“I thought you weren’t coming in today,” he says. He sets the plate under a heat lamp and turns back to the stove, sliding dirty pots and black-bottomed pans into the deep sink.
“Yeah, I wasn’t. But you know Dolly’s is like my safe place now.” I lean against the counter beside him. “I had to tutor today,” I say quietly.
“Uh-oh,” he says, looking at me through the fringe of his lashes as he continues to move expertly around the kitchen. “How’d that go?”
“It could have been worse, but she barely looked at me the whole time. Jase was there, which helped.”
“Ahhh,” Dom says. He walks over to the fridge and pulls out a fat red tomato and a ball of juicy-looking mozzarella. “Hard to be upset with that ray of sunshine nearby.”
I laugh a little. “Exactly. But I don’t know. I think today is the first day I realized Layla’s totally different now. Like my Layla is really, really gone.”
He nods. Dom’s always focused in the kitchen, but tonight he seems even quieter than he usually is.
I’m about to ask him if everything’s okay when he picks up a sharp knife and starts to cut the tomato into thick slices. My stomach growls.
“Want some of this?” he asks, and I wonder if he heard. He picks up the mozzarella next and slices it, then arranges both on a plate, alternating tomato, then cheese, then tomato before drizzling it all with a thick olive oil.
“Duh,” I say. He smirks and sprinkles big granules of salt and pepper all over it, and I grab two forks.
We eat standing up, without talking, and the soft sounds of us chewing is drowned out by the dishwasher and the one other cook, who is talking loudly on his cellphone. The cheese is smooth and cold and the tomato is so juicy that the seeds slide down my chin. I wipe them away with the back of my hand.
“So is it over?” Dom asks. He hands me a napkin, but his eyes seem distant even as he looks at me. “Like, are you done tutoring her?”
I nod. “I think so. If she needs more help for the next assignment, I think I’m going to ask Novak to pair her up with someone else.”
I cut the last slices of tomato and cheese in half so we can share up until the very last bite. I look around the kitchen at the stainless steel appliances, the stacks of serving plates and spices. I want to believe that truly good things can last forever even if my friendship with Layla couldn’t.
“So. I was doing some research about fundraising,” I say, lifting the empty plate and used forks. I settle them into the sink and turn the water on, rinsing it all clean. He looks at me blankly, so I add, “For this place. For Dolly’s.”
“Oh,” Dom says. He angles his head in my direction, and his dark hair shimmers as he turns. He looks skeptical. Or I guess uninterested. He grabs a bar mop and starts wiping down the counter, and I thought he’d be more excited by the prospect of raising money for his grandparents—that he’d be dying to hear what I had to say.
I take a deep breath and I pitch him the idea about running a fundraiser in the neighborhood.
“I don’t know,” he says.
I tell him about the crowdsourcing websites I’d looked up—how successful I read they can be.
“We could post about it everywhere. People love feeling like they’re a part of something.”
Dom crosses his arms. “I don’t really want to do that,” he says.
“But, Dom,” I insist. “It could be really great. What about your small plates? We could set up a table out front and give out little samples to encourage people to come in like you do with the regulars now anyway, and maybe have a donation box near the door. Or what about posting SAVE DOLLY’S posters around the neighborhood. People would be so—”
“Look,” Dom starts, but he isn’t facing me. He sniffs hard and rubs his hand down his face. He stares at the floor, then at the stove in front of him, then at the wall behind my head. His eyes turn stormy and he furrows his brow. “I totally appreciate you offering to help out after school or whatever. Lolly and Pop do too. But this is our livelihood, not some part-time gig the way it is for you, and…”
I cut in. “Don’t worry about it, really. You know I love this place. I’m happy to help. Obviously, I know a fundraiser won’t fix everything. We’ll need to come up with something more sustainable to get business back to where it used to be, but I think it’s a good place to start, and I’m—”
He looks right at me then, and the weight of his gaze stops me cold.
“Cleo. Stop. Just stop. We don’t need—or want—your charity.”
The color of our conversation turns so quickly that I’m a little too stunned to say anything that makes much sense.
“Right,” I say, the way he’s looking at me hurting more than his actual words. Stupidly, I say it again. “Right. Of course not.”
I try to clear my throat a few times, but it doesn’t work. Dom doesn’t look my way or say another word to me, just keeps cleaning the kitchen like I’m not there. And here I stand again, feeling invisible; feeling forgotten.
Before I walk out of the kitchen, I want to apologize. I want to get us back to sharing a plate, to talking like we’re old friends, to fix whatever I just broke. But the last time I tried to tell someone I was sorry, they just told me how little they wanted me in their life. And I’m not brave enough to hear that again—that someone I want doesn’t want me back.
Now, not even Dolly’s is safe.
All this time I’ve been blaming Layla for the way things are between us. But after her, and Sydney, and now Dom, it’s clear that the problem isn’t them. It has to be me.
I pull on my coat, waving goodbye to Miss Dolly and Pop, wondering if I should bother coming in tomorrow if Dom is still upset with me. It isn’t until I’m back inside my own bedroom that I realize I’ll be avoiding three different people at school tomorrow—that I’m back to being all alone again.
A CHANCE
I expect Monday to be torture, what with the Sydney and Dom situations, but in homeroom I encounter the perfect distraction: there seems to be trouble in Chorus Girl Land.
When I walk in, Dom ignores me, which hurts, but I expected that. What I don’t expect is to see Layla sitting as far away from Sloane as possible in a classroom of this size. Sloane’s cheeks are a bright, angry red, while Layla looks like she’s been crying. It’s strange that it makes me kind of happy, seeing them so unhappy. But I need to know what happened.
I spend the rest of the morning launching a full-blown investigation, which is an excellent way to avoid my own problems. I ask around in each of my classes. I walk slowly down the hall, listening for whispers. I linger in bathroom stalls. But by lunch I still know nothing.