Mr. Thornton. He wore a wool coat, unzipped. Shiny shoes. A button-down shirt with no tie, the first few buttons undone to reveal a spouting of chest hair. Mr. Thornton was kissing Lucinda on the mouth, pressing his forehead against hers, and wrapping father hands around Lucinda’s shark-fin hips.
And with him: the limping little dog. Mr. Thornton clicked off its leash and the dog—happy to be outside and free—sniffed lethargically around the trunk of the wind-chime tree. Mr. Thornton zapped the extendable rope up into the leash like a tape measure, holding the big square of blue plastic by the handle. This was Mr. Thornton’s ten o’clock walk—Cameron had always gone home when Mr. Thornton brought the dog outside, afraid of sharing his nighttime space.
Cameron stayed behind the tree. The bark ran up and down the tree in patterns he could have molded with his hands—faces that glared, faces that judged, and some that watched, unsurprised, as Lucinda kissed Mr. Thornton back.
They whispered things Cameron could not hear. It occurred to him how you could watch people all their lives. You could watch them sing along to music, but you’d never hear what song. You could watch them drink cups of tea before bed, but you’d never know that bitterness on their tongue. You could watch them talk on the phone, but they could be in love with the person on the other end of the line. Sight was useful, and also beautiful—but it was not necessarily truth. The truth was a rock lodged deep in Cameron’s gut, and before he could turn around, before he could leave her diary on the ground next to the tennis courts for the cold to freeze over, Lucinda and Mr. Thornton started to yell.
Cameron only caught the loudest words.
“You wouldn’t,” Mr. Thornton was saying. “I know you wouldn’t.”
It happened in one instant, so trivial and seemingly unimportant that Cameron would not understand how, already, death had appeared.
Mr. Thornton was digging his man fingers hard into Lucinda’s shoulders. She was yanking herself away, Mr. Thornton was reaching for her, she was stumbling backwards, taking quick steps across the lawn. She turned around and ran toward the playground, and Mr. Thornton ran after her.
He caught up with Lucinda at the carousel. In one swift blow, his arm, heavy with that sorry little dog’s leash—a flash of sharp blue plastic tucked in his palm—cracked against the side of her head.
A small scream as she fell. Quickly silenced.
Cameron wanted to yell out. No: He wanted Lucinda to call for him. To acknowledge that she knew Cameron was there, that he was watching, had always watched. That Cameron loved her and he would help. But Lucinda only lay on her stomach on the carousel, the back of her skirt flipped up with the force of the fall.
It did not look like death at all. Mr. Thornton was kneeling in his suit, shaking her, begging, but she was limp. Gone. Minutes passed, and Mr. Thornton sprinted, panicked, back to the fence, where the dog sniffed calmly around the bushes, and then into his house. The faces in the tree grimaced at Cameron as the scene swirled around him—chaos, midnight, matted gold hair.
Cameron stood in the shadows with the diary, as Lucinda lay with her head turned grotesquely sideways. For the first time in his life, Cameron had what he wished for: he was invisible.
Miraculously, the snow. The sky’s kindest form of mourning. Cameron let the flakes land and rest on his hands, his neck. He begged them not to melt.
When he could no longer feel his skin, when the snow had given his entire body a coat of fur and his jacket was soaked through, when his mouth was filled with the snot that had run from his nose, Cameron dared to move again. To leave her. It was not Lucinda, lying with her eyes open on the carousel: just a girl in a bleeding blanket of white.
As he walked away, he heard the click, then slam of a door. The night janitor. Cameron’s only friend in the world. From his angle by the door, the night janitor would not see Lucinda until he crossed the parking lot in the morning, at the end of his shift. So Cameron took up his usual spot on the street—tonight, he was Tangled, so he did not nod. The janitor shrugged, as always. Raised his palms to the sky, like Yes, yes, I know it’s cruel.
Cameron left him to the discovery.
Now, on the cliff, with Jade staring terrified at the gun by his side, Cameron remembered flashes of the rest of that night: the floor of Dad’s closet with Lucinda’s diary tucked, damp and sacred, between his shirt and his belt. He remembered making terrible slashes with charcoal. Realism is made up of what you see, Mr. O always said, and Cameron had hated him for this.
So with his legs dangling over a brutal formation of rocks, Cameron remembered the side of Lucinda’s face, and he hated Mr. Thornton’s massive hands, foreign and unexpected all over her. He was sad, he was so sad, because Lucinda was not alive and she was not loving him. She was not loving anyone—but she especially was not loving Cameron. He didn’t know which devastated him more: that Lucinda was gone, or that she was gone and the reason had nothing to do with him.
Jade
Ma once told me I have a heart made of stone. I’ve never forgotten this. Often, I imagine my heart sitting heavy in my chest, a rock sunk to the bottom of a muddy lake.
Cameron lifts the small black handgun, and I have the brief, stupid thought that this will save me. You can’t hurt someone made of minerals.
I have no idea what just happened. But I sense it, clear and electric: danger. I am in danger.
Cameron’s head is thrown back on his neck like the beginning of a laugh. He fiddles with the gun, hands in his lap, bitten nails traversing the barrel, the magazine, the trigger. The gun is small, less than five inches long, but it looks massive in Cameron’s hands. The air smells like iron. Urine.
The wind picks up, and my hair snaps across my shoulders. At the sudden motion, Cameron sits straight again. Laces his finger through the trigger.
What do you want? I try to ask myself, because I think it might be over. I want to see New York. I want to write something like lava, like gravity. There are things beyond the border of Broomsville, and I want to know how they taste. Somewhere, there is a person who will stand with me under the bathroom fluorescents, and when they say I want you, they will mean it. I want to be unafraid of death, but my heart is not made of stone, it’s made of the same thing as everyone else’s. I want to be unafraid of memory.
For the first time, my future is manifest, material—hovering just feet away from me, in the hands of a boy who barely understands he holds it. I could reach out and touch it.
“Mr. Thornton,” Cameron says. “I remember. It was Mr. Thornton.”
I first saw the ballerina on Eve Thornton’s dresser. It always looked out of place—the thing is too delicate to look natural anywhere in the Thorntons’ house, which is still packed in boxes from their move two years ago.