Shallow Pond (9 page)

“I didn't know what time you were getting in,” she said. It wasn't really an accusation, but I heard it that way. The urge to snap back at her was strong, but I shrugged it off.

“I had the training for my volunteer thing after school,” I said.

“You should have called,” she said. She glanced outside. “Did you walk home?”

“I got a ride with a girl from my class, and I did call. No one picked up.”

“Oh,” Annie said. “I was taking the trash out before.”

“Where's Gracie?” I asked.

“She called to say she wasn't going to make it home for dinner.”

I didn't point out that this wasn't really an answer to
my question. I was pretty sure I knew exactly what this
meant. Gracie was too busy with Cameron to make it home
for dinner.

Annie and I sat down to a meal of over-cooked casserole and began to eat in silence. I stole glances at her while I ate. She really didn't look good. It was like I was looking at myself a few years down the road—this is what would happen to me if I became all lovesick and obsessed with Zach. I needed to drop this thing right now. He wasn't worth it.

“He's not that special,” I said.

“What?” Annie asked.

“Cameron. He's not worth all this trouble. You should just forget about him.”

“I don't really want to talk about this,” she said.

We returned to our silent eating. I tried to think about college, about moving out of Shallow Pond. I tried to think of anything but Zach Faraday, but he kept creeping back into my thoughts.

Eleven

I didn't tell Jenelle or Shawna about Zach asking Meg to the dance, but by Friday morning they'd heard about it. Jenelle stood by my locker fuming. She looked like she was ready to bite somebody's head off.

“I can't believe the nerve of that guy,” Jenelle said. “How could he ask some stupid airhead like that to the Valentine's dance?”

“She's not an airhead,” I said. “She's actually kind of nice.”

“It's okay,” Shawna said. “You don't have to put on a brave face for our benefit. We're your friends.”

But the thing was, I wasn't putting on a brave face. I'd told Zach I just wanted to be friends with him, and he'd listened to and honored that request. I couldn't really blame him, and I kind of liked the idea of being friends with him. I mean, sure, he was good-looking and perfect boyfriend material, but I didn't need a boyfriend. I didn't want a boyfriend.

“Guys, really,” I said. “It's okay. I told Zach I just wanted to be friends with him.”

“You're hopeless,” Jenelle said. “Completely hopeless, you know that?”

“Are you still going to the dance?” Shawna asked.

“Do I ever go to dances?” I asked.

“Bunting, we really need to get you out of your shell, pronto,” Jenelle said.

“I like it in here,” I said. This only made the two of them shake their heads. I could sense they would probably spend the day engaged in some text message chat, trying to come up with some scheme that would get me to the Valentine's dance and into Zach Faraday's arms.

I didn't wait for Jenelle and Shawna after school. I nearly ran out the doors and walked home as quickly as I could. They'd been on my case all during lunch. Their new plan was to have me go to the dance with some sophomore guy they described as marginally attractive, the thinking being that it would drive Zach into a jealous rage. I declined their offers to meet this guy, but I had a feeling they weren't really going to take no for an answer.

Two blocks away from school, I stopped looking over my shoulder every couple of steps and slowed down my pace. I was glad that it was Friday afternoon, glad that for a couple of days, at least, I could avoid the high school social scene.

Annie was on the couch when I got home. When I opened the door, she actually let out a little yelp. Apparently she'd dozed off and I had startled her.

“Are you okay?” I asked.

“Fine,” she said. “It's just this weather, the cold. It makes me sleepy.”

“Maybe you should go see someone, a doctor.”

“I'm perfectly healthy,” she said. She didn't look healthy. Did perfectly healthy people fall asleep in the middle of the day? She'd been going to sleep earlier and earlier. She must have been averaging twelve hours of sleep a day, maybe more.

She stretched and got up from the couch, and with stiff, awkward steps headed upstairs, saying she had some laundry to put away, but I couldn't help wondering if she was planning on crawling into bed to finish her nap. I went into the kitchen to hunt around for a snack.

I saw him standing at the back door. I wasn't sure how long he'd been there. I supposed he must have just gotten there. He waved when he saw me. I didn't want to let him in, but I didn't see any choice.

“Cameron,” I said as I opened the door. “What are you doing here?”

“I was supposed to pick up Gracie,” he said. He stepped into the kitchen without actually being invited.

