The Shipwreck: An Official Minecraft Novel Page 12

  Inside the main lobby, cleaning supplies and a number of cardboard boxes have been assembled: disinfectant sprays, rags, brooms, and mops.

  Mrs. Jenkins looks down her nose at them. “Now, I believe a good strong work ethic is the solution to any sort of mischief. Builds character. You’re going to help me clear out all my personal things. You’ll need to sort through all the items and my personal effects—sort them into these boxes. Like with like. Photos, files, memorabilia. Large furniture items you can leave in place—I’ll have the movers come and get those to bring to the donation center.”

  “And the computers?” Jake asks.

  Mrs. Jenkins frowns. “You can do that last. I’ll have to sort out which machines to keep and which to recycle. Start with the other two rooms and the main office, and if you need more boxes come get me.”

  “You aren’t going to stay?” Emily asks, brightening. If they aren’t being supervised, what’s to stop her from going home?

  “I’m going to trust that the three of you are going to work together. If one of you isn’t working, then I can just let Mr. Thomas know I changed my mind about pressing charges. I’m sure a judge would say a minimum of two hundred hours community service for trespassing and vandalism.” Mrs. Jenkins shrugs.

  “Two hundred—” Tank splutters. “That would be like, the whole summer!”

  “Ten weeks, five hours a day, Monday through Friday,” Mrs. Jenkins says, nodding.

  No way. Emily’s only grounded for two weeks.

  Mrs. Jenkins holds out a clunky old key on a ring. “I don’t want you bothering me every day to let you in. I trust you’d be responsible enough to manage your own time.” She dangles the key out at them. “I’ve only got one of these, so someone take it.”

  Emily looks at Tank, who shrugs.

  Jake finally pockets the key.

  Mrs. Jenkins hands Emily a mop, Tank a broom, and Jake a bucket full of rags. “Or you can just work here until it’s done. I don’t care when you’re here during the day or how often you come—figure it out amongst yourselves. The sooner you start, the sooner you finish.”

  Emily grips the mop, holding it like she would a staff. Great. All she has to do is finish this stupid cleaning project, and she can get back to her life.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  TANK

  Tank wishes he’d brought headphones.

  Emily disappeared immediately with several boxes and rags, claiming the office. Tank thought it was a good plan, divide and conquer, so he followed suit, grabbing a few empty boxes and a bunch of cleaning rags before heading into the storage room. Figured that would be a cue for Jake to take the other storage room or the computer room, but the kid just followed Tank right inside, dusting noisily behind him.

  Tank ignores him, starting with a shelf full of weird sculptures. Everything is caked with a thick, dark sheath of dust, and every move releases even more dust into the air. He coughs, spluttering.

  “Oh, here—I brought these for everyone. Emily said it clashed with her outfit earlier, so she didn’t want it, but I thought you might—I mean, they’re good for like, air pollution and stuff in general, and I figured we might need them for here.”

  The kid is babbling again, and he pulls something out of his pocket, a crumpled piece of cloth. It looks like the masks that everyone wore back in his grandparents’ town in Vietnam, when people were bustling about on motorcycles and scooters and cars and the air was filled with thick clouds of smoke. He kind of misses those long wet summers, weeks spent at his grandparents’. It’s been two years since his last visit, but Tank knows they have to save money to send home.

  He coughs again. Great. Dusting with allergies is so much fun, and it’s only going to get worse.

  Tank nods at Jake and takes the mask, shuffling it onto his face. Jake grins and bobs at him, looking more pleased than he ought to, like a puppy who’s successfully retrieved a ball. Tank shakes his head and continues dusting.

  The silence only lasts for a few minutes.

  “Do you think she’ll want the photos to stay in the frames? There are a lot of them here. What do you think, she’ll want them organized by date?” Jake holds a stack of photo frames, standing in front of the bare wall. The wallpaper looks comical without the photos, spots of light yellow standing out against the darker color.

  “Sure.”

  “Look at these weird haircuts!”

