What Happens Now (34 page)

“Are you walking back with me?” she asked.

“I’m going to stay for a bit.”

She nodded and headed up the trail. She got a few feet away, then stopped to turn and wave. I waved back. We froze, neither of us wanting to be the one to lower our hand first. But then Kendall did. She started moving again and in seconds, she was around a curve and out of sight.

I lay back on the rock, my hands behind my head, and stared up at the sky.

In my mind, Camden came to lie on the rock next to me.

Holy cow, how I missed him. This ache. Like the ache I’d felt during the summer of watching and wanting, but in the core of me.

I started to cry again. The only thing I could make of this agony was the truth: Camden had given me what he could, but it was not enough. What I needed, I could only give myself. He had gifted me the ability to do that. By falling in love with Camden, I’d been able to fall in love with Ari, and for that reason, I wasn’t lying to Kendall about having just one regret.

So which Camden was with me now? The first Camden, or the one who’d let me down so terribly? Maybe it was neither.
Maybe it was a parallel-universe Camden, a new Camden created by the things that could have happened but didn’t.

Although, just because they could have happened didn’t mean they should have.

I had to let that Camden next to me go.

I had to let them all go.

23

“Help me!” Danielle
squealed from the top of the wooden tower.

I didn’t budge. She was laughing now, as I knew she would be, and my spot on the playground bench was so comfy in the shade.

Labor Day.

It always felt melancholy, even with the weather perfect like this. I usually spent every possible hour of the holiday at the lake before it closed for the season at sundown. But this year, I couldn’t bear to say an official farewell.

“You said half-and-half, right?” asked Mom as she plunked down a to-go tray from the café across the street.

“Thanks,” I said, picking up my iced coffee. She sat down next to me, took hers out of the tray, and tore open a pack of artificial sweetener.

“Mom!”

“What?”

“You said that stuff is evil.”

She shrugged. “I let myself have one a day at work. Sorry, it’s my guilty pleasure.”

“If
that’s
your guilty pleasure, you have nothing to apologize for.”

She laughed, and Dani raced past us, shrieking again. Then Richard came tearing after her. Roaring like a lion or a monster or some other terror she’d requested today.

“I remember Richard doing that with you, when I first met him,” said Mom.

“Yup. It was love at first chase.”

Mom smiled. “For me, too.”

I watched her as she took a long sip of her iced coffee. “What time are you guys going out later?”

“The movie’s at eight, but I’d like to leave at six so we have time for dinner at Lemongrass. Is that okay?”

“Of course.” She’d never asked that before. She’d never needed to, or so we both thought. Maybe we were both wrong.

I thought of the World Wildlife Fund calendar hanging in the kitchen, now turned to the September page with the tiger cubs, already filled in with the details of our four different schedules. On the square of that coming Friday, there
was only one thing scribbled in: that long-planned appointment with my therapist, Cynthia. Under my name, Mom had recently written Richard’s and Dani’s and her own.

Yes, we were all going to go, together. It would be something new and strange and probably cringeworthy. We might never do it again. But we were going at least once, and that counted.

Mom summoned Richard by holding up his coffee, jiggling it so the ice rattled loudly. He scooped up Dani and carried her over to us.

“Here, sweetie,” said Mom to Dani after she handed Richard his drink. “I know you said you’d have a smoothie but I figured, it’s the last day of summer. What the heck. I got you a chocolate milk shake.”

Dani silently took her drink and sipped hard, closing her eyes. She seemed to be having a moment. Then her eyes popped open and she stared at Mom.

“Will you push me on the swings?” she asked, her voice shaky.

My mother sighed. I was prepared to step in with an excuse for her, but then Mom laughed and said, “Sure.”

She got up and took Dani’s hand.

“I want to go so high, my foot touches that tree branch. I just saw a kid do it. Can you push me that high?”

“I don’t know,” said Mom as they walked away from us. “But I’ll try.”

Richard followed them, ready to take pictures with his phone. I sank back on the bench and felt the
warm-but-definitely-not-summer-anymore breeze on my neck.

Sometimes, all you can ask for is the try.

An hour at the playground, a chocolate milk shake. A movie and Thai food. Being able to sit and talk and listen and see what comes next.

Sometimes, it’s all more than enough.

School. Senior year. Why wouldn’t I be ready?

Kendall was gone, but there were new people, new possibilities, everywhere. The summer had taught me that much.

My first morning went fast. Precalculus, English, physics. It was going to be an interesting year, academically. These were classes I could lose myself in.

Step after step down a hallway, letter by letter scrawled as class notes on paper. That was how you did it.

You’ve never been stronger and more positive
, I told myself, and believed.

But I’d forgotten about lunch.

Lunch, and its universal suckiness when you don’t have a best friend or a to-hell-with-it attitude or even a plan.

When you have to stand there with a brown paper lunch bag and scan the room for a seat, but not so long that everyone sees how you’re quietly dying inside.

The trick, I knew, was to keep moving. I circled the perimeter of the cafeteria, reaching into my pocket to feel the edges of a folded-up postcard I’d gotten from Kendall.
No regrets and all that
, she’d written on the back of a London aerial photo.

At one table, I spotted Lukas and Brady with a few of their friends. They were busy peering at someone’s phone and didn’t see me. There, too, were Kendall’s newspaper pals, who suddenly looked so much nicer than I’d pegged them, but their table was full.

A dark, shaggy head flickered in my peripheral vision. I turned on instinct, saw only the crowd around the condiment station. Then I remembered that boy from last year who’d seemed so teasingly familiar. Great. Maybe I could pay him to cut his hair.

