We didn’t speak for days. It felt like when you accidentally jump into the deep end of a swimming pool: you expect concrete beneath your feet, but instead you flap, panicked, toes grazing water and water and water.
After Christmas break, the spell lifted. He called me one Saturday. Let’s make a fort, he said. We gathered all the blankets and pillows in the house, rearranged the furniture in the living room. We pressed the couch against the wall, moved all the dining-room chairs to the front of the fireplace. We built a castle out of floral-print sheets and down comforters, lining the different rooms with Persian rugs. When it was finished, we climbed into the “master bedroom”—the largest quarter of the thing, roped off with cream-colored sheets, and we lay down side by side, gazing up at white cotton.
“People have been talking, you know,” Zap said.
“About what?”
“About us. It’s getting pretty annoying. Like Louis the other day. I keep telling them there’s nothing going on, but they won’t believe me.”
I wondered if I was going to be sick. It wasn’t a bad thing I felt then, as he folded his glasses and set them on his stomach. Zap’s elbows were filling out, gaining the muscles and contours I’d come to recognize on grown men. I watched them, his elbows, in the hazy pink light of the fort, and I thought about how you could know someone really well, know everything about them—how they tuck in their sheets, messy in the morning. How their legs bleed when they run through tall grass in summer. You can know all these things, but you’ll never know how it feels to be them: to inhabit their space, to exist in their skin, to grow into their elbows.
I’d seen movies. I’d watched people kiss. I knew how it was supposed to work, kissing, but it always seemed so unnatural to me: pressing parts of your two bodies together, feeling someone else’s wetness against yours. Zap’s mouth was very close to mine, and for the first time, the reality was palpable. Someone else’s teeth were so close, someone else’s tongue. I wanted it. His lips were full, in the dim light of the overhead lamp that filtered through the sheets. Our bodies were cast in this creamy glow, thick with some surging emotion I didn’t recognize.
He felt it, too. When I think about what I’ve lost, it’s not the end I drift back to. Instead, this: Zap’s neck stretching closer to mine, the hollow space above his collarbone, and the seam of his red T-shirt nearly brushing the tip of my chin. He wanted it, too.
Zap sat up, so fast that the top of his head caught the sheet and it engulfed him like a hood. He was a ghost. A corner of the fort fell, leaving us gasping, feeling much older than we were supposed to.
I went home. We didn’t speak for another two weeks. For a few months, our friendship went on as it had, but by the time summer came around, he stopped calling entirely. That’s how it goes. People change, they grow up, I understand. But sometimes it’s like I can still feel the heat of him, can still feel our young stupid hands reaching for one another, shaking with some sort of bewildered love.
Cameron
Cameron had lied. He had read Lucinda’s diary, one page, before he gave it to Mr. O.
January 11th:
What is a window for
Except to watch
Through glass, sometimes
I can feel u
U terrify me
He couldn’t read any more.
Lucinda had doodled five-pointed stars across the top of the page, but they were not careful—they were messy, ink smeared in the corners. Also, she dotted her “i”s with bubbly circles.
U terrify me. Cameron could not look at the words, could not think of glass, could not allow this thing to exist anywhere but with him. So he ripped the page from the diary and tucked it where he’d found it in the first place: the crack between his bed and the wall, where it fell to the dust. He tried desperately to forget.
Her handwriting was not elegant; it did not swirl. Lucinda’s words didn’t dance the way he’d hoped. They didn’t dance at all.
Mom’s van pulled out of the Maplewood Memorial parking lot, and Cameron rolled down his window, even though the dashboard display read twenty-six degrees. The day should not have felt like this: so bright and unabashed, like it wasn’t even sorry. The dry trees flicked by in blurs of naked brown, like they’d peeled off their layers and were learning how to breathe again. This was so unfair.
The quiet calm of the car was oppressive, interrupted only by Mom’s crying. It was not the sort of crying you could hide. Cameron wanted to comfort her, but she was crying for Mr. O, and this was all Cameron’s fault.
They inched forward. Cameron knew what was happening in all the other cars: Mr. O, parents were saying to each other, Mr. O, the art teacher from Jefferson High; remember him from parent-teacher conferences? Kids were sitting wide-eyed in the backseat, hoping this would get them out of homework.
When they pulled up to the house, Mom turned to Cameron.
“Go inside,” she said.
Her eyes were small and red. She pulled a coffee-shop napkin from the cup holder and used it to wipe her nose.
“Where are you going?”
“I’m going down to the station. Cameron, I want you to go in the house. Do not leave until I’m home, don’t answer the door, don’t speak to anyone. Do you understand?”
“Yes,” Cameron said as he slid his legs over the seat and onto solid ground.
“Cam?” Mom said before he could shut the door.
“Yes?”
“I know how you felt.”
“What?”
“About Lucinda. I saw your drawings.”
“Mom, I didn’t—”
“I know you loved her, is what I’m trying to say. I know you loved her in your own Cameron way.”
Mom’s bony hands grasped the steering wheel.
“When I get home,” she said, “I need you to tell me everything. I know it’s hard, and you must miss her terribly, but sweetie, I need to know what you have done.”
Mom motioned for him to shut the door, and before Cameron could tell her that he loved her and he wished she wouldn’t be so hard on herself, the van was bumping out of the driveway and around the corner. Cameron let those words fall off him like snakeskin, rearranging themselves as they hit the ground: What have you done?
Cameron had been in Dad’s closet twice before—both times after Dad had gone, when Cameron had been so Tangled he had lost all sense of time, curled up on cream carpet.
1. When Beth said Cameron was the kind of kid who would bring a gun to school, he came home and opened the chest under Mom’s bed. He stared at the .22 handgun, wondering: Was it possible to lose control of your own body? Could your hands do things your head didn’t want?
2. When he read that book on Mom’s shelf, about the man who killed someone while looking directly into the sun. Albert Camus, The Stranger. Cameron dreamed of ultraviolet rays burning straight through his pupils.