Zarr, Sara - Sweethearts (5 page)

because I could tell she sensed something about me and Cameron I wasn't ready to tell her. And I didn't call Katy because I knew she'd only want to talk about how to get Cameron to like her. Mom and Alan couldn't make me feel unlost, either. I was almost certain now that Mom never really believed Cameron was dead. She was smart, she was a nurse, and she knew what he meant to me. If she'd believed the story about Cameron she would have found out more and talked to me about it. I knew she'd lied, but I didn't know how to ask for the truth. Right as I was thinking these things, I drove by Smith's, i circled the block and pulled into the lot. I stayed parked for a few minutes, trying to talk myself out of what I was about to do, but soon the automatic doors were swishing open and I checked out the situation. The store was crowded with moms doing predinner shopping, and lots of their loud kids running around. I was just one of a dozen people in the candy aisle and it was easy to take the bag of mini chocolate bars and let it drop quietly into the gym bag I'd brought in, unzipped. Knowing it was there in my bag gave me some satisfaction, but anxiety about whether it would be enough and whether it would be the right kind of enough kept me walking up and down aisles until a bag of corn chips and a pint of cookie dough ice cream also ended up in my bag. An employee walked by with some go-backs for the freezer and i imagined him looking at my open bag and my lack of any grocery cart or basket, so I moved down the aisle and tried to act like a regular shopper: frozen peas, a diet meal, some veggie burgers. I actually bought those things in the express lane. I had the money. I could have paid for the other stuff, too, but I didn't. CHAPTER 10 I HAVE TO GO HOME. That is what I tell Cameron's dad. I want Cameron to say something, but he is staring down at Moe. Put that back in the cage, Cam, his dad says. We'll deal with it later. "That" and "it" is Moe. Cameron takes three steps to the cage in the corner of the room, lifts the top, and sets Moe down gently. For a long minute he stares into the cage, not turning around. I keep my eyes on the back of Cameron's head. Outside, more leaves fall by the window and I think how we could be outside, crunching them under our feet in the cool air instead of in this small, hot room that has one too many people in it. The first thing you need when you're playing doctor is to decide who's gonna be the doctor and who's gonna be the patient Cam turns around, finally, to see what his father will say next. When I was a kid the boy was always the doctor. His father looks at me. But they've got all kinds of lady doctors these days so it could go either way. And frankly I don't know if Cam has the nuts or the smarts to be the doctor, so it looks like you're up. I have to go home, I say again. This time I turn my body toward the door and take a step, then another, and another. Cameron's father reaches his long arm in front of me and the door closes with a hollow click, leaving the three of us together in the tiny room. Midnight. After Mom and Alan went to bed, I put on my pajamas and got the ice cream and a spoon and the bag of mini candy bars. I started out with my back against the door again, but once a small pile of wrappers accumulated next to me i worried that one of my parents could wake up and come to my room for some reason, and it would be hard to clear away the wrappers without being caught. So I moved myself and everything else into my bedroom closet, with the door open enough so that light came in and I could see as much as I needed to. At first, I'd hold a candy bar in my mouth until it warmed up enough to start softening, then I'd take a spoonful of ice cream, which would make the chocolate hard again, just for a few seconds, until it all began to melt together. Then I'd take some ice cream and balance a candy bar on top of the spoon and put it all in my mouth at once and chew, even when the cold hurt my teeth, pressing my tongue into the bits of cookie dough to taste for the mix of salty and sweet. But it wasn't working. The memories of that day at Cameron's house wouldn't stop. I told myself that it was useless thinking, since I couldn't change anything now. I couldn't go back in time and make it unhappen. I told myself it was okay, that I'd grown up into a regular person and had a normal, productive teenage life. I told myself that worse things had happened to other kids -- much, much worse things that you could hear about every single week if you just watched the news. I worked at getting different Cameron memories in my head, better ones -- the day in the aspen grove, the note in my lunch box -- but they wouldn't stick. All I wanted was to talk to him. Without a phone number or e-mail or an address that I knew, he was as unreachable as he'd been the last eight years. I closed the closet door with my foot and finished the ice cream. CHAPTER 11 I WOKE