Lucinda’s face was easy to draw from memory. Her cheekbones were high and bright. The lines near Lucinda’s mouth gave her the appearance of effortless happiness. Her lashes were thick and winged outward, so if Cameron skewed the shape of her eyes or set them too deep beneath her brow line, you could still tell it was Lucinda. In most of the drawings, her mouth was open in laughter; you could see the gap between her two front teeth. Cameron loved that gap. It unclothed her.
Cameron pressed his eyes to his kneecaps. He could not look at Lucinda like this because he had missed her most important parts: The way her legs flew out when she ran, from all those years of ballet. How her hair got frizzy at the front when she walked home from school in the heat. The way she sat at her kitchen table after school, listening to music on her shiny pink MP3 player, drumming white-painted fingernails against the marble. He always imagined she listened to oldies because he thought they fit her. Little bitty pretty one. Cameron had missed the way she squinted when she couldn’t see the board in class, the creases at the corners of her eyes like plastic blinds she had opened to let in the sunlight.
He couldn’t look at Lucinda like this because now she was dead, and all he had were the useless things—a smeared charcoal iris. A pinky finger drawn quickly, slightly too thin.
“Oh God, Cam,” Mom whispered from the doorway. “Oh, God.”
Mom stood with her hands on the doorframe, taking in his ring of drawings, looking like she might crumple. Her pink, striped sweater looked fake and sad, and Cameron wanted to melt her right into him so she wouldn’t look so old. The way Mom’s hands clung to the doorframe reminded Cameron of when he was a kid and Mom did ballet in the basement. She used the dirty windowsill as a barre and put her Mozart tapes in the cassette player. She whispered to herself. And one and two and three and four. Jeté, jeté, pas de bourrée. Cameron watched through the railing of the basement stairs. Her old back never straightened, and her old toes never pointed, and she looked like a bird with a body of broken bones. It made him sad to watch her dance because she looked so fragile and so expressive and so happy and so fragmented, all at once. Mom looked like herself when she danced; he had always thought so.
Cameron wanted to tell Mom that he was sorry for all of this. But he could not, because of the horrified way she was looking at his collection of Lucinda.
Cameron put his head back on his knees and kept it there until he was sure Mom had gone.
Things Cameron Could Not Think About:
1. The .22-caliber handgun in the lockbox underneath Mom’s bed.
Gandhi was assassinated with a Beretta M1934—three bullets to the chest. Lincoln took a bullet from a .44-caliber derringer. A .30-06 hunting rifle killed Martin Luther King Jr., and John Lennon was murdered with a .38-caliber pistol. The only famous person shot with a .22-caliber handgun was Ronald Reagan, who came out of the ordeal just fine. This made Cameron feel a bit better, like maybe if he or Mom were to use the pistol, the chances of actually killing someone were less than if Mom had, say, a 9-millimeter.
2. Dr. Duncan MacDougall.
Dr. Duncan MacDougall claimed in 1907 that the human soul weighed twenty-one grams. Cameron had read this statistic a few years back, after Grandma Mary died. He calculated exactly where he was at the moment she passed: in the kitchen, washing crusty macaroni off a plate. There had been a functioning body on earth and now there was not—didn’t it have to be subtracted somehow? But after Grandma Mary died, the earth weighed twenty-one grams less and Cameron had gone on washing. Nothing had felt lighter.
Cameron tried to calculate exactly where he was last night, when Lucinda died on the playground. He couldn’t fathom it—like when you tried to remember what you had for breakfast, and in the process of fishing for the truth you only pushed it deeper down, until you could have had pancakes or pizza or a five-course meal, but you’d thought about it so much you’d never know.
3. Hum.
Lucinda was probably there now, standing in front of the blue-painted door, wondering how any place could be so peaceful.
4. The strips of translucent hair on Lucinda’s shins where she forgot to shave.
Before Mom picked Cameron up at school that afternoon, Ronnie and Cameron had walked together to history class. Ronnie wore what he’d had on since last Thursday: A pair of forest-green sweat pants and a plain white T-shirt with yellow armpits. An oversized black ski jacket, unzipped. His head stuck out the top like a cardboard box balanced on a #2-pencil neck.
“Dude,” Ronnie said. “This is some seriously crazy shit.”
Police officers milled around at the end of the hall. From this distance, they looked like ants.
Cameron had turned fifteen last month, but he wouldn’t take driver’s ed. He would never learn to drive. He didn’t want to risk getting pulled over and having to look a police officer in the eye. Hey, the officer would say. Aren’t you Lee Whitley’s son?
It didn’t help that they looked similar. Cameron and Dad were both wiry, with long arms that swung when they walked. They had the same light-brown hair. (Cameron grew it out, because Dad had a crew cut.) Pointy nose, pasty skin, hazel eyes. Narrow shoulders, which Cameron hid in various versions of the same baggy hoodie. Knees that bowed in a V shape, pointing naturally inward. Shy feet.
People used to say that Cameron and Dad had the same laugh, but Cameron didn’t like to remember that.
Ronnie had talked all the way to class, and Cameron had ignored him. Ronnie Weinberg was Cameron’s best friend—his only friend—because neither of them knew what to say or when to say it. Ronnie was obnoxious, while Cameron was quiet, and no one else spoke to either of them.
Beth DeCasio, Lucinda’s best friend, had decided a long time ago that Ronnie smelled bad and Cameron was weird. People tended to believe Beth DeCasio. Beth once told Mr. O—Cameron’s favorite teacher—that Cameron was the sort of kid who would bring a gun to school. Aside from dealing with the administrative mess that followed—the interviews with the school psychologist, the calls home to Mom, the staff meeting—Cameron had the same nightmare for four months straight. In the dream, he brought a gun to school and he shot everyone without meaning to. But that wasn’t the worst part. In the dream, he had to live the rest of his life knowing those families were out there, missing their kids. Mom had lots of meetings with the school’s counselors, and after, she’d come home vibrating and angry. Unfounded and unprofessional, she’d say. She’d make Cameron tea and assure him that he would never do such a thing, and besides, it was physically impossible to accidentally shoot a whole school of people.
Cameron still thought about it sometimes. Not in a way that made him want to shoot anyone—still, he felt like a toxin in the bloodstream.