I follow him through the boys’ locker room, passing the bathroom stalls, the lockers, the showers, and I think, Thank God. If there’s food, I might stay here forever. I want to stop running. How long until school starts again? One month? Two? What I wouldn’t give to pause here, stay hidden for that month or two, until interest dies down, until the conjectures begin—that I’ve died, that I’ve disappeared, that I’m gone. And then maybe I’ll dye my hair and put in colored contacts and walk out of the school, and nobody would know who I am—nobody would be looking for me any longer.
Cameron tests the handle on the unmarked door beyond the second alcove of lockers, but it doesn’t budge. He takes the tools from the cargo pocket—the screwdriver, the thing that looks like pliers—and crouches in front of the lock. It doesn’t take him long.
“Oh,” I say.
His hair drops in his eyes, and when he looks up at me I cannot read his expression. “I’m very good at what I do,” he says.
“I know you are,” I say, suddenly feeling entirely inadequate. Because the thing I’m supposed to be good at, I have avoided. And the things I am good at are not coming in useful right now.
“Okay.” He pushes the door open, and we find ourselves inside a storage closet that must be used by the janitors. There are mops and buckets and cleaning supplies, and the room smells faintly like bleach. There’s also a door on the other side, and Cameron starts working on the lock again.
“Cameron,” I say. “What is it, exactly, that you do?”
He pauses, pretending to concentrate on the door in front of him. He’s thinking of what to say, how much to say, how to say it. Eventually he says, “I get things for people.”
“Is that why you did this?” And by this I mean me. “You got me for Dominic?”
“No, Alina,” he says, opening the door. “You’re not a thing.”
Finishing that lock, he continues into the next room, and he doesn’t notice that I have frozen. Because it’s the first time someone has acknowledged that maybe I am my own person, someone other than June. “I’m Nobody, who are you?” I mumble, following him. We’re inside a large room with tables, but the tables have all been stacked against the walls for the summer. There’s a long metal counter set up with a plastic shield, separating the cafeteria from the kitchen.
“You’re Alina Chase,” he says, which is what everyone calls me. Full name. Because I am a thing. A thing in a history book. Nothing around me has ever been real. People speak with me because they are supposed to, and they don’t speak with me if they’re not supposed to.
I weigh my words before I say them. They’re one thing I do have control over. And so I am purposeful with them. Deliberate. I decide what to give and what to hide. I watch for reactions. I study their impact.
I remember Dom saying that everyone was scared of me on the island. And I can’t say he’s wrong.
I have become the very thing they feared.
“Okay, Cameron London. See? Even you talk about me like I’m a thing on the news.”
He looks at me from the side of his eye. “Or maybe I just really like your full name. It’s got a good ring to it.” He grins. “And it sets you apart from all the other Alinas in the world. I know you just fine.”
I’m not sure what he means by that—what he thinks he knows of me. That I am weak, that I don’t know how to swim, that I had to be dragged to safety, that I made an impulsive decision that got us all into this mess.
“I’m good at what I do, too,” I say. “But those skills are really not useful right now. A lot of the things June was good at, I ignored. I should be better.”
Cameron runs his hand across the metal counter, walking toward the kitchen, as he says, “You escaped an island, let me cut the tracker from your rib, swam when you couldn’t swim, figured out where the hideaway was when no one else could, threw my sister out of the way of a bullet—yes, don’t look so surprised, I noticed that. Honestly, helping you escape will probably turn out to be the one good thing I do with my life. You’re incredible.”
My heart is beating too fast, and I’m hoping he doesn’t turn around again, because he will see the heat creeping up my neck. My face feels as if it’s on fire. I make myself look busy, prying open a box left in the corner.
Except he pauses.
Because he knows.
I’ve noticed that Cameron doesn’t always weigh his words. He speaks them, whatever he’s thinking. He doesn’t study their impact, or wonder how they’ll be received, or what he can gain. He says them, and they’re out there now, and I don’t know what to do with them other than to continue rifling through this container filled with boxes of dried cereal like I haven’t heard him.
“Well, if you ever decide to start getting people,” I say, “I think you’re pretty good at that, too.”
“Inanimate objects are a lot more predictable,” he says. But since I’m avoiding eye contact, I can’t tell if he’s being serious or trying to make a joke. The conversation stops, but it still lives, replaying inside my mind. I am imagining the twenty different possible things I could’ve said back to him, and how everything could’ve changed from a sentence. If I told him I thought he was incredible, too, or if I’d told him I’ve spent the last four days in a state of total fear—that I did those things because there was no other way. No going back, only forward. I am imagining each of these things, and in every scenario, Cameron comes closer. But imagination is not the same as a memory, and I make myself stop. I see the scenario for what it is: I am ignoring him, and he is pretending not to notice.
In the end, we decide to bring back the cereal and a bunch of snacks that Cameron has miraculously retrieved from the vending machine without money.
We avoid eye contact as we carry everything back, and we remain silent as we enter the gymnasium. Casey is standing in the middle of the empty room. “God, you guys scared me to death. I had no idea where you went.” Then she punches Cameron in the arm. “Next time, tell me, asshole.”
“Casey, we’re going to look for food. Be back in a few.” He smiles.
She punches him again. But then seeing a sealed chocolate bar, she smiles. “My favorite,” she says.
“I know,” he says.
She opens it on the spot, talking while chewing. “I hit a roadblock. Those hard drives are at least seventeen years old, and I don’t have the right cables. I need to check out the computer room or media center or whatever.”
Cameron mumbles something and grabs a team uniform from the box and disappears into the locker room. When he comes out, he looks hilarious in basketball shorts that come past his knees and a navy-blue jersey with the number twelve on the front. “Don’t laugh,” he says, but Casey giggles anyway.
He has a ball cap pulled down low over his face, and his hair is tucked behind his ears. He grins at me and says, “Welcome to high school. This is what we look like.”
“So basically I haven’t been missing anything?” Except as ridiculous as he looks, I am ridiculously drawn to him.
“I’m in disguise,” he says with a smile. “Okay, seriously.” He moves his jaw around, as if he’s trying to keep from smiling. “I’m assuming the cameras aren’t on a live feed, because what’s the point? So I’m gonna go turn them off. If they look back through the tapes later, hopefully they’ll just see a kid in a basketball uniform. Not us, just some kid up to no good.”
“Just some punk,” Casey says, but she grabs his upper arm as he passes. “Hey, punk?”
“Hmm?”
“Don’t trip anything,” she says.
“I won’t. But if I do, do me a favor and run.”
“Not a chance,” I say. And I’m not sure where that came from. They’re both looking at me.
“Like she says,” Casey says, “not a chance. So just don’t trip anything. Got it?”
“It’s a school,” he says, rolling his eyes as he backs away, “not a bank vault.”
He decides to leave through the locker room, explaining that if he’s on film, he wants them to think he came from the cafeteria instead of the gym, which I think is for our benefit. He seems completely unworried, and Casey smiles, like she’s not nervous either, except she’s pacing. Pacing and pacing and pacing. She doesn’t speak to me.