EARLY SATURDAY, FEELING LIKE CRAP -- HEADACHE, nausea, intense thirst. I promised myself I'd be very, very good for the rest of the weekend and got up for a glass of water. Alan's laptop was open on the kitchen table but he wasn't there. I wanted to see his crooked, comforting face. I found him standing at the fish tank, in the bleach-spotted blue sweatpants my mom pretended to hate, his curly hair matted to the back of his head from sleep. "What's the prognosis?" I asked. "On the fin rot, I mean." He turned, a little startled. "Oh, hi. I think Estella is okay. But now I'm worried about Monty. Does he look lethargic to you?" I studied the little pink-and-black platy hovering near the bottom of the tank. "I don't know. Maybe he's not awake yet." Alan sprinkled some food over the water. We watched as fish darted up to the surface to eat. "And what are you doing up?" he asked. "Trouble sleeping?" "Kind of." I checked the tank's aerator. The living room was dim and the house was quiet and I knew Mom would probably be asleep for another hour. It seemed like I could say things then and there and maybe not have them be as real as they would be if I said them when the sun was all the way up. "This ... kid I used to know in grade school started at Jones Hall this week. We were, like, pretty good friends." Monty swam across the tank to catch a flake of food that had been slowly sinking. "There he goes." "I didn't know ... you ... had any friends from back then," Alan said carefully. I rested a finger on the cool glass of the tank, considering what to say, what to not say. "Just this one boy." "Ah. A boy." "In fact, yes," I said, turning away from the tank and toward the kitchen. "Is there coffee?" "Of course." He followed me into the kitchen and we both got a cup. I sat at the table and watched him. There was something about his bare feet on the kitchen floor I liked: his big crooked toes with gray and brown hairs springing all around, the knobby ankles sticking out from his too-short sweatpant legs. I kept my eyes on his feet as he tuned in NPR on the radio, toasted his English muffin, and covered it with peanut butter. "How's the car running?" he asked. "Great. I think I've only put twenty miles on it. The horn doesn't work, though." "I'll take a look. Probably just a fuse." Alan settled in front of his computer, chewing his English muffin and sipping his coffee. "So tell me about this friend, this boy." "Well," I started, and then wondered if Mom had told him about Cameron Quick. Maybe Alan already knew more than I did. "It's complicated," i finally said. "How's the writing?" "Oh, that. I've abandoned the poems for the time being. I do have this idea for a screenplay, though." Alan, a creative writing hobbyist, proceeded to give me a rough outline of the story while I drank my coffee. My headache was starting to subside, and I tried to tune my brain in to the day before me; homework, chores, eating right, getting some exercise, Ethan. I figured I should probably touch base with Katy and/or Steph at some point.". . . and finds the treasure on the ranch, exactly where his grandfather said it would be," Alan was saying. "So what do you think?" "I like it," I said, nodding thoughtfully as if I'd been listening. "Hm." He rubbed his beard. "It sounds terrible to me." "Don't overthink it. I'm going to get back in bed and do some reading for English." "Good," he said. "Conserve your energy, because I think your mom has a lot of raking planned for us today." Once in my room, I shut the door behind me and cleaned the wrappers and ice cream container and napkins out of my closet, putting them in two layers of plastic grocery-store bags and then shoving those into the bottom of my trash can. When that was done I made my bed and straightened my room and brushed my teeth and put on clean pajamas, and then I felt okay again, like the night before hadn't happened, like I was handling my life just fine. We -- Mom, Alan, and I -- were out front doing the garden work when Cameron came walking up the hill. Mom saw him first. "I hope this kid isn't selling those coupon books," she said under her breath. "Say we already bought one." "He's my friend," I said, wondering if she'd recognize him, if I could get away with giving him a fake name. Alan stopped bagging leaves and rose slowly from his squatting position. His knees popped audibly. "Ow." As Cameron got closer, I laid down my rake, straightened my hair, wished I'd put on some makeup. Mom had now stopped working, too, and lifted her hand to shield her eyes from the sun. "Do I know him?" "Yes." He was just a few yards from us now. "Oh my God," Mom said. I tried to read her expression, but her hand still mostly covered her face. "Hi," Cameron said to us all. Mom looked at me, incredulous. "Jenna, why didn't you tell me?" Alan extended his hand. "Alan Vaughn." "It's Cameron Quick," Mom said to Alan before turning back to Cam. "You're Cameron Quick. Come here and let me hug you." I watched them, Mom