The Probability of Miracles (5 page)

At least they got a good laugh out of it.

Cam had vowed that that was it, though. She was done trying stupid New Agey crap. In fact, if she heard another note of Yanni or Enya or anything on the harp, she was going to lose it.

Tigger removed his enormous head to reveal the friendly smile of Jackson. Everything about Jackson was broad. He had broad shoulders and a smattering of Irish freckles across his broad Samoan nose. When he smiled Cam could see the tiny chip in his front tooth that he'd gotten when they were seven and spinning too fast on the teacups.

“Congratulations, Cam,” he said.

“Whoa, Jackson, moving up in the world. You got the Tigger job, huh?”

“Yeah. Just for the summer.” He blushed. It was the perfect job for him. He didn't have to speak.

Jackson was from a show family like Cam's. Both of his parents danced in “Aloha,” so he and Cam had grown up together, playing in the volcano pool at the Polynesian while their parents worked. They even had an act together when they were five, mimicking the moves and postures of the grown-ups while the audience sighed,
A wwwwww. How cute. Little island kids.

Jackson was ultra-shy now, though. When Cam had tried to kiss him once on a dare while they were in line for Space Mountain in Tomorrowland, he'd gotten so nervous, he'd refused to talk to her for months.

That was Cam's entire love life. One aborted kiss in line for Space Mountain.

“You can use this check for your future,” said Jackson, which was so sweet, but kind of pathetic at the same time.

“I've been to the future with you, Casanova, and there wasn't much going on there, remember?”

“I'm sorry about that,” Jackson said, blushing. “Want to go back there tonight? To Space Mountain?”

“Dance with me first,” said Cam, and the whole party moved to the stage, where they danced some traditional storytelling dances from Hawaii and Samoa. They started off slow, with nuanced, flowing movements in their arms and hands, taking big, rolling steps, like waves. Then the Tahitian girls took the stage and things got wild. Those girls could move with their
varu
s and
fa'arapu
s. Hips were flying everywhere. Cam did the best she could to keep up, but she got tired after about ten minutes.

Later she and Jackson lit their fire knives and spun them around a bit. Cam loved the smell of the lighter fluid and the extreme heat of the flames swinging by her face. It astounded her every time that there was something even hotter than the summer heat in Florida. She let Jackson take the lead and made sure to stay just one step behind him. She didn't generally demur. Demurring was not in her bag of tricks, but Jackson was being so sweet, acting as her date, she didn't want to do anything to crush his ego.

Even as she was juggling fire, she couldn't help noticing that Jackson was filling out, the muscles of his thighs bulky and defined beneath his cargo shorts. He would look great in his
lava-lava
in a few years.

The music began to die down, and people drifted to their posts to prepare for the real show at five thirty. After it was over, each family stopped by Cam's table and gave her a gift wrapped in
siapo
, sacred Samoan cloth made out of bark and painted with a special pattern that was unique to each family. The cloth was said to be life-giving (legend had it that if you wrapped someone's dead bones in it, the person could come back to life) and to provide miracle cures, which was sort of a joke to Cam, but she accepted them politely and promised people that she'd sleep with them. The
siapo
reminded her of her dad. He couldn't remember what the family pattern of his
siapo
looked like, so he had one made with the face of Mickey Mouse on it.

“Ready to go?” asked Jackson. He was back in his Tigger costume, holding the head under his right arm.

“You're wearing that?” asked Cam.

“I have to return it to wardrobe, and I can't just carry it on the monorail in a bag. Kids would be devastated.”

“God,” said Cam. “All right. Let's go, then.” Every Disney employee's family got a passport good for free entrance to the park at any time. It was like having the golden ticket in
Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory
, and it was, Cam had to admit, a pretty fun way to grow up.

They walked across the lush, tropical rain forest of the lobby, complete with its own waterfall, and upstairs to the sleek, cement monorail track that passed through the hotel. The track and the futuristic train provided a stark contrast to the natural wood and foliage and traditional arts and crafts that made up the heart of the Polynesian. It was Disney's plan to create a world where past and future were slammed together in disjunctive harmony, and nowhere in the park was that more evident than the monorail track at the Polynesian.

Cam stood on the platform with Jackson, watching him get mobbed by sunburned kids who wanted their picture taken with Tigger. Her phone buzzed.

 

 

Lily:
Happy graduation! Where R U?

Cam:
On a date.

Lily:
☺!!! If you don't at least get to second base I'm going to kill you.

Cam:
Second base? What are you, 11? Who sez 2nd base anymore?

Lily:
Just do it.

 

Cam clicked her phone off and Jackson shooed some children away playfully. He grabbed Cam in his soft furry arms, dipped her, and pretended to plant a slobbery Tigger kiss right on her lips. This spurred a wild, tinkly wind chime of giggles from the kids. Cam loved how assertive Jackson could be when in disguise.

He posed for a few more shots with the children, and Cam made sure to sneak at least one of her body parts into each of the pictures, putting her fingers in a
V
over Tigger's head. But when the last camera flashed, Cam felt herself getting dizzy and nauseated. She fought to stay conscious. Her vision tunneled, the green of the rain forest closing in on her. She looked at the mahogany and teak carved ceiling tiles above her. Their patterns moved in and out and back and forth in her field of vision.

“Hey Jackson,” she said weakly, but Jackson was busy with his Tigger-lovin' public.

“Jackson,” she said, more loudly this time. “I need to go home. Can you drive me home?” she managed to say before doubling over with a horrible, stabbing stomach pain.

Jackson got Cam to the parking lot, where he de-costumed and threw the Tigger head into the backseat. He sped home in Cumulus, and by the time they got there, whatever it was that gripped her had subsided. Enough for her to speak at least.