Finally, I zeroed in on a corner table that was only two-thirds full of juniors. I slid into a seat at the farthest possible end, not making eye contact. I heard them stop talking for a moment to establish that I was nobody worth acknowledging, then continue.

The meek crinkle of a paper bag. A bite of tuna sandwich. A drink of milk.
Come on, Ari. This is just lunchtime in your cafeteria in your school. It means nothing about anything.

So why did I feel like crying?

Yeah, this was going to be bad.

Suddenly, someone threw themselves into the seat across from me, making the whole table shake.

I glanced up, annoyed.

The boy leveled his green eyes at me. Eyes the color of a diving board, on a dock at a lake that felt so far away, it would have taken the
Arrow One
a hundred light-years to get there.

I looked into those eyes and all I could say was, “Oh, crap.”

Camden smiled, all his features bright and blinding.

“Hi, Ari.”

I put down my sandwich and rested my palms on the table, needing to feel something solid beneath them.

“What . . . are you doing here?”

Camden searched my face, but I wasn’t sure what he was looking for. “Fifth period lunch, just like you,” he said, pulling a crumpled piece of paper out of his pocket—a class schedule—and consulting it. “Then, AP History.”

“Oh. Me, too.” I couldn’t think of anything non-idiotic to say.

We stared at each other as I processed the fact of him existing in front of me, the class schedule with his name on it.

He swallowed, clearly nervous. “So. I was reading in the student manual that seniors can leave campus during their free periods. Is that right?”

“That’s right,” I said, glad to be asked a simple question with a simple answer.

Camden cleared his throat, stood up, and offered his hand. “Then, let’s go.”

The kids at the other end of the table turned to watch, suddenly alert to a happening.

“Go where?” I whispered. “We’ve only got, like, half an hour left of this period.”

He moved closer, around the end of the table, his hand still outstretched. “Ari, this is me stepping up. Giving back. Following the rules and doing the work.”

I started to draw a deep breath, but it fell apart into a sob.

“Don’t do that,” said Camden. “Or do that, but also take my goddamn hand.”

I took his goddamn hand. Still warm, with suddenly lots to say to mine. I guess they had some catching up to do. He pulled me to standing and led me through the cafeteria, past all those eyes watching us. Out the doors to the parking lot. Toward his car.

“Where are we going?” I asked him.

“Wherever you want to go.” He paused as he slowed his pace so we were walking side by side. “What’s someplace we’ve never been together?”

As soon as he said that, I knew.

When we pulled up to Scoop-N-Putt, the first thing we saw was a big sign across the closed Order Here window. We both climbed out of the car to get a closer look.

Fall Hours: 5 P.M. TO 10 P.M.

“Great,” I said. “I completely forgot about that.”

“Eh, that’s just a technicality,” said Camden. He sat down on the hood of his car and patted the spot next to him. I crawled up, rested my feet on the front bumper. “Chocolate?” he asked, his eyes dancing, curling one hand to hold an imaginary ice cream cone, then the other. “Or vanilla?”

I laughed and pointed to the chocolate hand. He handed me my “cone.”

We sat there, not knowing what to do next, watching the
traffic on 299 speed by. Where were all these people going in the middle of a Tuesday? I hoped it was someplace that made them happy.

Then, Camden reached down and laced his fingers through mine.

“What happened to your ice cream?” I teased.

He smiled and shrugged. “Nothing’s better than the real stuff.”

I felt the pressure of his palm against my palm, his forearm nudging my elbow, and realized he wasn’t talking about soft serve.

All those fantasy nights I’d had that first summer, the dreams that made me sweat and ache. This right here, this was the moment. The point where I always woke up alone.

So now, a different kind of waking up, where you do it again and again, and feel the glory of it each time. Not a gift but rather, something you’ve earned.

“Hey,” said Camden, leaning his head against mine and looking off toward the mini-golf course. “Is that gnome giving us the finger?”

With my free hand I turned his face toward mine and kissed him.

They say, be careful what you wish for.

But I say, how else does anything begin?

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Rosemary Brosnan, thank you for your faith in this story and also in me (as a writer and, you know, as a person). You guide a book into the world with such intelligence, affection, and grace.

My agent, Jamie Weiss Chilton, knows when to make her support gentle and positive, when to make it fierce, and when it’s time to just chat about junk. She’s terrific.

I’m grateful for the hard work of Jessica MacLeish, Kim VandeWater, Olivia Russo, the Epic Reads team, and the rest of the HarperCollins staff who do so much behind the scenes. Designer Heather Daugherty created a cover that’s truly a thing of beauty in its own right, and I’m thrilled that anything
that comes out of my brain could be associated with Thomas Doyle’s stunning artwork.

I was lucky to have early readers in Stephanie Kuehn, Rachel Hartman, and especially Phoebe North, with whom a walk on the Rail Trail is often the cure for my angst of the moment. Kim Purcell, I love you for always being present and honest, and also for thinking Camden was so hot.

Bill Spring gave me everything I needed to get the work done, in whatever form and at whenever time, including a hand in the creation of the
Silver Arrow
universe. My daughters, Sadie and Clea, were endlessly understanding and excited and proud, even though they’re not even allowed to read this yet.

I’ve run out of ways to articulate my gratitude to my parents, Jay and Sue Castle, for their wholehearted, multifaceted support. I’m reminded of Camden’s question to Ari, when he asks how you figure out love without anything real to base it on. I’ll just say, thanks to them—and the many treasured people in my life I don’t have room to mention here—I’ve never had that problem. Every day they fill my heart with something-reals.

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