standing on her toes to reach around Cameron's neck, him bending low. I hoped for her to say something like, We thought you were dead, proving me wrong about her lying. Instead, she asked, "How is your mother?" "Fine." "Cameron goes to Jones Hall now," I said. "You go to Jones Hall? Here in Salt Lake?" "Just started Thursday," he said. "I never thought..." Mom said, shaking her head. "Jenna, I can't believe you didn't say something." They talked, and I waited for her to point out the obvious: that Cameron had been dead and now he was alive. But she never said it. They talked about Cameron's mother and his little brothers and sisters, which I'd somehow completely forgotten he had, but she never made one mention of his death. I glanced at Alan to see what he knew, if anything, but he was distracted with a lawn bag that wanted to blow away. I almost said it: Isn't it amazing? We thought he was dead, but here he is, right in our very own front yard! When I opened my mouth, Cameron said to me, "I thought you might want to go get some lunch or something." "Now?" "Yeah." He looked at the piles of leaves. "I'll help you finish this first." "Go ahead," Alan said, "we can handle it." Mom smiled a strained kind of smile, her eyes never leaving Cameron. "Sure. Go on." We ended up at Crown Burgers, across from each other in a small booth near a window. "You didn't tell your mom about me," he said. "I didn't have a chance." "Okay." He took a bite of his burger and chewed slowly before saying, "What. Just say it." Two days and already he could read me better than any of my friends. "Is it that obvious?" "Can't hide anything from me. You know that." "I'm just... confused. Because we thought you were dead. At least, / thought you were dead." He laughed. "Dead? Why would you think that?" "I heard at school," I said. "And I told my mom, and she didn't say that you weren't." He was quiet; chewing, staring. "And," I added, "why else wouldn't I have heard from you?" "I came back." "Eight years later!" "You're mad at me," he said. "No," I said, shaking my head. "I'm not" "Yes you are. It's okay. I'd be mad, too." "I'm not! I'm . . . not." I stabbed into my Greek salad with my plastic fork. "Anyway, never mind. You're not dead, you're here, I'm happy to see you and happy you're alive." "Not that simple, though, is it." I'd forgotten this about Cameron. How he didn't play games, never pretended, never just filled the quiet with meaningless words the way regular people did. If he opened his mouth to speak, it was to say something that mattered to him. That was part of why he never fit in. I used to be like that, too. Now I was a professional maker of small talk, filler of conversational space, avoider of awkwardness. I was doing it even now, at Crown Burgers, too easily going from talking about Cam's alleged death to babbling about unimportant things like my problems in trig and auditions for The Odd Couple, "Hey, why aren't you in the drama class, anyway?" I asked. "Everyone has to take it." It was right there in the Jones Hall charter; the founders thought drama was important for our social development. "They made an exception for me. I have too much catching up to do in real subjects." I watched him eat, the way he followed every bite of a burger with exactly two fries and a sip of his drink. The curve of his fingers as he dipped into fry sauce, the shape of his lips around the straw -- it was all information, all part of filling in the missing years. "Do you want to help with the play?" I asked. "There's a lot to do even if you're not in it." "If you want me to," he said. "I do. I want you to. It will be fun," I said, trying to convince myself. "You can get to know everyone." He appeared as unexcited as I felt at the prospect of him bonding with all my friends. "If you do something for me." "Sure. What?" The way he looked at me, I knew that what he was going to ask was serious. Not like helping with a school play. "What?" I said again, quieter this time. "We need to go back." I put my fork down. "Where?" But I knew where. "To all of it. The neighborhood, the school. My old house." Our surroundings seemed to spin a little. I held the edge of the table for support. "That's why you came back." "Partly." "Is he ... Do you still live with ..." He shook his head. "Okay," I finally said. "All right." "Tomorrow?" "Tomorrow? As in the day after today?" "That one." The last thing I wanted to do was let him down, but when I thought about taking that trip back in time everything in me seized up. "I can't, Cameron," I said. "I need more time. It's only been a couple of days. Let me get used to the idea of you being alive, and then -- " "Nothing to be afraid of. I'll be there with you." "I know, but..." Something in his face closed, a door behind those eyes swinging shut. He looked at his watch. "Gotta be at work soon." "Where do you work? Let me give you a ride." "Don't worry about it. I'll get a bus." And he left. I watched him walk out -- he didn't