  Tank peers over Jake’s shoulder. A yellowing photograph sits in a wooden frame. “Pacific Crest Community Youth Council,” reads the caption. Twenty or so grinning kids with old-fashioned haircuts, and Mrs. Jenkins beaming in the center. The date scrawled in the corner is from before Tank was born. “Guess kids used to really hang out here.”

  “Yeah,” Jake says, whistling. He opens a folder filled with newspaper clippings. “Local Youth Council Cleans Up Beach,” he reads. “Ellen Jenkins, founder of a local nonprofit community center, leads youths in community service. The state-of-the-art center provides children and teens a place to spend their time, learning new skills and making new friends.”

  “Cool,” Tank says, squinting at a photo of a bunch of teens laughing in a park, wearing matching T-shirts and gloves as they dig holes for new tree saplings and flowerbeds. Planting in real life? That does look like fun. “I wonder why they stopped doing it. I’ve never seen this place like that.” The community center in the photos looks well-loved, filled with kids and adults and a much younger Mrs. Jenkins.

  Jake sifts through the newspaper clippings—they go from loose sheets to carefully laminated ones as they go back through the years, like some of these were framed and put on the walls. “Local Apartment Manager Wins City-Wide Grant for Innovative Youth Program,” Jake reads. “This is the first one, I think.” He whistles. “Ellen Jenkins, thirty-two—wow. This is like, thirty years ago. Look at the date.”

  In the photo, Mrs. Jenkins stands next to a handsome man with broad shoulders and warm brown skin. One of his arms is looped around her shoulders, a proud smile on his face, and between them is a young girl in pigtails.

  Ellen Jenkins, Christopher Reyes, and their daughter at the groundbreaking ceremony of the Pacific Crest Community Center.

  Tank eyes where Jake has now spread out all the clippings and is reading them slowly. “You know, you can just put them away and it takes less time. Mrs. Jenkins didn’t say we had to be here on a specific schedule. It’s up to us. So once this is all clean and organized we can go home.” And Tank can go back to his summer—helping Mr. Mishra, taking care of Viv, saving up for those shoes, impressing Shark.

  “Oh.” Jake looks sheepish. “Sorry. I just thought it was interesting.” He offers Tank a small smile. “Um, the other day in the computer lab, I was looking for Wi-Fi and hanging out in the lab, and I got up to go stretch but the door was jammed. For like…an hour until I saw you.”

  Tank was right. Jake totally did think he locked him in there.

  “I never said thank you, for opening it. I’m sorry if I, like, ran away, I was just freaked out at first and I thought it might have been Shark and those other guys back to mess with me. I thought maybe you…” Jake smiles. “And then I remembered you distracted Shark and those guys last week, too. At the vending machine? So. Thanks.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Tank says gruffly, swiping his dust rag harder than necessary.

  “Okay,” Jake says, smiling at Tank. “It can be a secret.”

  Tank goes back to his shelf, moving all the knickknacks into a box. They’re clumsy little sculptures, all painted gaudy colors. He wonders if it was one of the programs here. Tank shakes his head. He doesn’t care about the arts and crafts that some kids made here more than a decade ago. He doesn’t care about the stories about this place; he doesn’t care that he sees it now, that he can’t stop seeing it as he cleans, the laughter and life that used to
flow in here.

  He grabs a new dust rag and keeps cleaning. It’s meditative, like planting rows and rows of plants, one after another, and Tank settles into the silence thankfully.

  * * *

  —

  Bright sunlight streams in through the window, and Tank smiles at the clear view outside. He can see the dusty lot in front of the center that leads to the street, looking even more shabby now that it’s surrounded by a chain-link fence.

  “Nice job. We did good work so far,” Jake says proudly.

  “Yeah,” Tank says.

  “Aw, yeah! That was a smile! Give me five.” Jake grins and raises his hand at Tank, like he has the overeager answer to a question in class.

  Tank stares blankly at him.

