“The people I work with.” He turned his head and looked at me pleadingly. “Change of
subject?”
I let it go out of guilt but also out of relief to leave this line of questioning. Even I had to
admit that it was too much information—more than I could swallow.
I took a second and continued the interview, “Tell me about your family.”
He smiled but his eyes were cautious. “What do you want to know?”
Everything. “For starters, what does your mother do for a living?”
“She drinks,” he answered promptly.
Okay. “What about your dad?”
He cringed and stalled. “I don’t like to talk about my father.”
“Why not?”
“Because he’s … not a very nice person,” he said, struggling.
“Neither are my parents,” I said.
“It’s not the same thing. My father’s a con artist.”
“Can you tell me about him?” I murmured. “Please?”
He closed his eyes. “When I lived with my mom, my dad would come strolling in every couple
months with his expensive suits and big cars, while my mom and I lived in dumps. The small
amount of cash my dad did give to my mom she drank away. When I went to live with my dad, I
thought that things were finally going to get better. But my dad was … he wasn’t who I thought
he was. His money was not his own. He hung out with rich people, pretended he had money so that
he could swindle old ladies out of their money …”
His tired voice had started trailing.
“He must have had some money to put you through private school,” I pressed for more.
“When I first came to live with him, he didn’t know what to do with me. Eventually though, he
figured out that he could use me too. He put me in that private school and showed up once in a
while with some woman who’d have money but no husband. Then he’d put on the rich, father-of-
the-year act. It worked like a charm; they trusted him … he stole all their lifesavings and
disappeared. The payments to the school would stop after that.”
His voice was so faded, I could barely hear him. “What happened then?”
“The school sent me to live in a group home.”
“Wow.” This made me angry.
Cameron plunged his head deeper into the pillow. “He always came back sooner or later, usually
when he was getting low on cash. He’d put me back in school so that he could start the show all
over again. When I got older, the cops assumed that I was his partner in crime, ’cause he kept
coming back to find me, and I was the only one the women could identify. I turned fourteen, my
dad disappeared again, and I got thrown in juvi when I couldn’t tell the cops where he was
hiding. That’s when I met Spider, and we cooked up a plan to sell drugs to the rich kids I went
to school with. Within a month of getting back from juvi, I was making my own payments to the
school and never had to depend on my dad’s stolen money again.”
“What happened to your dad?”
“I don’t know. He came back once with some woman. I didn’t want to be associated with him and
get thrown back into juvi. I told him to stay away; I never saw him again after that.”
His breathing had become slower, deeper. I took another second.
“Cameron?” I called out softly.
“Hmm … ?”
“Was my brother happy?”
He considered this. “Most days …”
I held my breath.
“Do you think he knew he was going to die?”
There was a long pause.
“Cameron?”
“ … I really wish I knew, Emmy …” he said with a long sigh.
After a minute, he was asleep.
He snored, just a little bit, like a subdued Darth Vader.
I carefully reached over him, feeling the heat that radiated from his skin, and clicked off the
lamp. I lay there for a while, next to him, listening to his calm, even breaths, watching his
chest rise and fall in the shadows. I was exhausted. Having him there, so close, was strangely
peaceful, but it didn’t help me relax. I could feel every muscle in my body tiredly tingle.
When half an hour had gone by, I started to wrestle with the sheets again. I was afraid of
waking him.
I considered … decided, listened vigilantly. When I was sure he was in a deep sleep, I extended
my hand … and very slowly slid it under his. I clasped our fingers. In an unconscious reflex,
his hand squeezed mine. I inhaled and I exhaled, and finally, finally I fell asleep.
We were woken up in the morning by the commotion of incoming guards downstairs. I had awoken a
few seconds before Cameron, carefully peeling my hand away from his before he realized what I
had done. My hand suddenly felt cold, unnatural, like it was missing a finger.
The front door slammed shut.
Cameron shot out of bed like a bullet and stood, disoriented, panting, every muscle of his body
tightly clenched, like body armor.
“It’s okay, Cameron,” I gasped. I was scared of him, for him.
He turned abruptly toward my voice. His face was ominous.