My Worst Best Friend (6 page)

Some weirdo was standing in the doorway. He was wearing a tweed suit, a green hat with a crow’s feather stuck in the brim and yellow-framed shades. He looked like he’d just stepped out of his time machine. You could tell from the way the other customers were eyeing him that they thought so, too.

“Hi, Gracie.” He smiled.

I peered over the tops of my reading glasses. “Cooper? Is that you?” He looked different. This may sound strange, but I’d never really seen him away from the others before. Or outside school. The rest of us sometimes did things together, but Cooper never joined in. And the shades kind of made him look like an owl.

He came over to my table. “You didn’t recognize me because I don’t really dress up for school. You’ve never seen me at my sartorial best.” You didn’t want to imagine what his sartorial worst could be. “And anyway, that makes us even,” said Cooper. “I almost didn’t recognize you because I’ve never really seen you without Savanna before. Where is she?” He pretended to look under the table. “Don’t tell me you’re travelling solo today – striding out to explore the rich tapestry that is life with only a backpack and a cell phone.”

“Excuse me…” I was still coming to terms with Cooper being in Java. It wasn’t exactly his kind of place. Unless, of course, he was staging a one-man picket because they didn’t serve fair-trade coffee, or something like that. “What are
you
doing here?”

“I’m on my way to the Meeting House to improve my teaching skills.” That would be the Neighbours’ Project. Another of Cooper’s causes. The local churches had all banded together to run a community-action volunteer programme that taught English as a second language and reading and stuff like that at the Quaker Meeting House. Cooper had been involved in the programme since the summer. “I saw you in the window as I was walking past. In a trance of terminal boredom. So I thought I’d come in and say hello. You know, brighten up your dismal day.”

I thanked him for his concern. “Only I’m not going to be here too long. I’m waiting for Savanna.”

“You see?” He pulled out a chair and sat down. “I knew she had to be lurking in the shadows somewhere nearby. The whole state would’ve known if she wasn’t. We would’ve felt the world come to a sudden stop and the heavens quake.” Cooper laughed. “Rogers and Astaire, Spencer and Tracy, Zindle and Mooney.”

Or, to put it another way, bread and jam. That would be me with the crust.

Cooper took off his glasses and laid them on the table. “So where is the Princess Zindle on this glorious afternoon?”

“She’s on her way. We have a date to go to the mall, remember?”

“Of course! To cheer you up from yesterday’s defeat and disappointment!” He gave me a crooked, cocky kind of smile. “So, where is she?”

“I don’t know.” I started folding up the newspaper.

“I take it you’ve tried calling.”

“She’s not answering her phone.”

“Now there’s another first.” Cooper laughed. “I always figured Savanna would answer her phone even if she was in the middle of being interviewed on TV.” He gave me another smile. “And you’ve been sitting here waiting for how long?”

I acted like I had to think about that question for a couple of seconds. Because it wasn’t that long and the time had gone by so quickly. “I’m not sure… An hour or so.”

“
Or so?
An hour or two? Or an hour or three?”

Savanna’s lateness was pretty legendary. Archie always joked that Savanna would be late for her own funeral, but Pete said she probably wouldn’t show up at all.

“Maybe an hour and a half.” Or maybe a little more. “I guess she’s been held up.”

“Who by?” asked Cooper. “Bonnie and Clyde?”

“Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway.”

We both laughed.

Cooper tipped his chair back. “I suppose she could’ve fallen into a time warp,” he suggested. “Right this minute, Savanna Zindle is wandering through first-century Rome, trying to make her cell phone work.”

“Or maybe she was abducted by aliens.”

Cooper nodded. Thoughtfully. “That could be it. She could be sitting in a zoo on Trafamadore right this minute.” He held up his hands as though he was reading a newspaper.
“Local girl beamed into deepest space while friend drinks enough tea to drown the whole town.”

“
Slaughterhouse-Five
, Michael Sacks, Ron Leibman and Valerie Perrine.” I raised my empty cup to him. “She’ll show up before my second gallon.”

“Sure she will.” He raised one eyebrow. Inquisitively. “But what if she doesn’t?”

