Res Judicata by Vicki Grant Page B

no particular or legal purpose. In some jurisdictions,
there are statutes against loitering by which the police can
arrest someone who refuses to “move along.”
    I could have sworn I saw Biff the next night too.
    I’d talked Kendall into going to the library with me. Because of all the crap going on at home, I was seriously behind at school. Ms. Cavanaugh had assigned a new video project a couple of weeks ago. I hadn’t even started it. I needed to come up with an idea for it—like, right away—or I was pooched.
    We’d just left the apartment. We were about half a block away when I realized I’d forgotten to bring a book I was supposed to return. I conked myself in the head and swung back around to get it.
    I saw something. It was just out of the corner of my eye, but I saw it. A flash, a flicker, someone darting back into the dark. I tried to see who it was. I did this sort of Egyptian dance thing with my neck to get a better look down the street, but I was too late. Biff—if it was Biff—was gone. I might have smelled his cologne again or I might have just imagined it.
    It sort of freaked me out. I went, “Did you see that?”
    Kendall went, “What?”
    I went, “That! Someone just, like, ducked down the street!”
    I dragged him over to the side of our building and pointed.
    At nothing.
    There was no one there, nothing moving, no sound except us breathing. It was like a photograph of an empty street or something. Kendall raised his eyebrows and looked at me. “Okay. Is this a joke?”
    â€œNo, I saw something! Really!” I was going to say I saw Biff, but I couldn’t be sure it was Biff, and even if it was, I don’t know, I didn’t want to talk to Kendall about that stuff. I didn’t want to, like, betray Biff if it wasn’t him, and I didn’t want to—this sounds stupid—make it seem like I was all broken up or anything just because Biff wasn’t around anymore. It’s not as if he was my dad. He was just some guy.
    Just some guy who actually made my mother happy. Just some guy who almost made us look normal.
    Kendall must have noticed something going on behind my face. I could tell he was trying to, I don’t know, reassure me. He didn’t bug me about it or anything. He just said, “Coulda been a cat.”
    I went, “Yeah, I guess,” and let it drop. It was kind of a relief. I didn’t want to get sucked back into that Andy and Biff thing right then. I didn’t want to wonder if I should run after him or act like nothing happened. I didn’t want to wonder what Biff was doing hanging around our place again. And I didn’t want to wonder why he’d pretended he wasn’t. There were going to be at least one or two answers to those questions that I didn’t like.
    Personally, I’d rather just do my homework. At least when your answers suck there, the worst that can happen is a bad mark.
    I went home, got the book and we headed back to the library.
    The place was practically empty. We got on a computer right away. That was good. There’s nothing like the Internet to crowd everything else out of your brain. Biff totally disappeared.
    Kendall and I began to just sort of randomly Google stuff. I was looking for inspiration. I needed to find something good to do my project on.
    It started off serious. We looked up stuff like “the fishing industry,” “mini basketball” and “the Lebanese community in Halifax,” but then it just got stupid. We went from “people who look like their dogs” to “people who look like their ferrets” to “fudge sculptures.” I don’t know where that came from or why fudge sculptures seemed so funny to us, but it did. We were practically peeing ourselves laughing when the librarian went “Shhhhhh!” and did the big “Boys, you know the rules” thing.
    I looked up to say sorry.