  “Oh. I thought, maybe now that we’re friends—”

  “We’re not friends,” Tank says, his voice stiff with annoyance. Is this Jake kid going to follow him around everywhere now like a shadow he can’t shake? All summer? And then at school? Tank can’t be seen with him. What even is he wearing, a collared shirt?

  Jake’s smile falters, but he doesn’t lower his hand. “I just wanted a high five, dude. Like to say congrats on a good job?”

  “I don’t high-five.” Tank glares at the open outstretched palm in the air. He steps forward with his most intimidating dark glare.

  Jake just nods and lets his arm fall. “Good to know. You know, my cousin Aimee doesn’t like people touching her, so no hugs or high fives, so it’s, like, good to know what people like and don’t like—”

  “Anyone ever tell you you talk too much?” Tank shoulders past Jake and goes back to work, swabbing at the dusty shelves aggressively with his rag.

  Jake laughs sheepishly. “Sorry, I tend to ramble when I get nervous. My dad told me I need to be friendly in order to make friends, which I always try to do when we move, but it’s hard, you know?”

  Tank doesn’t know what to say to that, because he certainly knows what it’s like not to have friends. But he has Shark and AJ and Gus now, and Shark’s already made his feelings on where Jake belongs clear. The door opens and Emily flounces through. “Office is all sorted. What are you all doing in here?”

  “Dusting. Boxing up this stuff.” Tank jerks his head at the myriad of shelves still filled with mementos.

  Emily nods and puts her headphones on. Finally, someone with some sense.

  Tank goes back to work.

  He can hear Emily’s music through her headphones on the other side of the room. She’s got some sort of complicated dance thing going on and she’s just kind of lightly swabbing at surfaces without picking up things. That side of the room Tank was saving for later because the shelves are these huge, heavy-duty things that are holding crates and crates filled with who knows what and it’ll likely take forever. He figured they’d need to open each crate and sort each thing slowly, but Emily’s just dragging a rag along the shelf.

  “Have you never dusted before?” Tank asks, shuffling in next to her and picking up a crate. “Let’s put this stuff in the pile of stuff we have to go through. We gotta make sure all the shelves are clean.”

  “Of course I have. What’s the point, though?” Emily says, rolling her eyes. “Why do we have to clean it if it’s just going in the trash?”

  “It’s not trash. She said the furniture movers are taking everything to be donated,” Jake says, too helpfully and eagerly, popping in out of nowhere. Tank is somewhat pleased to note that Jake’s shelves are dusted properly and there is a sizeable growing pile of stuff he’s added to the proper “to sort” pile, and the photo frames and newspaper clippings are stacked neatly in a box. Good that someone understands organization.

  Tank flips an empty crate over and sits on it, enjoying the break. His phone says they’ve been here for only an hour. He sighs. This is going to take forever.

  “Hey, man,” Jake says, flipping over another crate and sitting down next to him. “Break time? Want a snack?”

  He pulls out a squashed chocolate bar from his pocket.

  Tank takes it, but not because they’re friends. It’s because he likes chocolate.

  “Want some?”

  Emily takes the bar he offers her warily, peeling it open and leaning back against the wall. “This doesn’t mean I like you,” she says.

  “Noted,” Jake says around a mouthful of chocolate.

  Emily pulls out her phone, scrolling through it and leaning casually against the wall, throwing up a fresh cloud of dust. She startles and immediately starts dusting off her clothes.

  Tank chuckles, watching her jump up in surprise like a startled squirrel.

  “Do you know each other?” Jake asks. Emily shrugs and gives Tank an askance look, which Tank returns with a sideways glance of his own and a shrug, the look of acknowledgment where they recognize each other from school but definitely aren’t friends.

  “We went to the same middle school,” Emily says.

  Tank waits for her to call him Frankenstein like the kids used to, and is pleasantly surprised when she doesn’t. He’s glad that stupid nickname disappeared once Shark started calling him Tank. In the first week of seventh grade he came to school with a sweater that Ma had stitched together from two old sweaters that were slightly different colors. He’d been proud of the sweater, that it was a unique style that Ma had made—right up until he realized it wasn’t cool at all, to wear this homemade thing covered in patches.

