I simply nodded. Once again, those familiar lips, which now tasted like garlic and wine. With Kendall in the car, the others probably watching from the house, it didn’t feel like we should kiss for longer than a few moments. Each millisecond of it was precious.
I got in the car and turned to Kendall, expecting her to give me some kind of look, but she was staring out the window at the moon.
Neither of us said a word on the way home.
In my half sleep, I thought about the “Ferris Wheel” episode of Silver Arrow. It was my favorite of the whole third season, where the Arrow One explores a portal that sends them to 1950s Earth. It lands in a cornfield outside a fair somewhere in the Midwest. The ship creates a temporal anomaly where people get on the Ferris wheel, and by the time they get off, they are much younger. Satina and Azor have to figure out how to fix it before word gets out among the locals.
I loved this episode because of what it said about aging and lost youth, and because it was one of the few where Satina and Azor have a lot of screen time without Atticus Marr around.
Eliza thought I could pull off Satina. Camden did, too. If I didn’t believe them, what did it say about me?
I grabbed my phone and pulled up Camden’s name in my contacts. Letter by letter, I deleted the “Armstrong,” and with each backward stroke it was like I was claiming a little more of him.
Then I called.
“Ari?” he said, sounding very much awake. I wondered if I was just “Ari” on his phone.
“I’m saying yes to the cosplay,” I announced. “Tell Eliza before I chicken out.”
11
The plan fell into place pretty quickly.
We picked three scenes from the “Ferris Wheel” episode to cosplay at the county fair. Accuracy was everything. My job was to look at Eliza’s sketches for all the characters—Satina, Atticus, Azor, and Bram—and make sure they were as spot-on as possible. Over the next two days, Eliza texted me constantly with photos of items or fabric she’d found, asking for my thumbs-up. Every time she shared a new element of Satina’s costume, I couldn’t help but feel like I was being rebuilt piece by piece.
At the end of the second day, Camden called me while Danielle and I were doing the dinner dishes.
“Hang on,” I said as soon as I picked up. I went into my room and locked the door before Dani could follow me in. “Okay. I’m alone.”
“I can say hi now?”
“Yes.”
“Hi,” he whispered, and in the fleeting solitude of my room I crawled inside his voice.
“Hi,” I practically sighed back.
“What did people buy at the store today?”
“Origami paper. Blank canvases. Fancy pens.” I paused. “Did you get any calls at the hotline?”
“A few. I was on the phone with one kid for an hour.”
“And you helped him?” I knew Camden wasn’t allowed to talk about the details.
“I think so. God, I hope so. He promised he’d come to the teen support group this weekend, so we’ll see.”
“He’ll come,” I assured him. “You seem like the kind of person whose advice is worth taking.”
He laughed a bit, surprised. “I do?”
“Yeah. I mean, your friends all look up to you. That’s obvious.”
“It is?”
Was it? I flushed with panic that maybe I’d gotten it wrong. Why was I telling this boy about his life, instead of shutting up and listening to that voice talk about . . . well, anything it wanted to.
But then Camden added, “Maybe you’re right. Maybe they do.” He cracked up again.
“What’s so funny?” I asked.
“I’m remembering this thing that happened last winter.”
“Tell me.”
“Well, Eliza, Max, and James decided they were going to put on a production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream at Dashwood. Eliza was doing the costumes, of course. Max and James thought they could direct it together, but that was a total disaster. Max wanted to make the play shorter by rewriting some of Shakespeare’s lines, and James was like, completely outraged by that.”
“Um, as he should be,” I said.
“I know. But then James kept changing his mind about where one particular tree on the set was supposed to go, which drove Max crazy. I’d never seen him that annoyed. Seriously, I thought the whole show was going to implode. I had to step in and tell them how to fix it.”
“And they listened to you?”
“I was Oberon. Who’s going to mess with a badass Fairie King?”
I laughed, sensing myself falling toward two things at the same time: Camden, of course, and also this group of people who were so important to him becoming part of my life, too.
I’d started telling Camden about a big Mock Trial team fight we had during our biggest competition when Richard rapped on the door and told me that Dani was ready for me to kiss her good night.
“I have to sign off now,” I said.
“Want to go swimming tomorrow?”
“I’m with Danielle all afternoon.”
“Here’s a shocking concept: you can swim with both of us at the same time. I think I can coexist with your sister and not rip a hole in the space-time continuum.”
“She’ll blab to my parents.”
“Let her blab.”
“Easy for you to say.”
“You, too, Ari.”