It wasn’t often that Savanna never showed up at all, but it had been known to happen. And not just to Marilouise. There was always a really good reason though. Like the time the sheep escaped from the truck and blocked the road.

“She’ll show.”

He leaned forward. “But what if she doesn’t?”

I made a well-what-can-you-do? kind of face. “Then I guess I’ll go home.”

He was tapping his shades against the table. “I have a better idea.”

If we’d been at lunch and he’d said something like that, the others would have exchanged looks and groaned. Cooper’s ideas
never
involved anything like ball games or burgers or getting a pizza like theirs.

“What is it?”

He gave me a big grin. If you ignored the hat and the feather and the suit, the grin made him look almost normal. “Why don’t you come with me?”

The last time he’d asked Archie to go somewhere with him it was to a demonstration.

“Come with you where?”

“To the Meeting House.” He sat back. “I know some of us have a sceptical attitude towards the Neighbours’ Project…” That would be Savanna. She wanted to know what Cooper was trying to prove. The boys just thought it was a joke. The only extracurricular activities they took seriously involved sweat and jock straps. “But it’s actually a lot of fun,” Cooper continued. “Makes you feel like more than a ball of fluff on the carpet of time.”

“Yeah, it sounds like it’s cool and everything…” I was the only one who’d given any real thought to joining, but Savanna had laughed so much when I told her that I kind of chickened out. “It’s just that, you know…”

“What?” He cocked an eyebrow. “You’re too busy?”

“That wasn’t what I was going to say. I was going to say that I don’t exactly belong to a church.”

“Me neither.” The smile came back. “The only faith I have is in doom.”

I laughed. I was also the only one in our group who found Cooper funny haha – instead of funny peculiar. “Which means you’re never going to be disappointed.”

He picked up his glasses and shook them at me. “You see … you’re like me – you’re a realist. On whom the fate of our troubled world depends.”

“I thought you were a pessimist.” Another of Savanna’s names for him was Mr Negativity. She said he was the guy who looked at a silver lining and saw a cloud.

Cooper laughed. “You mean because I’m supposed to be anti-everything?”

“You do have a reputation.”

“So do you. You want to save everything.”

“Not
everything
.” I had a long list of things I thought the planet could do without. “If every golf course on the planet was turned into a primeval swamp I’d jump for joy.” To give you just one example.

“You see?” Cooper laughed. “You
are
like me.” He
gave me the thumbs up. “And like the good folk at Neighbours. Pessimism is thinking you can’t change anything – ever – and none of us thinks that.” He gave me a wink. “You’re just the kind of person we need.”

“I don’t know … I’m really better with other species…” You know where you are with whales.

“Look, I’m not trying to pressure you.” Cooper tilted his hat back on his head. “Not too much, anyway. I’m just saying you should come along and see what it’s like. You don’t have to commit yourself to anything. Just check it out. They can always use another volunteer. And, despite your intense love of poikilothermic herptiles, you have had dealings with human children, right? Didn’t you do some teaching in the summer? So you’re not unfamiliar with the concept.”

“Well … sort of…”
This is a tree. This is a bat roost. Those are deer droppings. Here’s how you plant a seedling…
“But those were little kids.” I was OK with little kids – they were close to my height.

“We have little kids!” He clapped his hands together. “We have lots of little kids, Gracie. Really cute little kids. And you have experience. Mrs Darling – she runs the programme – she’ll be really excited to get somebody with experience.”

“Yeah, but you know … I’m really more into the environment than little kids.”

Cooper was amused. “I hate to be the one to point this out, Ms Mooney, but little kids are part of the environment. Besides, this is a good chance for you to spread the word. Inspire them. Convert them to the cause. Not every book for little kids is about teddy bears and talking giraffes. It’s more
goodbye moon
than
goodnight moon
nowadays, isn’t it? I bet you could get some stories from the library about the stuff you’re into.” I’d never really noticed before, but he actually had a really nice smile. “You know, iguanas and trees and the collapse of civilization as we know it.”

“You could be right…” Mr MacGregor had been using toxic pesticides in his garden for decades – Peter Rabbit had to be in really big trouble by now. Maybe Cooper’s ideas weren’t as bad as everybody thought. “But I don’t really know very much about real teaching.”

