What Happens Now (12 page)

“The day after,” said Camden. “We’ll say two thirty.”

It felt like the conversation was over. I knew it had to be. I had to go inside. He had to drive to Vermont. I was torn between not wanting to hang up, ever, and desperate to do so while it still felt perfect. You know, before I said something stupid.

“See you then,” I said.

“Okay, bye, Ari.”

“Bye,” I said, but he was already gone. The phone felt warmer than usual in my hand, the screen glowing a little brighter, I was sure.

One of the sneakers hanging from the telephone line was slowly turning in the breeze. I waited for it to do two complete circles before standing up and going back into the store.

9

It had been
a long two days, but now I was leaning against a tree at the reservoir parking lot, watching Camden glide toward me on his bicycle.

Seeing his face in person again and not pressed into the blackness behind my eyelids, I couldn’t decide if it looked the same. Was it going to be this way from now on? Every time I saw him, would I have to reconcile the Camden I was looking at with the Camden I’d been thinking about?

He was wearing a cranberry-colored button-down shirt and navy blue swim trunks, sneakers with no laces or socks. I saw the skin of his right ankle as he pedaled and had a sudden urge to lick it.

“Hey,” he said, braking to a halt in front of me. “You came.”

“Why wouldn’t I come?”

Camden stared blankly for a second, then laughed. “I don’t know why I just said that.”

Before I could respond, Max’s SUV pulled up. Eliza waved from the passenger window, then jumped down from the car.

“You came,” she said.

“Why wouldn’t she come?” asked Camden.

When Max appeared from his side of the SUV, I held out the paper bag with the yarn in it. “I come bearing the makings of a Bramscarf.”

Eliza squealed and snatched the bag from me, peeked inside.

“Perfection!” she proclaimed.

“It’s not quite the color of the swatch you gave me. It’s actually a little darker, but more accurate.”

She looked up at me, her eyes wide and serious. “You’re good. You’re good at this.”

“I’m good at
Silver Arrow
.”

Max turned to Camden and said, “She’s going to guess it right away.”

“Shhh,” snapped Camden. “I want it to be a surprise.”

“You want what to be a surprise?” I asked.

“The
surprise
,” he said, smiling with delicious mischief. I could taste it even from where I stood.

He gestured for us to walk toward the Crapper, where he paid for my admission. Julian was there again, and it was fun to watch the slow dawning of his expression as he realized I
was with Those Dashwood Kids. I followed them toward the beach, but before they got to the spot where the trees stopped and the sand started, they suddenly veered to the left, toward the entrance to that trail I knew led into the woods.

“We’re not going to the lake,” I said stupidly.

“No,” said Camden, hanging back so Eliza and Max could walk in front of us. “We’re going to the surprise.”

Camden let me go first as I stepped onto the trail, almost a tunnel with its canopy of branches arced above our heads. We walked for a minute in silence, and I thought of all the times I’d watched him and Eliza and Max disappear into these woods. How I’d wondered what they did there, and how the wondering itself burned up inside me. Was this going to be about drinking or smoking something? Whatever they offered me, I wouldn’t take it. Was there a way to explain why, without ruining everything?

Ahead of us, Max slid his hand into Eliza’s.

“There’s dog hair on your sleeve,” he said to her.

She reached down and pulled something off herself, flicked it away. “Sorry. I thought I’d thoroughly de-furred.” Then she glanced over her shoulder at me and said, “My pet-sitting business and Max’s allergies make us a little like Romeo and Juliet, don’t you think? But I can’t give it up. Cosplay is not a cheap hobby, and you can only get so much raw material from dumpsters.”

“You’re star-crossed,” I said.

She smiled a smile that showed her teeth before turning
back around. Did that mean she liked me? Did that mean it mattered?

“What about you, Max?” I asked, suddenly wanting more of all of them and not just Camden. “Are you working this summer?”

“I’m helping my dad at his computer programming firm. I’d explain exactly what I do there, but it’s so boring, you might nod off and fall and injure yourself.”

“Thanks for the safety considerations,” I said with a laugh.

