My mom was working hard to finish nursing school. My stepdad, Richard, was gone most days, running his art supply store. There were meals to prepare and a self-regenerating to-do list stuck to the fridge with alphabet magnets. Also, the small matter of a real live child who needed to be, you know, fed and clothed and supervised. I filled the gaps. Sometimes it felt like there were more gaps than whatever it was that went between the gaps.
Let’s keep her busy, I’d heard my mother tell Richard once. She didn’t want me to have time to retreat into myself, apparently a place full of dark corners and hazardous material.
Kendall was my friend and wanted to help, too. What was happy anyway? A dumb-sounding word, if you really broke it down. Happy was something you didn’t think too much about because if you did, you knew you weren’t.
I turned to look out at the raft where Camden sat by himself, staring off into the sky. I was always confronting the sky with questions, but that didn’t seem to be the case with him. It was more like he and the sky were collaborators. Like maybe he had the whole edgeless thing on his side.
How would that even feel? I couldn’t imagine. But, oh, to find out.
Soon, summer began in earnest, so hot and green and wet, it was hard to remember what any other season felt like. I saw Camden at the lake a couple of times a week, but it was always from afar and we never spoke. He usually came alone, which totally fascinated me—who had the nerve to come to the lake alone?—but sometimes he did come with friends: a rickety-tall boy and a petite girl with long, straight, jet-black hair. They’d disappear down a trail into the woods for a while before coming back out to strip down to their bathing suits and do yelping cannonballs off the dock.
I knew the lifeguards liked to drink or smoke stuff in those woods after the beach closed at night. Were Camden and his friends bold enough to do it during the day? And if I myself didn’t smoke anything and had even washed cars as a fund-raiser for Students Against Drunk Driving, why did the thought of Camden doing these things make my kneecaps feel unattached from my legs?
“We’re hardwired for the naughty ones,” sighed Kendall once, as we spotted Camden and his compadres come out of the woods. “It really sucks.”
Here’s one thing I learned watching Camden during those weeks: a person’s body can move and not ever touch you, but still have a physical impact on yours. He leaned against the diving board railing as he waited his turn, and it was like I was that railing. The motion of his hand as he ran it through his wet hair while talking—long fingers scattering beads of water—or the angles of his elbows as he stretched out on the sand: these things could make the hair on my arms stand up.
I never liked the word attraction. It’s way too much about magnets, and not enough about why someone’s mere presence can make you feel pleasure and pain at the same time.
Crush didn’t work either. I wasn’t twelve.
What should I have called it? I just called it Camden.
Sometimes, I’d catch him looking my way. A trick of the light, of course. Or the wishiest wishful thinking. Because there was no way I could possibly be worth that.
“Go talk to him,” said Kendall the time we caught Camden glancing at us while he stood in line for the snack shack. “Seize the moment.”
“I will,” I said. “I will.”
“I mean, this moment. Not some theoretical future moment.”
“I have to keep an eye on Dani.”
“I have two. I’ll keep them both on her.”
“Plus, I already have an ice cream. It would be so obvious that I was going over for him.”
“So?”
“Then he would know.”
“Argh,” snarled Kendall. “You’re making me crazy with this. What are you so afraid of?”
I looked at Camden again. He was at the window now, joking with Mabel. She was actually laughing. I hadn’t even known that she could laugh, and that it sounded like a chipmunk on helium.
What was I afraid of? Anything that might tip me off balance and make me fall back into that place I knew was still there, waiting beneath all my newly glossed-over, smoothed-out surfaces. But I couldn’t explain it to her, because I couldn’t even explain it to myself.
As the summer went on, Kendall gathered more details from one of her three older brothers, who seemed to know everyone with one or two degrees of separation. His mom was named Maeve Armstrong and was a medium-famous artist. They lived in a converted church that was either lavender or turquoise—the reports varied on that. He’d been homeschooled until last fall. The most delicious rumor was that his father was Ed Penniman, the lead singer for the legendary punk band the Stigmaddicts.
All this was unconfirmed, of course. But I knew two things about Camden Armstrong for sure:
1) His eyes were the exact same forest green as the diving board.
2) I ached for him in places I never knew could ache, like earlobes and collarbones.