  He was made fun of for a whole year until Shark came along, and even though he doesn’t like some of the stuff they do, it’s worth it, to be one of the guys that no one messes with.

  “You hang out with…” Emily trails off, making a vague gesture with her hands. “Don’t remember his name.”

  “Shark, yeah,” Tank says.

  “He is so mean. Why are you friends?”

  Why is he friends with Shark, if he could call that friendship? A tenuous allyship is all he can hope for in this stupid game of survival, of who’s who at school, and it’s all about perception and what people think of you and what they can expect from you.

  Tank shrugs, not wanting to explain. “He gets me,” he finally says. “Why are you friends with those girls?”

  Emily snorts. “Because I like them. I’m not sure that Shark likes anything except the sound of his own voice, but you do you.”

  Jake laughs. “What? I’ve met the guy. I feel like that’s pretty accurate.”

  “And how did that go for you?” Emily asks, raising her eyebrow at him.

  “He tried to get me to buy him a soda. Not sure that’s the beginnings of a great friendship. But doing community service together might be.” He grins at Tank and then at Emily.

  Tank blinks at him and sighs. “We’re just cleaning things together. We don’t have to even talk.”

  Jake shrugs. “I’ve moved a lot in the past few years. I figure I might as well be nice to people. There’s no harm in it. Even if people aren’t nice to me. I mean, I get it, I’m a new kid, you don’t know me. But you could. I think I’m pretty nice.” He shuffles away, the line of his back looking sad, and for a second Tank feels guilty, before he shoves that feeling into a box.

  Emily stares after him, a contemplative look on her face before a mask of indifference falls back over her features. She rolls her eyes at Tank. “What are you looking at?”

  “Nothing.”

  Emily goes back to her phone, her face ghostly lit by the screen. She’s wholly engrossed.

  The storage room door opens and shuts, and in the hallway Tank can hear another door open and close.

  Might as well be nice to people, Jake’s voice echoes in his ear.

  * * *

  —

  The old computer lab is eerie, the square blocks of machines letting out a faint electronic hum.

  Jake is in the first row,
his face illuminated by the faint blue glow of the machine. He shifts, his entire body flinching as he dodges something, and he presses the keys harder. “No, you don’t, creeper!” he whisper-yells, his eyes gleaming with delight.

  Tank shuffles over with interest. “You playing Minecraft?”

  “Yeah,” Jake says. “Do you play?”

  “My little sister does,” Tank says, grabbing a chair and spinning it around so he can sit in it backward. He watches Jake play, his avatar roaming the world as he mines and fights monsters. Tank feigns casualness, getting more and more annoyed when Jake finally approaches what apparently is his home base. It’s a mess, scores and scores of wasted potential everywhere. Why is there wheat mixed with potatoes? You can’t harvest like that without knocking something over. Random pools of water? What even is going on here?

  Finally it bothers him so much he can’t help but speak up. “What’s up with your farm?”

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  JAKE

  “What do you mean, what’s up with my farm?” Jake pulls away from Tank. “What’s wrong with it?” He takes a second look at his crops; it’s a bit chaotic, but he’s been busy trying to solve riddles, so he doesn’t have time to maximize crop efficiency or make fancy hoppers or automated things. He just needs the bare minimum.

  He does take offense at Tank’s tone, though.

  “I thought you didn’t play,” Jake accuses.

  Tank shrugs. “You know that those plants are failing because they aren’t close enough to the water, right?”

  “I’m just trying to grow some wheat, man, it doesn’t have to be pretty,” Jake says.

  Jake wanted to use this break to play for a bit, and maybe over the coming weeks he could actually solve the mystery before the whole cleaning service project is over. He didn’t mind Tank watching him play, but the criticism is not what he signed up for.

  “You think you can do better?”

  “Oh, I know I can.”