“I'm sorry,” Cam said. They sat in her driveway, dusk falling around them. Heat lightning flashed and lit up the inside of the car like a slow, intermittent strobe. Cam loved heat lightning. It reminded her that she lived on a
planet
. With each flash she caught the Tigger head in her peripheral vision—that famous underbite and the beady eyes locked in a constant state of surprise. Would he ever know anything? Cam wished she could be like Tigger—in a perpetual state of ignorance.

“Love means never having to say you're sorry,” Jackson mumbled. At least that's what Cam thought he said. He fiddled with Cam's Scooby-Doo keychain before handing it to her. His rough, calloused fingertips grazed hers. She loved his hands. There was nothing worse than soft man-hands.

“What did you say?” she asked.

“Never mind,” he said. “It's a bad quote from a bad movie. I'm not very good at this.”

“
Love Story
. Nineteen seventy. Starring Ali McGraw and Ryan O'Neal,” Cam said robotically.

“It's pretty bad,” Jackson admitted.

“Yeah, but in a good way.”

“So do you want to go out some time?” he finally asked.

“God, Jackson, is your mother putting you up to this?” Cam could see the light blue collar of his Dunder Mifflin T-shirt sticking out of the stripy fur of his Tigger costume.

“No. I mean, not really.”

“Please. You don't have to be the nice boy who dates the dying girl. Don't make that part of your identity. It will be hard to shake off. Believe me. It will stick, and you'll never get the hot blonde.”

“I like you, Cam.”

Well, it's a little late for that
, Cam thought. She couldn't even look at him; he was just so well intentioned, it was heartbreaking.
Sometimes
, Cam thought,
men really are the fairer sex.
The more gallant and pure and innocent and upstanding. Perhaps because they didn't have to fight so hard.

Luckily, Izanagi was walking out of the house as Cam and Jackson were getting out of the car.

“Perfect timing,” said Cam. “Drive him home, will you, Izanagi?”

“Sure,” he said. “Let's go, kid.”

Cam gave Jackson a little wave. “TTFN,” she said, which was Tigger's favoritest thing to say.

“Oooh,” said Perry when Cam came in the door. Perry wore a tight Hello Kitty T-shirt, short-shorts, and pink Uggs as she walked through the house texting someone on her hot pink phone. Two low, looped ponytails at the nape of her neck made her look like a Swiss Miss. “How was your date? Did you get any lip-lock or what?” she said, without looking up from her phone.

“What do you know about lip-lock?”

“More than you do, probably.”

“I hope not, you little tramp.”

“Mom! Cam called me a tramp.”

“If the shoe fits, honey,” sang Alicia, sweeping in, winking, and giving Cam a hug. She was in a good mood for some reason.

“Mom!” screamed Perry.

“Stop boo-hooing, Perry. You know she was joking. Go hug one of your unicorns.”

Perry was eleven and still had unicorn posters plastered all over her room, glass unicorns, porcelain unicorns, unicorn stuffed animals. Cam hated that stage in girls' bedrooms when posters of rock bands coexisted with piles of stuffed animals. But who was Cam to judge? She'd just gone on a date with freaking Tigger.

“You know, a unicorn could heal you, Campbell,” Perry said, finally looking up from her texting. She stared at Cam as if she'd just come up with a brilliant idea.

“There are no such things as unicorns, genius,” Cam told her. “Those are just freakish one-horned goat mutants.”

“They're just rare and extremely wild and can only be tamed by a virgin. So that's perfect. You could tame it. Easily. Because. Of. Your. Virginitude,” said Perry, punctuating each word with a wag of her finger, before running away down the hall.

“Shut up, Perry,” said Cam as she made her way to her room. She shuffled down the hallway, dragging her feet through the browning shag carpet. She was too tired to agonize over the fact that her eleven-year-old sister knew the status of her sex life. And really too tired to feel grateful about how at least her antagonistic relationship with her sister was still in the range of normal. It was probably the only thing in her life that was in the range of normal. Everything else, like the extreme fatigue she felt at that moment, was way, way out of the range of normal. She was even too tired to call Lily. She could not wait to flop onto her bed and fall into a deep, deep sleep, but then she turned the corner and gasped.

Everything was gone.

“WHERE IS MY STUFF?” YELLED CAM.

She slid open her drawers and found them empty. Naked hangers swung back and forth in her closet. Cam's down comforter had been replaced with an old electric blanket. The Lite Brite Mondrian she had created with four screens taped together was unplugged. The solar system replica she'd made in second grade hung from the ceiling. Her Wonder Woman action figure, dressed in a grass skirt, stood traumatized on Cam's desk next to the Magic 8-Ball. Constellations of blue putty spotted the walls where Cam's posters used to be. “What did you do with the Ramones?” she asked. “And my
Citizen Kane
poster? Where is Tweety, goddammit?”

“We packed it,” said Perry, appearing in the doorway behind Alicia. She kept her mom's body strategically between hers and Cam's.

“You packed Tweety?” The one dorky thing about Cam was that she had a canary named Tweety. Everyone else in the family was allergic to cats and dogs, so she had to love a bird. He sat on her shoulder and ate from her hands. “Where's Tweety?”

“Tweety's in the kitchen, Campbell. We were just cleaning his cage. Getting him ready for the trip,” Alicia told her.

“Yeah, I guess that's the missing piece of information here. What
trip
?” Cam demanded.

“To Maine.”

“Maine?”

“Maine.” Alicia picked up a pillow from the floor and tossed it on the bed. “You remember Tom. The guy I met at yoga?”