“You wouldn’t know it to look at him,” said Camden, “but Max is a coding genius.”

Eliza glanced back proudly at Camden. “And Camden’s volunteering with the youth hotline at Family Services. He wants to save the world.”

“I don’t need to save the world . . . ,” said Camden softly, shyly. “But maybe one or two people would be cool.”

I’d never experienced this before, friends talking as if they were a collective.

“What do kids call the hotline about?” I asked, trying to hide how Camden’s job impressed me. Was it wrong that this made him extra attractive?

“All the fun stuff,” said Camden sarcastically. “They’re being abused, or they want to run away. They realize they’re addicted to drugs or alcohol and they don’t know how to get help. They’re depressed or even suicidal, and they want to hurt themselves but also they don’t.”

I paused for a second, missing a half step, before continuing.
Back when I couldn’t stop thinking about opening up my skin, it had never occurred to me to call a youth hotline. What if it had? What if I’d called and talked to someone like Camden? I felt oddly happy for the kids who did.

Eliza and Max suddenly stopped walking. The trail had opened up, running parallel to a rocky creek about thirty feet wide.

“Wait. Where are we?” I asked.

“I think it has a name,” said Max. “Something Falls. But we call it . . .”

“Hush!” said Camden with a meaningful look at Max.

“I’ve been coming to the lake my whole life,” I said, watching the water travel busily downhill, oblivious to us. “I had no idea this was here.”

“We only found it by happy accident,” said Max. He stepped into the water and held out a hand for Eliza. Together they made their way through the ankle-deep creek and across some smaller rocks to a large one, flat and wide, lit by the sun. There, they crumpled together and started to kiss. Not kiss, really. More like, try to crawl inside each other’s faces.

“Come this way,” said Camden, touching my elbow as he stepped past me on the trail. “We have to go a little farther down.”

After we fell into step together, curiosity overpowered me and I asked, “Does it bother you? That Eliza and Max are so . . . PDA-oriented?”

Camden frowned. “Why would it bother me?”

“Because you and Eliza used to go out, right?”

He paused for a second, then started walking again. “How did you know that?”

“I saw you together last summer. At the lake.” I said it as casually as I could, as if I were just remembering it now.

“We only went out for a few weeks, and I was the one who broke up with her. I actually encouraged things to happen with Max. I’m happy they’re happy. I’m happy we found a way to still all be together, because I would have hated to lose that.” He suddenly sped ahead. “We’re almost there,” he called over his shoulder.

I followed Camden another few yards and around a bend, until he stopped. The creek ran over a rock face here. It was steep, and I could see the rock was covered in green moss. The movement of the water made the moss appear as if it were moving on its own, a bubbling entity under the surface.

Camden pulled his shirt over his head and hung it on the branch of a nearby bush. Even though I’d seen him shirtless before, I found myself glancing away. He didn’t speak, but simply made his way from the trail and down the bank. It wasn’t until he stepped into the water that he turned, finally, to face me.

“Does this remind you of anything?” he asked, spreading his arms wide and fanning his fingers.

We had so little shared experience. I knew he must be talking about
Silver Arrow
, and then it suddenly seemed so clear.

“‘Do No Good,’ Season Four.”

Camden threw his head back and practically crowed, Peter Pan–style.

“Do No Good” was an episode set on a planet populated by sentient rocks. (Yes, it was one of the sillier ones. Which probably explained why I loved it so much when I was seven years old.) Azor Ray communicated telepathically with the rocks while Satina and Marr set out to find the largest rock on the planet, known as the Great Mass (the silliness, remember?), for help getting the
Arrow One
back in action. They had to cross a river filled with guardian rocks to reach this big one.

The creek, the rocks, even the way the trees on the bank bent and bowed toward the water—it all looked eerily like that scene.

“This is freaking me out a little,” I said.

Camden grinned and held out his hand to me. “Come down here.”

“It looks really slippery.”

“It is. But I know the good footholds.”

I took off my boots and slipped my dress over my head, thinking of how carefully I’d chosen my bathing suit that morning, and draped it on the branch next to Camden’s shirt.

