“How’s your strumming hand?” Teresa asked, lifting and flexing Chloe’s guitar-playing hand.
Chloe reared up, baring her teeth at Lilith and Cam. “Why don’t you two run away and start your worthless lives together? I hear a meth lab calling your name.” She touched her temple and winced. “You’ve got top billing on my shit list, Lilith. You’d better watch yourself.”
Chloe and her band stalked away. The crowd dispersed slowly, disappointed that there hadn’t been more of a fight.
Lilith stood next to Cam, not feeling the need to say anything. She should have just let Chloe’s insults slide off her like she did every other day. Her mother would be furious when she heard about this.
Cam pulled Lilith against the nearest cafeteria table to let a few students walk past. But when the students were gone, he didn’t let her go. She felt his hand on the small of her back and, for some reason, she didn’t flick it off.
“Don’t let the bitches get you down,” he said.
Lilith rolled her eyes. “Transcend girls who think they’re better than me by pretending I’m better than them? Thanks for the advice.”
“That’s not what I meant,” Cam said.
“But you just called them bitches.”
“Chloe is playing a role,” Cam said, “like an actress.”
“What are you doing, Cam?” she said, feeling tired. “Why egg me on to fight Chloe? Why try to cheer me up now? Why pretend to be interested in my music? You don’t know me, so why do you care?”
“Did it ever occur to you that I might want to know you?” Cam said.
Lilith crossed her arms and looked down, uncomfortable. “There’s nothing to know.”
“I doubt that,” he said. “For example…what do you think about before you fall asleep at night? How dark do you like your toast? Where would you go if you could travel anywhere in the world?” He stepped closer, his voice dropping almost to a whisper as he reached out to touch her face below her left cheekbone. “How’d you get that scar?” He smiled a little. “See? Plenty of fascinating secrets in there.”
Lilith opened her mouth. Closed it. Was he serious?
She studied his face. His features were relaxed, like he wasn’t trying to persuade her to do something for once, like he was content just to stand next to her. He was serious, she decided. And she had no idea how to respond.
She felt something within her stir. A memory, a flash of recognition, she wasn’t sure. But something about Cam seemed suddenly, strangely familiar. She looked down and noticed her hands were trembling.
“You can trust me,” Cam told her.
“No,” she said softly. “I don’t do trust.”
Cam leaned closer, tilting his head until the tips of their noses almost touched. “I’ll never hurt you, Lilith.”
What was happening? Lilith closed her eyes. She felt like she might faint.
When she opened them, Cam was even closer. His lips came close to hers—
And then Jean Rah’s voice broke the spell between them. “Hey, dudes.”
Lilith stepped back, stumbling over her own feet. Her knees were weak, and her heart was racing. She looked at Cam, who wiped his forehead with the back of his hand and exhaled. Jean Rah was oblivious to anything that might have been about to happen.
He held up his phone. “Band room’s open till one. Just saying.”
A text chimed on Jean’s phone, and his eyebrows shot up. “You pulled out Chloe King’s weave and I missed it?”
Lilith laughed, and then something crazy happened: Jean joined in, and Cam did, too, and suddenly the three of them were laughing so hard they were crying, like it was the most natural thing in the world.
Like they were friends.
Were they friends? It felt good to laugh, that was all Lilith knew. It felt light, like springtime, the first day you go outside without a coat. She looked at Jean and couldn’t remember why she’d ever hated him.
And then it was over. They stopped laughing. Everything went back to dreary normality.
“Lilith,” Cam said, “can I talk to you alone?”
There was something about the way he asked that made her want to say yes. But yes was a dangerous word all of a sudden. Lilith didn’t want to be alone with Cam. Not now. Whatever he’d been trying to do a moment ago had been too much.
“Hey, Jean?” she said.
“Yeah?”
“Let’s go jam.”
Jean shrugged and followed Lilith out of the cafeteria. “Later, Cam.”
In the band room, a scrawny, dark-haired freshman in a tie-dyed T-shirt was struggling to set a huge copper timpani drum onto its base. The kid had long hair that nearly covered his eyes, and almond-colored skin. Jean watched the spectacle with interest, scratching his chin. “Yo, Luis. Need a hand?”
“I’m cool,” the boy wheezed.
Jean turned to Lilith like she was a calculus problem he didn’t know where to begin solving. “Did you really want to jam, or were you just trying to make Cam jealous?”