I open my eyes, and the room is bare, the night visible through the slats of wood. And the footsteps are Cameron’s hiking boots. “Hey,” he says, “I was worried you got lost.” He leans against the wooden beam at the entrance to this room, and there’s nowhere to go but closer to him. Casey asked me to keep away, and it’s the least I can do for her, but there’s nowhere else to go. There’s no other choice, and he’s walking closer.
“This will work,” he says, looking around the space, and I’m trying to see what he sees. What version of this house he’s talking about.
“Work for what?” I ask.
“For tonight.” He smiles, and he stands maybe three feet from me, keeping his voice low. “I know it’s not completely protected or anything, but it’s a shelter, and there’s a computer nearby. Oh, and there’s a ton of food in the minifridge back at the trailer, in case you missed it.”
“I did,” I say. “I missed it.” Stuck in my daydream instead of reality.
“Yeah, I thought so. Where were you back there?” He taps the side of my head.
I shake the thought away. “Just imagining things. Got lost for a minute.”
“Good things?” he asks.
I remember the voice I heard behind me, the deep voice from inside, and I fear he can see it all on my face. “Things that won’t happen.”
He tilts his head to the side. “I hope you’re wrong,” he says, but it’s the word he uses, that he knows how unrealistic that is, too, but the room starts to shift on me, and I can see both at once. The empty room, the full one. Me at the center.
“Whoever lives here better realize how lucky they are,” I say.
He shakes his head. “A house doesn’t make people lucky.”
“But the people in it,” I say, “the people you live with.”
He cringes and then gestures to me. “Some people never know their parents and wish they did.” His lower jaw shifts. “But some people do know their parents and wish they didn’t. No house in the world would’ve changed that,” he says.
I wish, for a moment, that the world was simple and predictable. That a family meant safety and unconditional love, and all the things I read about in children’s books.
This is my fear, too—the one I keep buried. That maybe the reason my mother does not speak out, does not fight, is because I no longer matter to her. That I am but a distant memory that resurfaces when she hears a crying baby, or reads an article in the paper, or realizes it’s my birthday. That when she said I could visit her in my dreams, in that song, that was her way of saying: nowhere else. That maybe she is scared of me, too.
“Do I scare you?” I ask.
“No. You surprise me, Alina,” he says, pulling me toward him effortlessly.
And that’s the change I was sensing in the air, not the scent of something burning, but this. One moment I’m sinking, and then I’m floating. Like being in the ocean with him.
But I put my hands on his chest and push back. “I promised Casey,” I say. And then, when he frowns, “She’s your sister.” That must count for something.
“She is my sister,” he says, but he’s not backing away. “Not my dad, not my mom, and not in charge of me.” And then he adds, “Or you.”
He is the spell. He’s the spell, not me, and I need to break it. “It’s not the time,” I say, repeating Casey’s words, because they make sense, they have logic and a purpose.
He looks around the empty house, and I know he’s seeing a thing none of us will ever have. Not anymore. He leans his forehead against mine. “I’m scared,” he whispers, “that this is the only time.”
I hear Casey in the distance, the door to the trailer, and I know she’s coming.
Cameron presses his lips quickly to my forehead.
I feel him slipping away, feel time doing the same.
“I hope it’s not,” I say.
Imagination is not the same as a memory, and hope is not the same as reality, but still, I am filled with hope for everyone in that moment. For my mother and father, for Cameron and Casey, for June’s soul, and I guess for my own, too. I hope there’s something more than what we were and what we’ve been. I hope that life surprises me.
So I change my mind and pull him toward me, and I’m the one to kiss him this time. I do it even though I hear Casey’s feet just outside, and even though it’s reckless and this isn’t the time. I do it because I realize that life did surprise me, and it comes in the form of the guy in a ridiculous-looking basketball uniform in a half-built house. And it comes in the form of the girl walking down the hall, too. And it comes in the form of me, standing on my toes to reach him, and this moment I can steal, even here, even now.
Chapter 20
I’ve pulled back from Cameron, but the moment must still be obvious on both our faces because Casey dumps a bag of food on the floor in the entrance to the room, drops her bag beside it, and says, “Wow, I’m so glad I just spent the last twenty minutes finding food for everyone and getting directions and checking the news. So glad to know you were doing something useful.”
He ignores her but grabs a can of soda and takes a bite out of a bagel that he’s found in a brown paper bag. Casey is staring at me, obviously trying to catch my eye, but I keep my gaze focused on the food while I rifle through and decide what to eat. How can I explain to her that I don’t have hope that there will be a right time, but that I want to? That I’m trying to create it out of absolutely nothing? That every choice is a betrayal to one side or the other?
I sit back against a wooden beam, next to Cameron, and I take a bite out of a slightly stale bagel.
A beam of light cuts through the night, and I drop the food, heart racing, ready to run. “Headlights,” Cameron says. We’re hidden, but only partly. I press myself, stomach first, against the floor, and hear them doing the same. The car engine idles near the end of the road, the headlights still breaking up the dark.
“What are they doing?” Casey asks. But the beams shift as the wheels move over the gravel, driving away.
We wait in silence, flat against the floor, for a good ten minutes before rising. “Probably just someone checking out the home sites,” Cameron says. But he doesn’t look at us when he says it. And neither of us responds.
We eat in silence, and then we rest against the wooden beams in silence. When at least another hour has passed since the car turned down this road, Cameron dusts his shorts off and says, “If anything happens while I’m gone, head down the road toward the highway, and I’ll find you.”
“While you’re gone?” Casey asks, and my food is stuck somewhere halfway down my esophagus.
“I need to get us a car,” he says.
“We’ll all go. What would’ve happened at the school if you weren’t back in time? If that car didn’t leave? No. No way. We’ll stay hidden while you get it,” Casey says.
“Seriously, it’s a lot easier for one person to sneak around a neighborhood than three people.”
“And what if you get caught?” I ask. “What then? There’s nobody to help you.”
“I won’t get caught,” he says.
I’m on my feet now. “How can you say—”
“Have a little faith, Alina,” he says, but he smiles when he says it. “I’m good at what I do, remember?”
But he cannot possibly know all the different potential outcomes. What might happen between now and then. He cannot promise that he’ll be okay. Oh, God, he has to be okay.
Casey has her arms folded across her chest, blocking the exit, which is ridiculous because he can just as easily slip between the wooden beams all around us. “Casey, I’ll be okay. I’m coming back.”
She nods, like she’s trying not to cry.
He turns to me, puts my face in his hands. “I’m coming back,” he says to me, too. And I feel it, those words, a promise down to my soul.
Casey gives me her best attempt at the cold shoulder, but it’s obviously not something she does a lot, because she could use some more practice. She’s cleaning up the wrappers and cans, and I’m helping her carry the leftover food back to the trailer when I say, “I do care about him.”