because there they were. Even if they had never even spoken to Bev, never even had a class with her, they were there somewhere, standing or sitting in their usual spots, looking like themselves in their signature glasses or boots, some small detail that made them recognizable. Our high school was different than other schools—no football team, no cheerleaders—but like any place there were kids who were noticed and kids who weren’t. Bev was definitely noticed. And then, there was her project, sitting in the library, saying, Yes, I notice you, too.
As we walk up to the car Bev tries to talk to me as if everything’s fine. She tells me that driftwood is great for the bigger pieces because it’s so soft and because it’s gray, a color that works well for walls and floors.
“If I’d had this to make the theater out of, it would have been so much better,” she says. “I wouldn’t have made that gash in the side from digging too hard.”
In Bev’s version of the school’s theater, Alexa and Meg and a few other people were onstage, holding scripts. I was across campus in the drawing studio, standing at an easel. Bev was two classrooms away, working on a miniature version of her miniature campus.
I unlock the passenger door and we let the wood tumble out of our arms and onto the seat. Bev picks up a piece I was carrying.
“I’m gonna use this one to carve the bus,” she says.
She looks at me.
She waits. Probably to see if I’m going to talk about this with her. If I’m going to pretend that things are okay. But I don’t know how I can have a conversation with her about anything until I know why she lied to me for so many months.
“Do you want to tell me now?” I ask.
She shakes her head. No. We turn back to the water.
Meg runs up to greet us when we get back to the beach.
“We’re finding it!” she tells us.
“Finding what?” I ask.
“The junk,” she says. “It’s everywhere. Come look at my stash. Here’s your camera back. I got some good shots.”
She leads us down the beach and shows us what she’s dug up: a plastic green army man, a doorknob, a rubber boot.
“Alexa’s thing is the best,” Meg says. “Show them.”
Alexa beams, holds up a harmonica.
“Isn’t this amazing?” she says. “Someone used to make music with this. How did it get here?”
I take the harmonica from Alexa’s hand. All of the little openings for air are filled with mud and sand.
“Do you think it’ll work?” I ask.
Alexa nods. “I’ll clean it out,” she says.
When I hand it back to her, she cups it in her hands like it’s something precious.
Meg dances around us. “Let’s find more junk!”
But Alexa stops gazing at her harmonica and tells us we have to go. On our way back to the car we gather more driftwood for Bev. She walks ahead, pointing out the pieces we should take, filling her pockets with pieces of glass.
The address Alexa has written in her tour planner belongs to a boarded-up house nestled in a block of several abandoned houses. We stand outside its front door as she flips through her notes, searching for a mistake or an explanation.
“Everything will be fine,” she assures us. “We are here for a reason.” Then, more to herself, she says, “But it just doesn’t make sense. It says it right here. I have it written down in two places.”
We’ve just been standing on the sidewalk in front of the house, so I walk up to the door. The sky is darkening, the window next to the door reflects a streetlamp. I cup my hands over the glass and look inside. An old, ripped chair. A coffee table. Nothing else. I take a step back, ready to tell Alexa that if there is a reason for our presence here, it isn’t clear to me.
But then I see a piece of paper on the ground below the window. I pick it up. It has a piece of tape on the top and typed words that read: SHOW TONIGHT. USE BACK DOOR with a hand-drawn arrow pointing to the left.
Alexa appears stunned but Bev nods decisively and starts unloading the equipment from the back of the bus: the drum kit, the guitar, the bass, the microphone stand, the amps. We carry everything around the overgrown side yard, step over a fallen fence, and stop in front of a screen door.
I can make out movement from the darkness inside.
“I think someone’s in there,” I tell Alexa. She consults her notes, walks in front of me, and opens the door.
“Walt?” she asks.