Trusting You and Other Lies

  “You bet.” Harry inspected the bandage covering his wrist. It was sparkling with shocking-green glitter.

  “Don’t worry. I’ll change it when we get to the cabin,” I said, guessing what he was thinking.

  He shrugged. “Why were you and Callum looking at each other so weird before we left just now?”

  I stopped in the middle of the trail heading toward our cabin. “What are you talking about?” I reminded myself to play it cool because Callum and I had been careful. No one had picked up on us yet. Least of all a ten-year-old boy.

  “You know. You guys were being all weird.”

  I made myself keep walking. “How were we looking at each other?”

  Harry made duck lips as he thought about it. “The way me and my friends look at each other when we’re trying to say something, but someone else is around and we don’t want them to hear. You know, when we have a secret we want to keep private.”

  So much for thinking we’d been secretive. “Callum and I do not look at each other that way.”

  Harry shoved his glasses up on his nose and huffed. “What’s going on? Is he still mad at you about the accident?”

  I practiced my most convincing voice in my head before replying, “No.”

  “Still giving you the silent treatment because you totally let him down?”

  I sighed and elbowed him. “No, nothing like that.”

  “Then what is it like?” This time he was the one who stopped in the middle of the trail.

  Moving a little closer, I scanned the area. Nothing but trees, trees, and trees. “You can’t tell anyone.”

  “Not even Mom?”

  “Especially not Mom.”

  I cocked an eyebrow so he knew I meant business. He threw his arms up. “Okay, fine. What?”

  My eyes squinted as I reconsidered telling him. Harry was trustworthy, but he was ten. Most ten-year-olds could barely spell trustworthy, but I was tired of everyone keeping secrets from us. I couldn’t control what my parents chose to keep from us, but I could control what I kept from Harry. As little as possible was my goal.

  “Callum and I are kind of, you know, seeing each other.” I put my hands on my hips. Then dropped them back at my sides.

  Harry’s face crinkled up. “Seeing each other?” he said slowly. “Haven’t you guys been doing that since, like, you first met?”

  It took me a second to understand what he was getting at. Yeah, I was so talking to a ten-year-old boy. I tried again. “You know, we’ve been getting kinda serious?”

  Harry blinked. “Eh, shocker, Phoenix, but you have always been serious, and Callum…he doesn’t seem like the nonserious type, either.”

  I shook my head and did one more scan of the area. And how ’bout them trees? “We’re dating, okay? Seeing each other, getting serious…in a dating kind of way.”

  Harry’s whole face flattened with shock. “Whoa,” he said “Like a boyfriend-girlfriend kind of way?”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  Harry started to get animated then. Spinning in circles and giving off woots. “Holy smokes. Callum is your boyfriend?”

  “I don’t know I’d call it that.”

  That was when an arm rung around my waist before he pulled me to his side. I could have jumped out of my skin if it wasn’t so plastered in Elmer’s Glue. “Well, I don’t know what you’d call it, but I’d call you my girlfriend.” Callum grinned over at me and fired a wink, before holding his hand high up in the air for Harry.

  Harry didn’t even pause before leaping up and smacking a solid high five. “My sister is dating the coolest guy at camp. Mind blown.”

  “My life’s purpose. To date the cool guy at camp,” I deadpanned, totally straight-faced.

  When Callum lifted his hand again for Harry to high-five, I intercepted it.

  “Yeah, yeah, I get it. You guys are best pals and on each other’s side. Fabulous. But we have to see Mom, and you”—I pointed at Callum—“have a practice test to complete before dinner.”

  He grumbled, but I knew he’d do it. He’d been going through a couple of mini practice tests every day since we started studying and with his persistence and my savvy when it came to researching just about any topic on the Internet—test-taking anxiety in this case—his scores were getting better maybe due to some creative scoring on my end. But I wasn’t ready to tell him about my extra help yet.

  “Yes, ma’am.” Callum gave a little salute and smiled as he started backing away. “Hope ‘the talk’ goes okay. Meet me at the Swallow Lake beach later?”

  Callum had introduced me to a private beach close by camp last night where we were supposed to spend a couple of hours studying. That hadn’t worked out as well as we’d planned. “For studying?”

  “Whatever you want,” he answered with a big grin. Then he disappeared down the trail.

  “You just told him to go take a test, and he listened, like, lickety-split.” Harry snapped his fingers, blinking at the spot Callum had disappeared. “You’re a drillmaster, Phoenix.”

  “Why, thank you.” I gave a little bow before wrapping my arm around Harry’s shoulders and pressing on. I wanted to get this over with.

  The cabin was just up ahead when I noticed Harry’s face line with concern. “Phoenix? Do you know what this is about? I’ve had lots of talks with Mom before, but never one I’ve had to schedule with her.”

  My fist curled around his shoulder. “I’ve got an idea.”

  When Harry swallowed, his whole throat moved. “Are we going to be all right?”

  “Of course we’re going to be all right. I’ve got your back no matter what. I’ll look after you no matter what.” I paused at the bottom of the cabin’s stairs. “You know that, right?”

  Harry was staring up the stairs like they were insurmountable, but when he glanced up at me, his face cleared. “Yeah, I know that.”