“She's still at work,” I said.

“Yeah, I guess I'm early,” he said. “I just needed to get out of the house. My mother was driving me crazy.”

Did he expect me to commiserate with him about how annoying mothers were or something? Could he really be that big of a jerk? He did know that my own mother had died shortly after I was born and I'd never had the chance to know her, didn't he? He smiled at me, but bright as that smile was, it wasn't going to be enough to win me over. Perhaps Cameron was one of those guys who'd been using that smile his whole life to get what he wanted.

“Are those the kind with the cinnamon on top?” he asked as I took out a box of graham crackers. “I haven't had one of those in years.”

I offered him some, and the two of us sat there munching them in a slightly awkward silence. I didn't know where to look. I began reading the back of the graham cracker box, but it was short of captivating, and I could feel Cameron staring at me.

“You look just like your sister,” he said. “She used to have a shirt that same color.” I had on a dark purple T-shirt. It was one of my favorites.

“Which one?” I asked. It was a valid question, considering.

“Annie,” he said. It was a perfect opportunity to give him hell for dating Gracie, but I really didn't feel up to it.

“Do you have any milk?” he asked.

“Would you like me to fix you dinner too?” I asked, unable to hold in my annoyance. He began to apologize, but what I'd said gave me an idea. “I mean, you should stay for dinner. Annie was going to make something. She's really a great cook.”

“Oh, I think Gracie and I were going to go out and grab something.”

I went into the fridge, pulled out the milk, and poured Cameron a tall glass. All he had to do was see how awesome Annie was and he would forget all about Gracie. Annie was smart and talented, and she was a good cook; I wasn't making that up. Gracie, on the other hand, was Gracie. She was silly and flighty. She couldn't hold a candle to Annie. Cameron had gotten confused—it was only natural. Gracie was younger, and looked more the way Annie had looked back when Cameron used to know her. It just made sense that he would fall for Gracie. It was like what he'd said about me, that I looked like Annie. Of course, once he had a chance to spend time with Annie, he'd see that she was the one he was really in love with.

I handed him the glass of milk. He grabbed it, and his hand closed over mine around the glass. He held it there a moment or two. His eyes stared into mine like he was searching for something in them. Then he adjusted his grip on the glass and let my hand go.

Nothing had happened. Nothing, really, but I'd felt something, some weird connection between me and Cameron Schaeffer. I wasn't sure what to make of it.

“I remember this time when you were little,” Cameron said. “We took you to get ice cream. You got a vanilla cone with rainbow sprinkles. You and I got into a debate about whether or not rainbow sprinkles have different flavors.”

“They're just sugar,” I said.

“Ha, that's what you said then, too, but I'm sure they're different fruit flavors.”

“They aren't.”

“Do you remember that?”

I shook my head. I remembered Annie taking me to get ice cream, but I didn't really remember Cameron there. Maybe we'd met him at the ice cream stand. Sometimes Annie had run into her school friends there.

“We should get out the photo album,” I said. A plan began to take shape in my head. “Hang on. Annie will know where it is.”

“She's here?”

Annie was always here, but I didn't want to tell Cameron that. “Upstairs. I'll be right back.”

Annie didn't understand my urgency about looking at the photo album, possibly because I'd deliberately left out the fact that Cameron was there. I didn't tell her until we were walking downstairs, and by then it was too late for her to turn around. Cameron was already in the living room, staring at the picture of my mother on the wall.

“Cameron,” Annie said. Her voice sounded different than normal, lighter and airier. I thought of it as her southern belle voice, but without the accent.

“I didn't mean to interrupt you,” Cameron said. “I was just—”

I knew he was about to say something about coming over to pick up Gracie, so I quickly said, “Cameron was talking about old times, when you two were my age, and I said we should get out the photo album. We never look at it.” I was talking so fast my words were running together. I sounded like Gracie after she drank a big cup of coffee.

“I'm not even sure where it is,” Annie said.

“It's right here,” I said as I pulled it off the bookshelf. I shoved the album into her hands as I steered the two of them toward the couch. Annie laughed at me. She could tell that I was behaving strangely, but she also didn't try to fight it. She wanted to spend time reminiscing about the good old days with Cameron.