“And
I
do?” asked Cooper. “I never even taught my dog to bring the ball back. He goes after it all right, but then he looks around for anyone who isn’t me and gives it to them.”

Maybe he was even funnier than I’d thought. “Yeah, but I’m kind of shy.”

“You should’ve seen how nervous I was at first, Gracie.” He was leaning forward again. “I thought I was going to be the youngest person in Crow’s Point ever to go into cardiac arrest. But now I really enjoy it. We laugh a lot. Mainly at me, it may be true, but we do laugh.”

I was weakening. I’d had a good time pointing out bat roosts and planting butterflies. “I’ll admit that I’m tempted… But, you know, I can’t. Not today.” I couldn’t. Savanna joked that there were only three things you could really depend on in life: death, taxes and Gracie Mooney. She expected me to be in Java like I’d said. And so did I. “I have to wait for Savanna. Something must have happened to her phone so she can’t call me, but I know she’ll show.”

“Doesn’t your dad teach history?” said Cooper. “Didn’t he ever tell you how we’re supposed to learn things from the past?”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning Savanna is always late. Archie says she’s even late when he picks her up later than the time they agreed on. And she’s always got some really terrific, not to say inspired, excuse. You know, like today it’ll turn out there was a herd of elephants that escaped from a travelling circus who were blocking her way.”

I laughed. Uneasily. It had never occurred to me before that the runaway sheep story might not be true.

“I just think it’s stupid for you to sit here all afternoon when you could be doing something really interesting.”

“I can’t. I really can’t.” Five minutes after I walked out of Java, Savanna would arrive, shaken and upset because she was so late and needed to tell me what had happened – but all she’d find would be an empty table and a half-drunk cup of peppermint tea.

Cooper snapped his fingers. “OK, I have an idea.”

Another one?

“Why don’t you leave a note for her at the counter? Since her phone isn’t working. Then if she does show up, she’ll know where you are. She can come after you if she wants.”

“I don’t know…” Friends don’t desert their post. What if there really had been a robbery or she’d had to have emergency surgery? How bad was I going to feel then?

“Look, you’re not abandoning Savanna, Gracie. You’re just waiting for her somewhere else.”

That was true. It wasn’t as if I was going to be a million miles away. I’d be just up the road, at the other end of town. If Savanna called from Java, I could be back in no time. “Well… OK, but I’m probably not going to stay long. I’m just going to check it out.”

“Great.” You’d think he’d won the lottery or something. I’d never seen Cooper look so pleased. “I guarantee that you’re going to like Neighbours, Gracie. It’s cool.” He pulled a notebook and pen from the pocket of his jacket and handed them to me. “Come on, be daring. Seize this moment of opportunity the way a dolphin rides a wave. Write her a note. Just tell the cashier it’s for the girl with all the hair who sounds like she’s herding a flock of geese.”

As
soon as I stepped through the door of Neighbours, I liked it. It had a really easy-going, friendly kind of atmosphere. You could hear people laughing. Every person we passed said, “hi”. And Mrs Darling couldn’t have been happier to see me if I’d been teaching English for the last fifty years. “If Zebediah recommends you, then that’s good enough for me,” said Mrs Darling. It took me a second to realize she meant Cooper. Nobody I knew called him Zebediah. And nobody I knew paid any attention to his opinions – not in a positive way, at least. Mrs Darling said that if I did decide to join there was a workshop where I could learn the basics, but for now I could just sit in on a class and see what I thought. I explained that I probably wouldn’t be able to stay too long because my friend was coming for me. I stayed all afternoon.

I sat in with the youngest class, which was taught by Mrs Hendricks from the hardware store. It was the second time since elementary school that I’d been in a group where everyone else wasn’t taller than I was. The other cool thing was that, unlike the kids I’d worked with in the summer who often had a limited attention span when it came to nature, these kids were endlessly enthusiastic. They didn’t fidget, or complain they were tired or thirsty, or wander off to stomp on some unwary insect the minute you turned your back. They were all systems go right to the very end. The person who had trouble concentrating was me. I’d get involved with the class for a while, but then I’d suddenly remember Savanna and start worrying about her again. Where was she? Was she all right?