She held her breath until she could no longer see her driveway in the side-view mirror, as if Jean or Luis might be able to tell that the hideous house at the end of the lane was the one Lilith called home. She thought about Bruce inside, watching old episodes of Jeopardy! with Alastor on the couch beside him, and she felt like she was betraying him simply by being ashamed of where she came from.
It surprised her that Cam would live on this side of town. She remembered an early conversation when he’d told her he’d slept outside the night before. At the time, she thought he’d been joking. He seemed to have plenty of money. He drove his own motorcycle, and his leather jacket looked expensive. He’d brought her groceries, served her caviar, tried to give her flowers just this morning.
Jean turned sharply left and braked. “This can’t be right.”
Lilith didn’t think so, either. Dobbs was a long, straight street that had been closed down to car traffic entirely. There were no houses here. No apartments. Between their idling car and the burning hills in the distance were hundreds of patchwork tents and cardboard lean-tos set up in the middle of the road. People milled among the tents, and they didn’t look anything like Cam. They were ragged, down on their luck, many of them strung out.
“Maybe the database is wrong,” Luis said, pulling out his phone.
“Let’s go check it out,” Lilith said, and opened the passenger door.
Luis and Jean followed her to the edge of the tent city, stepping over broken bottles and moldy cardboard boxes. It was strangely cold here, and the wind was sharp. Lilith didn’t know what she was looking for; she was no longer expecting to find Cam here.
The smell was overwhelming, like a sweaty landfill that someone had doused with gasoline. Lilith breathed through her mouth as she tried to make sense of this scene. At first, it looked like total chaos: Scrawny children running everywhere, men bickering over the contents of shopping carts, fires raging in trash cans. But the longer Lilith studied the world of Dobbs Street, the more it started to make sense. It was its own little community, with its own rules.
“I saw them first,” a woman Lilith’s mother’s age said to another, younger woman, yanking a pair of canvas shoes out of her hand.
“But they’re my size,” the second woman argued. She had blond dreadlocks and wore a gray midriff tank top. Lilith could see her ribs. “You couldn’t even get your big toe in them.”
Lilith looked down at her own falling-apart combat boots, with the laces she kept having to knot together when they snapped. They were the only pair of shoes she’d had for years. She tried to imagine not having even them.
“Maybe we should take off,” Jean said, looking antsy. “We can talk to Cam tomorrow at school.”
“There,” Lilith said, pointing ahead at a boy with a messenger bag slung over his shoulder exiting a dark green tent.
Cam paused for a moment and gazed up at the sky, as if he could read something there that the rest of them could not.
Against this backdrop, in the fading dusk light, Cam seemed like somebody else entirely. He looked older, tired. Had he always looked like that? She felt bad for him. She wondered how much of a front Cam had to put up at school to appear so confident and mysterious.
Was this really his home? Lilith had never known people lived like this in Crossroads. She’d never imagined anyone worse off than her own family.
He was walking their way, but he hadn’t seen them yet. Lilith tugged Jean and Luis’s shirtsleeves to pull them out of his line of vision.
Cam nodded as he passed two older guys. One of them raised a fist for him to bump.
“Hey, brother.”
“How are you, August?” she heard Cam say.
“Can’t complain. Just the toothache.”
“I’m pulling for you,” Cam said with a smile. He put a hand on the guy’s shoulder and looked him deep in the eyes. The man seemed to relax, transfixed by Cam’s gaze.
Lilith was transfixed, too. The people here shared a hungry, nervous look in their eyes. But not Cam. Beneath his exhaustion, he radiated a serenity that suggested nothing in this place could touch him. Maybe nothing in this world could touch him. It was one of the most beautiful things she’d ever seen. She wanted to be that way, too: at peace with herself, autonomous, free.
“I kind of get the feeling he does live here,” Jean said.
“If you can call this living,” Luis said, and started walking toward him. “He doesn’t have to be here. We’ve got two extra bedrooms at my house. I’m sure my parents would let him crash.”
“Wait.” Lilith held him back. “It might embarrass him that we tracked him down here.” Lilith knew it would embarrass her if the situation were reversed. “Let’s talk to him tomorrow.”
She watched as Cam strolled over to a burning trash can where a father was cooking two hot dogs for four small children over a metal grate. He cut each dog in two and turned them over on the grill, but when Cam paused before him, the man started to cut one of the hot dogs into smaller pieces.
“Hungry?” he said, and offered Cam a quarter of a dog.