“It’s good, right?” I said. “Exactly like her.”
Mom looked at the wig for a long time, her mouth twitching further into a smile. “Yes, it’s good,” she finally said. Her expression flatlined. “But I need to meet these friends. Or at least, the boy. Because there’s a boy, right?”
I sighed.
Mom scanned my costume again. “And you need to change before going to the store. It’s weird enough to walk around the fair like that, but—”
“Of course I’ll change. I was about to when you showed up.”
I took the backpack from Mom and started to move down the hall toward Kendall’s room.
“Wait a minute,” said Mom. “Why are you still in the costume now if you wore it last night?”
I froze. Opened my mouth, but nothing came out.
“I dared her to sleep in it,” said Kendall quickly. “She was complaining about how she didn’t want to take it off.”
I nodded. “I got kind of attached. I mean, look at this!” I motioned to the tunic with a flourish.
“Well, there’s always Halloween,” said Mom dismissively. “Go get dressed now, please. I told Richard you’d be there at ten.”
“Yes, sir, Captain,” I said.
On my way to Kendall’s room, I stole a glance back at my mom. She was still holding Satina’s hair, staring at it like she’d just run into an ex. Like she couldn’t decide what to see, the everything between them or the nothing at all.
“Here,” Mom said as she handed me the wig when I came back, changed, a few minutes later. She paused. “Be careful with it. Satina was always so particular about her hair.”
A few hours later, I was driving Richard’s car on my way to pick up some paint at a warehouse in the next town over when my phone rang. It was sticking out of my bag so I only saw “CA” on the screen. But that was enough to make me pull over.
“Do you think I’m an asshole?” he said when I picked up.
“I don’t know,” I lied.
“I think I’m an asshole.”
“Don’t think that.”
“Now you see I’m not that confident, carefree guy you thought I was.”
I was about to say something along the lines of And I like you even more for that, but a gigantic truck thundered by.
“Where are you?” asked Camden.
“By the side of the road on Route 44-55.”
“Well, crap. Call me back later.”
“It’s okay. This is actually the most privacy I’m going to get for a while.” I rolled up the windows and leaned the seat back. “Let’s talk.”
I heard him take a long breath, and maybe heard it shake a bit.
“Last night was . . . amazing, really.” His voice lower now. I closed my eyes and tried to pretend we were on his bed beneath the universe, and with that voice came hands and fingers that touched me.
“I thought you said it was a mistake.”
“I guess it was both,” he said after a pause, sounding pained. “I keep thinking of you next to me, letting me see your arm. I wish I could stay in that moment infinitely.”
“That’s the moment you wish you could stay in?”
Camden laughed nervously, then his voice got soft again. “There were a lot of moments, Ari. But I guess that one . . . that was where I felt the least freaked out. Knowing you’d been through stuff, too. Survived it. Can we get back to that part, where you were telling me about the scars?”
That was before I’d told him about last summer. I was more than happy to go back to that part.
“Where did I leave off?”
“You said you weren’t trying to kill yourself. But what set it off?”
I closed my eyes to the aggressive, almost obnoxious sunlight streaming in through the windshield. Maybe it was trying to scorch away the memory of that cold, midwinter night over a year ago.
“That’s the million-dollar question, isn’t it?” I said. “Thing is, I’m still not sure. My mom was in the final months of nursing school and always gone. I’d had a big fight with Dani because I was trying to finish a science report and she wouldn’t leave me alone. I knew Kendall was at a movie with some of her newspaper friends and didn’t invite me. On the outside, there wasn’t anything special about the day, except that it was one more in a long string of crappy days.”
I paused, opened my eyes.
“But on the inside . . .” I couldn’t articulate it to him. Didn’t want to. “Let’s just say, I had no control over it. It did what it wanted to. In a twisted way I was actually trying to manage it.”
After a few moments, Camden said simply, “I get that.” He was silent for another few moments, then added, “So what did you do with it? The blood, I mean.”
This I had an easy answer for. Facts embedded in a clear memory. “I watched it for a little while. Then I blotted it with toilet paper, and I watched that.”
A red-snake trickle down drip drip drip. The specific feeling of pleasure mixed with pain, gratitude mixed with guilt.
“What happened then?” he asked, almost whispering now. “Did someone find you?”
“No. I think that only happens in movies.”