Cameron knew Mom would be angry if the milk went bad, so he plugged the refrigerator back in and stood in his browning socks in the middle of the kitchen.
At first, it came from behind, and then from the hallway, and then from the direction of the living room, and Cameron felt so stupid spinning in circles, trying to catch something that didn’t want to be caught.
He pictured Mom waking up at four in the afternoon to the sound of Dad’s breath. Sleeping pills and crusty bowls would greet her from the nightstand. She would imagine his big, awful arms around her. She would miss him. Cameron could not bear the thought of Mom missing him.
“Stop.” He said it with all the authority his child voice could muster.
But the walls did not listen. They only stood there, being walls, ignoring his little-boy pleas.
Dad’s hammer was exactly where he’d left it: hanging from a nail in the garage, lodged between Cameron’s old tricycle and Mom’s dusty skis. Cameron pulled the hammer from the wall and stomped back into the kitchen.
The house was filled with the physical remnants of Dad. Crumpled socks in the laundry hamper, sweaty bottles of beer lining the door of the refrigerator. And, of course, his breath. Cameron was sure he was standing in Dad’s lung cavity, the walls were his filthy ribcage, and oxygen was moving up through his windpipe, past his nasal cavity, and into the air of a house, a family, a life he did not deserve.
Someday, Cameron’s windpipe and his nasal cavity and his lungs would be as big as Dad’s. They’d be shaped the same.
“I hope they put him away. I hope he does his time,” Mom had said, on the morning of the arraignment. Her voice had been shaky, a frog. “He deserves it, Cameron. Someday, I promise you’ll understand.”
Cameron didn’t know which wall the sound was coming from, but he figured it didn’t make much of a difference. He started swinging.
He swung and he swung until he could not hear anything but crumbling drywall and Mom’s panicked voice—let’s put the hammer down, good, yes, we’ll get you into pajamas, you’re tired, sweetie, we’ll deal with this in the morning, it’s okay, it’s okay. And, of course, the blank indifference of a house with holes he had created.
The first friend Cameron hurt was the sixth-grade class pet. A sparrow, named Pauly. It had started as “Polly,” but two weeks after Mrs. Macintosh rescued it from the parking lot outside the playground, the vet pronounced it male. Pauly was a tufty, fuzzy brown. His wings were clipped, so they could let him out of his cage when the classroom door was shut.
Pauly would perch on Cameron’s outstretched arm, like he couldn’t tell the difference between Cameron’s skin and the plastic tree Mrs. Macintosh bought at the pet store. This was three years after Dad left, and Mrs. Macintosh told Mom that Pauly was a good outlet for Cameron, that a pet at home might help with his anxiety. Cameron didn’t want one.
In the spring, Mrs. Macintosh took the sixth-grade class—Pauly included—on a camping trip in the mountains.
For two nights and three days they stayed in tents, spread across one of the most popular campgrounds in the Rockies. Mrs. Macintosh showed them how to tell the habits of native animals based on scat. That’s the scientific term for shit, Ronnie said. The class rode horses and watched birds with binoculars. Cameron liked bird-watching best; he learned about the different species native to Colorado. Their habitats. He drew anatomical diagrams over the blue lines of his spiral notebook and cartoons of house sparrows perched in aspen trees.
On the last night of the camping trip, the teachers packed the bus for the three-hour morning drive, and the parent chaperones went to bed. Mr. Howard, the teacher on duty, was asleep in front of the campfire. Come out on my signal, Ronnie had said earlier. Tom has a bottle of whiskey.
At Ronnie’s signal, Cameron unzipped the tent and slipped out. He was curious how the rest of the kids broke rules, and how this looked different from Cameron’s own nighttime rebellion.
Ronnie was waiting at the edge of the woods. Hushed laughter blossomed from a dense cluster of trees, and when Ronnie saw Cameron, he waved and disappeared into the woods.
“Shut up,” Tom was saying from the trees, and Cameron followed the sound of his voice, shining Dad’s heavy metal flashlight across the walking path. “Are you trying to get us caught?”
The sixth-grade class sat in a circle. Girls on one side, boys on the other. Cameron joined the boys’ side, slightly outside the perimeter of their shoulders, between Ronnie and Brady Callahan. He was surprised at how easily he blended in, how his legs folded underneath him. Sitting on the forest floor, he almost looked like everyone else.
Tom had set the bottle of whiskey in the middle of the circle—the same whiskey Dad used to drink late at night in the living-room armchair.
Tom swigged straight from the mouth of the bottle and passed it to Brady, who took a swig, coughed, and passed it to Beth. Soon, Ronnie was clutching the bottle; in the dim moonlight Cameron saw Ronnie sniff the rim of the bottle, discreet, before lifting the neck of it to his chapped lips. He swallowed. Sputtered, and passed it to Cameron.
The moment the liquid touched his tongue, Cameron knew he was going to vomit. The taste was so familiar—it had been in the air all those mornings, as Cameron dressed for school, dried and sticky against the rim of Dad’s glass in the sink.
He didn’t have time to stand up, to turn around, or to direct the spew away from his body. He threw up in his lap, all over his jeans, one hand cupping his own vomit and the other still holding the bottle of whiskey.
The girls squealed. Everyone else started to laugh. Even Ronnie joined in. Cameron could sit in their circles. He could whisper so he didn’t wake the teachers. But he couldn’t laugh like that.
Cameron stood up, dropping the bottle, and stumbled away.
“Where you going, faggot?” Tom hissed, a distant voice on Cameron’s heels. “I thought you were used to swallowing.”
Cameron let the forest hold him. He left Dad’s flashlight in his pocket, where it sank like a stone, and imagined he could melt into the pools of darkness between each solitary tree. Maybe there, wrapped in night, he wouldn’t have to be the kid with jeans covered in stomach acid and whiskey. He should have turned on his flashlight, because the forest was pitch black, but he didn’t want to see anything. He wandered along, vision blurry and salty, stumbling over roots that protruded from the ground like the limbs of the dead.