The Probability of Miracles

Table of Contents

 

 

 

The Probability of Miracles

RAZORBILL

Published by the Penguin Group

Penguin Young Readers Group

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ISBN : 978-1-101-55925-3

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—ALBERT EINSTEIN

WHEN CAMPBELL'S FATHER DIED, HE LEFT HER $1,262.56—AS MUCH AS he'd been able to sock away during his twenty-year gig as a fire dancer for the “Spirit of Aloha” show at Disney's Polynesian Hotel.
Coincidentally
, that was exactly how much her fat uncle Gus was asking for his 1998 Volkswagen Beetle in Vapor, the only color worth having if you wanted to have a VW Beetle. Cam had been coveting it since she was six, and it was worth every penny. It blended into the mist like an invisible car, and when she drove it, she felt invisible, invincible, and alone.

She hoped this was what it would feel like in heaven.

Not that she believed in heaven, or a god (especially a male god), or Adam and Eve, like half of the morons who lived in Florida. She believed in evolution: Fish got feet, frogs got lungs, lizards got fur, and the monkeys needed to walk upright to travel across the savannah. End of story.

She didn't believe in the Immaculate Conception, either, but it could get you into a buttload of trouble if you admitted to anyone that you thought the Virgin Mary probably just got herself knocked up like 20 percent of the teenage girls in Florida. That was an idea you kept to yourself.

Because other people needed their miracles. Other people believed in magic. Magic was for the people who could afford the seven-day Park Hopper and the eight-night stay at the Grand Floridian. Magic, Cam knew from a lifetime of working for the Mouse, was a privilege and not a right.

She inhaled the car's plumeria-oil air freshener. It was a powerful Hawaiian aphrodisiac, but since no one ever drove with her, it had only served to make her fall deeper in love with her automobile. Who was male. She called him Cumulus.

Right now Cumulus was parked on the Zebra level of the Children's Hospital parking structure. Cam typically parked on the Koala level; she preferred the eucalyptus tree mural and the soft, muted gray tones to the stark black-and-white stripes on Zebra. But when she arrived two hours ago, there were no spots available.

If she had been perceptive enough, she would have taken this for a sign. This appointment would not go well. They'd come to the point where things would be black and white. The good ol' gray times were over.

A family of four disembarked from the parking elevator. The mother tried to hold the hand of a healthy four-year-old as he skipped wildly and gawkily in his Spider-Man sneakers with blinking red lights on the side. A sick, bald-headed two-year-old in a pink dress slept on the shoulder of her father, who walked in a daze toward the family's SUV, probably wondering how this had possibly become his life.

Cam knew the feeling. She needed to do
something
—binge and purge, get drunk, smoke a cigarette,
something
—to get rid of this feeling. Her hands shook as she opened the glove compartment and rustled around to see if her mom had hidden any cigarettes in there. Her fingers felt the sharp corner of something.

What's this?
She pulled the tiny square of notebook paper out of the glove box. It crackled as she unfolded it. The handwriting didn't seem like hers at first. The pencil had pressed these letters forcefully into the paper. The
o
's were round and full and the consonants stood proud and upright as if the writer knew she had all the time in the world. (In the past few months, Cam's handwriting had become the faint and falling-down mess of an old woman's.)

 

FLAMINGO LIST

Cam stared at the sheet of notebook paper. She hadn't seen the list in almost a year, since she wrote it last summer from the top bunk in cabin 12 of Shady Hill Empowerment Camp for Girls. The camp brochure had promised to “help girls access their inner strength and help wallflowers blossom into the life of the party!” which made Cam shudder at first. But she had wanted to spend time with her best friend, Lily, outside a hospital and it was better than becoming counselors at “sick camp,” where the sea of bald heads, the meds cart making its rounds with the pill bottles clicking together, and the occasional pity visit from a popular celebrity were constant, depressing reminders of their condition. At Shady Hill they were just regular campers—the Flamingos. Each cabin had to choose a bird, and they decided to choose one that you'd least likely find in the woods. One that would not blend in with its surroundings. Like them.

Cam closed her eyes and leaned her head against Cumulus's headrest. She could practically hear Lily's voice thinking out loud from her adjacent top bunk in cabin 12:

“. . . Then you put the list away and stop thinking about it, and slowly . . . eventually, the simple act of writing things down will bring them about.”

Over the summer, Lily had become obsessed with making fun of the self-help books she found in the self-esteem section of the camp “library.” While the other girls were sneaking their way through the yellowing pages of
After-School Action
and
Graduating to Passion
that someone's cousin had hidden beneath one of the library's floorboards, Lily read about “affirmations.” They'd spent one afternoon in front of the cabin's cracked and patinaed bathroom mirror jokingly informing their reflections that they were beautiful and powerful and deserving. Lily read about “visualizations,” and they giggled as they closed their eyes and imagined a rainbow of light purifying their diseased organs. Then it was this
list
.

“Lil,” Cam had said, but Lily was on a roll, twisting a strand of the green part of her hair around her finger as she summarized out loud.

“You can't type it or text it. It has to be handwritten on paper, old-school like. And you can't show it to anyone else, or it won't come true.”

“Come on, Lily—you don't believe in that, do you? Write it, and it will happen?”

“Of course not. But we should do it. Just for laughs. Here,” she said, and she threw Cam the oversize three-foot-long orange pencil she bought at the Davis Caverns gift shop on the last all-camp field trip. “Get writing. A list of everything you want to do before you die.”

Cam doodled in the top margin of her notebook. “What should we call it?” she asked Lily, who was already scribbling furiously. “‘Bucket list' is so grandpa.”

“What's another phrase like ‘kick the bucket'? ‘Pushing up daisies'? We'll call it the Daisy List,” Lily said without looking up.

“No way,” said Cam.

“I don't know, Campbell,” sighed Lily. “Just call it the Flamingo List then.”

“Isn't that sort of irrelev—”

“Just write it.”

Cam sighed, wrote
Flamingo List
in big block letters, and then thought about what to include. It should be realistic, she decided. What she really missed since becoming sick was normalcy. That's why she came to Shady Hill instead of cancer camp, even though the cabins smelled like mildew. Maybe
because
they smelled like mildew. Cam wanted a life that was mildewed. Metaphorically speaking. So she began making a list of all the regular stuff she might miss out on if she didn't make it through her teens. Like
Lose my virginity at a keg party
, she wrote. Or
Wallow in misery, mope, pout, and sleep through Saturday . . .