“Ah, right.”
“I wasn’t sure what to do after I got tired of watching the bleeding. I was just sort of sitting there. I was maybe even a little bored. I’d made a lot of cuts and they were starting to hurt, because the peas were wearing off. So I left all the . . . evidence . . . and went out.”
I kept talking and telling. About my mother frantically calling my cell phone, then Kendall frantically calling my cell phone because my mother had frantically called her. I described myself driving north on Route 32 until an unexpected snow started falling, and I got nervous, then turned around and drove south until the car fishtailed at a stoplight. That was when I knew it was time to go home and step into the situation I’d created.
We listened to each other breathe for a little while after I stopped talking.
“So how did you get here from there?” he finally asked. “How did you get better?”
“Therapy. Medication.” Bad decisions. Better decisions. Him. “I started believing in something I call the Possible.”
“Is that what you were doing last summer, at the lake? Believing in the Possible?”
“Yes.”
He didn’t respond, and I started to worry that we’d been disconnected. At last he said, “Keep believing in that, Ari.”
“I will.”
“Keep believing in me, too.”
Tears welled up in my eyes. It was all I wanted. That, and being able to reach through the phone and bite his ear.
“Okay,” I said. “But first, you’re going to have to meet my mom.”
“Arrowhead Mom?” he asked, sounding relieved, unburdened. “Uh, yes please.”
“She’s not really that cool anymore. Or ever.”
“Pshaw.”
“I’m talking about dinner with the family and everything.”
“A normal family dinner? That’s like a fantasy of mine.”
“My family isn’t normal.”
“Normal is relative.”
I sighed. “I guess you’ll see where we fall on that spectrum.”
“It’ll be fine, Ari,” he said, as if aware that he could make anything okay as long as he added my name at the end. I’m going to chomp the heads off baby ducklings, Ari. Do you mind if I date two other girls while I’m dating you, Ari?
We said good-bye and I held the phone in my hand for a while, feeling its warmth as a substitute for the warmth of Camden’s skin.
“Okay,” I said to myself, moving the seat back into position. I turned the ignition back on, felt the blast from the AC hit me square on the cheek. I wasn’t sure what the conversation had accomplished, what we’d just agreed to. We were still nervous and uncertain, directionless and green. Maybe we’d simply agreed to be all these things together, and that was enough for now.
I pulled onto the road and drove toward the address Richard had given me, glad that at least in one respect, I knew exactly where I was going.
15
“Tonight, tonight, a boy is coming over tonight!” sang Dani to the tune of her favorite West Side Story song, squeezing in syllables where there should not have been syllables. This was cute the first three times. Coming up on the twentieth, not so much.
Mom was at the stove, cooking moussaka. She was starting her new job the next day, which meant she had a lot of nervous energy. She’d vacuumed and dusted and brought out the linen place mats. It was all a little horrifying.
What had Richard told her about Camden and his friends? And what had Dani told her about “the dude who Ari likes to swim with at the lake”? She wasn’t letting on. What Mom definitely knew about Camden: that his mom was an artist, that he went to Dashwood, that he lived in a converted barn, that we’d met at the lake.
What Mom didn’t know: everything else.
Since that morning at Kendall’s, Mom and I hadn’t spoken about the cosplay at all. I’d washed the Satina costume and hung it in my closet, the wig in a bag hidden on a shelf where Dani couldn’t get to it. I’d almost put the boots in there, too, but after half a day in sandals I slipped them on again.
I brushed dirt off the left boot as I sat on the top step of our porch, waiting for Camden. Richard was mowing the lawn in the hazy early evening half-light. Crickets made a racket and I felt a very particular combination of anticipation and dread.
When Camden’s car drove up, I met it in the driveway. He rolled down the window and there was his face, that face. I leaned in, wanting desperately to kiss him. But I didn’t know if that was okay, with Richard there. If it was okay, after what happened at the Barn.
“Hey,” I said.
“Hey,” he said back, smiling like I’d said infinitely more than that. He looked way too excited, and way too handsome, to be here.
“They don’t know about your mom being away this summer.”
“Oh, I’m getting a debriefing?”