The Model of Elm Street (Part 2)

Sunday came in cold and bright, with a wind that turned the trash cans over along Elm Street. Simone got to the garage at ten and stopped in the doorway with her keys still in her hand.

The window was open. The roof section was not on the bench.

It was in the bucket of gray floor paint that Ethan’s dad kept underneath, corner first, like a boat going down. Above it the window let in one long cold push of air, exactly as it must have done at some point in the night.

Three weeks of shingles had come apart in the paint. When Simone lifted the section out, the card was soft and heavy, and the little rows slid off it in sheets.

Ethan arrived ten minutes later. Neither of them said anything for a while.

“I have every measurement,” Simone said at last. “All of it, in the notebook. We can build it again exactly. There’s time, if we start tonight.”

“And then we’ve got what we already had.”

“Yes. That’s the idea.”

Ethan turned the ruined section over in his hands. “The paper shingles were the weakest feature of the whole model, and you know it. Up close they’re printed lines. What if we did the roofs in real wood and cut them one by one?”

“With what? Neither of us can cut wood.”

“We could learn.”

“In three weeks. With school.” Simone put the section down on the bench. “You want to change the plan because the part that got ruined was the part you were proudest of.”

That landed, because it was partly true, and Ethan didn’t answer it. He swept the loose shingles into his hand and dropped them in the trash, and for an hour the two of them cleaned gray paint off the bench in silence.

At six, Simone’s phone buzzed. She read the message, and then she read it again.

“Ethan,” she said. “Come and look at this.”

The Civic Center had double-booked the hall. The competition had been moved up one week.