Jamie’s eyes return to mine. She reaches for her bag and takes the camera out, pinching the sides of the lens cap and smuggling it away inside a pocket. Her finger nudges a tab and the shutter twitches to life with a click. She looks through the viewfinder and snaps a picture of the empty rear of the bus. “It sees more than I can. Captures those tiny moments in time. Things you think are soft but they’re really solid. Like light,” she says, but I can hardly hear her above the engine. “Unexpected things. Vulnerabilities.”
The camera lands on me and I hide in my sleeve. “Don’t.”
It sinks down, revealing her face.
Hers is such an interesting face.
“Take a self-portrait,” I say.
“I have,” she says. “Thousands.”
“Thousands?”
Jamie hugs the camera to her cheek. “You think it’s egotistical?”
“No.” But I might be a little jealous.
She tugs her skirt down and rests the camera on her leg. I swear it nestles in like a pet cat. “I could take a nice picture of you in your uniform, if you want.”
“What uniform?”
“Your football uniform.”
“I’m no more a football player than you are a heroin addict.”
“You’re not?” I hate that she’s surprised. “I figured, football season, your leg, you can’t play. Benched. Depression, self-destruction, all that jazz.”
“Time to change your tune.”
I can’t bring myself to look at her face after that.
The world will never see me as the smart guy, the guy who likes to sop up equations like crusts of bread dipped in warm soup. Everyone but my mom thinks the rows of A’s on my report cards are a quarterly mistake. Why am I killing myself over grades when I could just be running into other meatheads, bringing glory to our town?
If I were a withered, hundred-pound string bean who could barely hoist a backpack, no one would think twice. It’d be, Oh hey! Look at Dylan dominating the honor roll again. Of course he did; isn’t that jolly. Indeed. Pip-pip, cheerio, send him off to Oxford on his Rhodes Scholarship, where he can squirrel away in a turret and ruin his eyesight by reading all those tasty history books.
And there it is. My dream.
I’ve never told a single person alive that I want the Rhodes. That I want to wake up in an eight-hundred-year-old dorm room in England and dash to class in a building that looks like something out of a Harry Potter novel. That I want to drink a tall pint and talk about All the Things at The Bird and Baby, the tavern where J. R. R. Tolkien hashed it out with C. S. Lewis every Tuesday at lunch.
I want to understand cancer, and not just the cellular kind. All cancer, because that shit is everywhere in all forms. There’s very little difference to me between a malignant tumor and the Salem witch trials of 1692. Faced with his entire world going to hell, a seventy-year-old farmer named Giles Corey refused to plead guilty to practicing witchcraft, so they pressed him to death. And what did he do? He looked them all in the eye and said, “More weight.” That’s amazing to me. I like to think my dad was similar in his final days. Dead at twenty-six. I’d like to think he threw up the double birds and said, “More weight,” because fuck you, cancer.
I don’t know if there’s such a thing as a historical oncologist or an oncological historian, but I don’t see why I can’t be the first. It’s a solid step up from some bullshit major like underwater basket weaving. Oxford is the perfect place for a Dr. Dylan Ingvarsson, MD, PhD, to do quite a bit of both.
Only my dad knows my top secret dream. Being dead makes him magic because he’s officially become a part of history, however small. But if I told a living, breathing person my biggest wish, of somehow blending obscure history into the cure for cancer, they’d be like, that’s nice—here’s a football.
Try not to chew it too hard.
My gut falls into its very own tar pit and right now, all I want is to go home and sink into bed. I take my phone out and hit the screen. Twenty-two messages. All from Mom. I should get off this bus and call her. Tell her I thought I’d make it easy on her and take the bus home.
A bus that ended up going in the wrong direction.
“Hey,” Jamie says. She stands. “Come with me.”
“And do what?”
The bus skids into a blank patch reserved on the pavement. The door opens. She looks over her shoulder. “Now or never.”
Her boots tap-tap-tap down the aisle. My phone starts to vibrate. I don’t think about how fast I’m shoving it back into my pocket; I’m too busy giving my wheels a giant push. The driver sees me and the bus starts to kneel. Now or never.
SEVEN
Downtown Portland looks like what a five-year-old would doodle up if you gave them a piece of paper and some crayons and said, now draw a city. There are rectangular buildings with glass windows standing tall in various heights on square blocks. Very basic. You’d win at Pictionary. But with any city, it’s not always the surroundings that make it worth visiting; it’s the people—and this town is the ultimate grab bag. Fixie-bike drag racers, eco-warriors, steampunk foodies, zoobombers, caffeine snobs. You need to fulfill a lifelong search for someone with a fork tattooed on their neck? We got you covered. Couple years here in the rain and everyone wears the same thin coat of moss. It keeps us huddled together and loving weird things like bewitched donuts and refusing to use umbrellas when it’s pouring out.