When Cameron played his game of Statue Nights, he wandered down cemetery streets. Quiet, like this small town was an island in the middle of an unchartable ocean.
Cameron liked the way the janitor slouched in his jumpsuit beneath the streetlamp, on the back left side of the school. The janitor smoked a cigarette every hour, on the hour. It must be nice, Cameron thought, to know that comfort was waiting for you—you just had to live through so many more minutes.
They had a secret language, Cameron and the night janitor.
Nights when Cameron felt good, he would nod once from the other side of Elm Street. The janitor always nodded back. On nights when he felt Tangled, Cameron would not nod—he would only stand there, so heavy inside himself. This was enough for the janitor, who would remove his foot from the school’s exterior, where he leaned like a cool kid from an old movie. The janitor would shake out his long, hulking limbs. He’d shrug, as if to say: So?
These nights, Cameron felt less alone, even if your one true friend couldn’t really be made across a yawning midnight street.
Cameron started with the underside of her jaw.
This was the darkest part of Lucinda’s face. The underside of the jaw blending into the neck blending into the collarbone blending into the chest—a continuous spectrum. The light in his bedroom was bad. A frigid dusk. A fly, somehow alive in the cold, slapped its little body across the ceiling. Buzz and thud and buzz and thud. Cameron couldn’t concentrate.
The memorial service was tomorrow, and Mom was ironing his dress shirt in the laundry room. She’d bought the stupid thing for a seventh-grade choir concert, and Cameron had worn it to every formal occasion since. The sleeves were too short. The buttons barely closed around his wrists, and the fabric scratched his skin. But it didn’t matter—the service tomorrow was just a memorial. It was at Maplewood Memorial Chapel and Funeral Home, but Lucinda’s body wouldn’t be there. Her body was probably in a morgue, on a metal table in the basement of some hospital, and people were probably peering down at her over surgical masks.
Cameron started again with her chin. It was too wide, but that was okay, because if you drew someone’s chin too wide, it could still look like them. He moved up toward her lips. His hand was quaking, and his hand never quaked. The edge looked wrong. Once Cameron had looked at it wrong, he realized with a horrifying lurch that he would never look at it right again, because it was on that table now. Her jaw and her lips were there, peeling off their bones, decomposing—unless, maybe, they used some sort of preservation fluid.
Untangle.
He was trying to draw her cheekbones, but these were not right either, and he couldn’t remember where her freckles went, so he counted them—one, two, three, four—but they were in all the wrong places and she was beginning to look cross-eyed and he couldn’t place the corners of her easy eyes or the peaks of her mountain cheeks and when he pictured her face, he could see only the unpainted wall of Jade’s skin. When he looked down, the picture he had drawn was not Lucinda and it was not Jade, and February fifteenth had happened, somehow. For all of them.
Cameron imagined himself holding a gun, pressing his index finger to the cool metal trigger.
Untangle.
He imagined himself holding a gun, pressing his index finger to the cool metal trigger, pressing the barrel to the back of Lucinda’s shiny yellow hair.
Untangle.
He imagined himself holding a gun, .22, pressing his index finger to the cool metal of the trigger, pressing the barrel to the back of Lucinda’s shiny yellow hair; No, she was saying, please don’t, and a whack. He imagined himself looking down at Lucinda on the carousel—his own dirty sneakers, the left shoelace was untied—looking back at her contorted form, watching blood ooze from the gash on her head like a sick sort of halo.
Lucinda first asked Cameron for help on a sunny Saturday, a whole year and a half ago. Last August. The neighborhood was roped off with orange traffic cones—people set up food stands on their driveways. The incoming eighth-grade girls wore bikini tops and denim shorts. The boys walked around shirtless, tan from a summer of chlorine and SPF 15.
Cameron wore his baggy sweat shirt. Take that thing off, Mom told him as she scooped a piece of banana bread onto Mr. Thornton’s plate. Baby Ollie, newborn then, slept in a car seat by Mr. Thornton’s feet. Mom had microwaved the banana bread so the neighbors would think it was fresh. You must be boiling.
Cameron trudged to his bedroom and changed into a plain white undershirt. It made his arms look like two sets of disjointed bones poking from oversized sleeves. No matter how Cameron twisted in the mirror, he was a mess of angles—jutting elbows and corners that didn’t look natural. Like one of those paper skeletons teachers hung in classrooms around Halloween.
Something crashed down the hall. It sounded like broken glass.
When Cameron followed the sound to Mom’s bedroom—to the back, Mom’s marble bathroom—Lucinda Hayes stood in front of the vanity. A smashed perfume bottle lay on the floor, and the smell of Mom on a good night leaked down the cracks in the tile.
Lucinda wore a yellow bikini top and a pair of ripped denim shorts. White strings dangled from the pockets’ seams. Tiny, translucent hairs spread up toward her belly button, and then, the flat expanse of her stomach: it stretched before Cameron, a boundless plain. The tan line on the soft inner skin of her breasts, where another swimsuit had protected her from the sun—it was two shades whiter, naked and goose-bumped. The plastic straps of the bikini top created red tracks that traveled across her collarbone and over her shoulders.
“I’m so sorry,” Lucinda said in the bathroom, standing over the broken perfume bottle. “I didn’t mean to break it. I was just looking.”
“It’s okay,” Cameron said, pulling Mom’s bath towel off the hook next to the shower curtain. He kneeled down to collect the bits of broken glass in his cupped palm. Lucinda watched from her spot next to the toilet.
Cameron knew Lucinda was pretty, but he’d never seen her squint like this. She squinted at him and she did not seem annoyed or disgusted. She squinted at him like she would squint at anyone else, and this in combination with the small smile that folded across her mouth made Cameron very certain: she was kind. So while Cameron desperately wanted to know why Lucinda was in his mother’s bathroom, he would not ask. Later, when Cameron stood on Lucinda’s lawn and watched her through the window, he would think: no reason at all. Fate. The world had simply pushed Lucinda toward him.
“So?” Lucinda said.
“I—I’m sorry?”
“Do you want me to buy you a new one? Or your mom, I guess?”
“No,” Cameron said. “It’s fine.”
Lucinda pulled aside the curtain at the bathroom window and peered out, rubbing her hands together nervously, a fruit fly. Her fingers were tan and tapered, thin, but not too bony.
“Can I stay here for a minute?” she said.