I took a step down from the bank and into the water, which gathered so cold and frenetically around my ankles. Then I reached and on the other side of that reach was Camden’s waiting hand. I grabbed it, felt a jolt of warmth. Then I stepped up close to him.

“I knew you’d get it,” he said. “I love that episode.”

“For years, I talked to rocks,” I admitted. “Until my mother made me stop.”

“I was thinking we could do a cosplay photo shoot here someday.”

“But you guys only have the reboot costumes.”

“Maybe we’ll make new ones,” he said, something suddenly ablaze in his eyes. “I have one more thing to show you, but we have to get over there to be able to see it.” Then he pointed downhill, toward a pool of water where the creek flattened out about thirty feet away.

“And we do that how?”

“We slide. I’ll show you.”

He took one careful step, then another, then lowered himself so he was sitting on the rock. He flashed me a devastating smile, then pushed off with both hands. The flow of water caught him and pulled him down the creek, away from me, faster and faster. He let out a whoop as he landed in the pool.

“So easy!” he shouted as he climbed up onto a rock. “So fun!”

“You’ve never gotten, like, a concussion doing that?” I shouted back.

“No.” He scratched his head. “Well, not a bad one. You gonna try it?”

I didn’t really want to try it. But also, I did. Badly.

“If you feel like you’re going to tip backward and crack open your skull, clasp your hands behind your head. That’s what Eliza does.”

“Thanks for the tip.”

I stood there. Afraid to take even a step, because it didn’t seem possible that my foot could find steady purchase on the rock face.

“I’ll catch you when you get here,” yelled Camden.

I flashed him a thumbs-up, then took a step onto the spot Camden had pushed off from. Sat down on the rock, the moss soft as fuzz. Why was I doing this? To save face, to look like a good sport, to please a boy? Because I’d probably regret it if I didn’t? That was all part of it. But I thought of Satina and how this kind of thing was nothing to her. She felt present here.

I pushed, and started moving, and continued moving. It was like the water was playing with me, tugging and nudging, tipping me off balance. I kept my hands firmly planted on the rock, felt its bumps and ridges painfully under my palms as I slid. Before I knew it, I was going feetfirst into the pool, closing my eyes just before I went under. When I came back up, the first thing I saw was Camden’s face.

“That was spectacular,” he said.

I swam to where he sat on the rock and he helped me up. The rock was barely big enough for him to leave a sliver of space between his body and mine.

We were silent as I took a few seconds to catch my breath. I remembered a scene with Atticus and Satina in the “Do No Good” episode. How Atticus had stumbled on his way across the river, and how Satina had caught him (and how my mother used to shout at the TV, “You go, Satina! Sometimes the men
need saving, too!”). How, after Satina had grabbed his arm and pulled him close, they’d had one of those Almost-Something Moments.

Were Camden and I having this kind of moment? I felt like if I turned to look at him, I’d know.

Go ahead, you idiot. Turn to him. Know.

But then Camden pointed with his chin and said, “Look over there.”

We were sitting where the creek was about to make a hairpin turn to the right, and beyond that curve was an open expanse of water.

It was a lake.

Oh. Our lake.

In the distance, I could see the dock and the diving board, the red-and-white dots of the buoys. The beach and the colorful smudges of people on it.

We were looking at it all from the far side of the lake. I felt a strange rush of intimacy with it, a new understanding of its many dimensions.

“You’re in that forbidden zone beyond the rope,” said Camden.

I dared to turn to him now. “You remember that?”

“Yes.”

His eyes searched my face and there was no denying it. The Moment-ness of this moment.

I turned away quickly, all instinct, stared out at the scene
before us, and asked, “What do you love about
Silver Arrow
?”

Camden took in a long, slow breath. “I like the idea of being on a ship, part of a crew. Part of a whole. Belonging to something.” He stopped abruptly and shook his head, as if trying to reset whatever his next thought was. “What about you, Ari? Why are you such a fan?”

He said my name. His mouth wrapped around the same vowel-consonant-vowel progression I’d heard ten thousand times before, but it had never shaken me like this.

“I’ve never really thought about it.”

“Think about it now.”