I arranged it so that Cameron and Annie had to sit next to each other. I sat on Annie's other side. I felt like I was being something between an annoying little sister and cupid.

The photo album was a big fat one that went way back, back before I was even born. I didn't make Annie skip ahead to the stuff where she and Cameron were a couple, though. I figured the more time they spent side by side together on the couch, the more chance there was that those old flames would be rekindled.

So, together, we looked at shots of a toddler Annie holding an Easter basket nearly as big as she was, of her and my father posing in front of a lake somewhere. There was a picture of her in some nursery school pageant, another of her skinny-dipping in a kiddie pool in the backyard, which she flipped quickly past. Eventually a baby Gracie began appearing in pictures beside her older sister, sometimes with, but mostly without, my father in the shot.

It was a dark shadowy picture with a Christmas tree in the background that made me grab hold of the couch arm as if the floor had dropped out from under me and I was holding on for dear life. That's what it felt like, anyway. The picture was too fuzzy to really make out, but I could have sworn I was staring at Zach Faraday.

“What?” Annie said.

“Who is that?” I asked. She looked at me like I was crazy.

“It's Dad,” she said.

I took another look at the picture and realized she was right. It wasn't a very good picture, but something about the shadows in the photo made it into a sort of optical illusion, like those pictures where if you look at it one way it's a young woman, and if you look at it another way it's an old lady.

“Who did you think it was?” Annie asked.

“It looked like this boy I go to school with,” I said. I shook my head. “He wouldn't even have been born yet.”
I tilted my head and looked at the picture, but I saw only my father. Whatever it was that had made me see Zach was gone. I wondered if I'd only seen Zach because subconsciously I was still obsessing over him.

A couple of more pages and we came to my baby pictures.

“Look at you,” Cameron said. “You were a chubby little baby.”

He reached right around Annie to gently squeeze my shoulder. It filled me with a happy warmth—not the fact that Cameron was squeezing my shoulder, but the fact that for however briefly, his arm was around Annie. Perhaps things were already starting to happen.

There was a picture of my father holding me in his arms. His face looked grim and cheerless. It was the face that naturally sprang to mind when I thought of my father, but it made me realize what an unpleasant time my infancy must have been for him. On the one hand, he had a new daughter, but on the other hand, he'd lost his wife. It must have been difficult for him to try to pretend to love me. I was staring at that picture of my unhappy father, my chubby infant self, when it hit me.

“Why aren't there any pictures of Mom?” I asked.

“Babie, she died right after you were born,” Annie said.

“No, I know that, but I mean, what about before that? There aren't any pictures of her with you and Gracie.”

“That's because she's the one who took all the pictures,” Annie said. “I think she didn't really like having her own picture taken. She used to shy away from cameras.”

There were pictures of her, though, from when she was younger. The picture on our wall, others I'd seen of her from when she and Dad were dating. One where she looked so much like Annie I'd actually been confused when I saw it as a kid, assuming it was a picture of Annie.

I wondered if she'd put on weight after having kids and didn't want to have her picture taken. Maybe something about being a mother had made her have the same dark circles beneath her eyes that Annie presently sported. I tried to imagine what she would have looked like, this woman on the other side of the camera lens capturing the smiles and giggles of her two daughters on film. It didn't seem fair that they'd been able to have her there, if only for a short while, when they were growing up, when all I'd had was a sad and bitter father.

The three of us were huddled together, laughing at a picture of me at two years old not at all happy about being dressed up in a robot Halloween costume made from a cardboard box and part of an old vacuum cleaner, when Gracie stepped into the room. We must have been laughing so hard we never heard her come in the back door.

“What's going on?” she asked.

“We were just looking at some old pictures,” Cameron said. He seemed suddenly aware of the fact that he'd been sitting so close to Annie, and he stood up.

“Remember the year you were a cowgirl for Halloween?” Annie asked. She pointed toward the photo in the album, but Gracie didn't seem interested.

“Cameron and I are headed out,” she said. “I just want to change my shoes.”

Gracie slipped out of the sneakers she wore for work, into a dressy pair of flats. I watched Cameron watching her. I waited for him to look back over at Annie, but he didn't. When I glanced at Annie, I could see that some of the light had gone out of her face. She'd been so happy, so animated when we'd been laughing at the pictures, but now her face looked pinched and tired again.