  Before I could catch myself, I mussed his hair. If he was irritated, he didn’t show it. Instead, he exhaled and climbed the steps with me.

  “Mom?” I called through the screen door. The main door was open.

  “In here!” she called as the scent of…baking fanned over me. Harry sniffed at the air as we exchanged a look like neither of us could believe it. Mom used to bake—pies, cookies, and breads—but not recently.

  “Cookies,” Harry sighed with another sniff before charging into the cabin.

  “I’m just pulling the last batch from the oven.” Mom was standing in front of the stove, skillfully sliding cookies from the baking tray to a cooling rack. Oatmeal chocolate chip. Harry’s and my favorite. “Go ahead and have a seat at the table, you two. I’ll be right over.” Mom wiped her hands off on her jeans after licking a few gooey globs of chocolate from her fingers.

  Harry sprinted to the table and crashed into a chair so quickly he almost sprained his other wrist, but I stood there watching her. It was like she’d transformed into the mom of my childhood, dancing around the kitchen to whatever song she had blaring on the radio, letting me whack metal pots with wooden spoons while she experimented with some new recipe. Flour in her hair, her sleeves rolled up to her elbows, the smile on her face…I had a sudden urge to run and wind my arms around her so she could soothe and kiss and pat all my problems away like she used to be able to.

  That was when I reminded myself that the problems of a seven-year-old were entirely different from the problems a seventeen-year-old encountered. They were trivial in comparison.

  “Phoenix?” Mom paused when she noticed me standing at the door.

  I shifted and flushed the urge to let her comfort me away. “Do you need any help?”

  “Yes.” She waved at the table where Harry was already helping himself to a towering plate of cookies. There were three glasses of milk at the table, too. “I need help eating those cookies. Every last one of them.”

  Harry grinned over at her, his teeth all coated in chocolate. He lifted his second cookie in the air.

  Mom motioned at the cha
ir beside Harry and waited for me. When I took a seat, she looked between us, the happy calm seeming to drain from her face. When she took her own seat across from us, she shifted restlessly. I’d picked up a cookie, but so much for eating it. Not when I felt like my heart was lodged in my throat.

  “I want you both to know that no matter what, your dad and I are going to take care of you. You’re going to be okay, and we’re going to get through this.”

  Mom glanced at the wall clock, like I did when I couldn’t wait for class to be over. She hadn’t even really started talking and was already counting down the seconds until we would be finished.

  Not good.

  “You both know that your dad lost his job two years ago and that things have been…difficult since.”

  Sure, if difficult was the code word for disastrous, then sure, things had been difficult.

  “Your dad made good money at his job, money we depended on to pay for the house and school and lots of things.” She slowly twisted the glass of milk in her hands, staring into it. “When he got laid off, he wasn’t able to find another job that paid anything close to what he was making, so we knew he could either take a lower-paying job and we’d have to make some changes, or he could keep searching for a similar-paying job and we could hang on for a while…until things ran out.”

  “Things being money,” I added, sounding impatient. I didn’t need a recap of the past; I needed a general sketch of the future.

  “Instead of uprooting you kids, we chose to hold on to the life we’d been living, hoping…”

  I snorted over the hoping part, wondering when unicorns and magical lands were going to show up in this conversation.

  “It didn’t work out the way we’d hop—” Mom stopped when I snorted again. “The way we’d planned. Your dad wasn’t able to find the same kind of job and things—money—has run out.” She was looking at me the whole time, but it was that statement that shifted Harry’s attention from the cookies to the conversation.

  “We don’t have any money?” He swallowed the bite he’d been chewing. “Are we, like, poor?”

  Mom’s eyes went glassy instantly. She was going to cry. I was watching, waiting for the first tear to fall, when she lifted her shoulders, sniffed, and forced a small smile aimed Harry’s way. “We have money, sweetheart. We’re not poor.” She didn’t blink as she talked to him. “But we can’t keep holding on, watching that money shrink, keeping our fingers crossed. It’s time to make some changes. That’s what I want to talk about.”

  Harry bobbed his head, but he looked nervous. I might not have looked it, but I felt nervous.

  “We have to move,” she said. The glass of milk stopped twisting. “We’ve got to leave our house and move to another one.”

  Harry’s face went white. “My Legos? My computer? They’re goners, aren’t they? I’m never going to see them again?”

  Mom shook her head as hard as I did. “No, Harrison, your Legos and computer and everything else are just fine. That’s why your dad left. He’s home, packing up the house so we can bring everything with us to the new house.”

  “The new house will be in the same school district, right?” I scooted forward in my chair. I knew we were losing the house. I’d known for a while. I knew downsizing and budgeting and all those adult things would be involved, but I’d just assumed we’d stay in the same general area so Harry and I could stay at the same schools.

  Mom’s face answered my question on its own. My lungs collapsed, and I couldn’t breathe. “That’s what we really wanted, Phoenix. We did everything we could to find a place where you and Harrison could stay at the same schools, but our neighborhood is expensive.” Mom exhaled and dropped her eyes. “Too expensive for our present situation.”

  I glanced over at Harry, expecting him to be freaking out. Instead, he looked a little concerned, but that was about it. I was the one who felt like the room was closing in on me.

  “Where are we moving to?”

  “We’re moving a little inland—somewhere in Riverside County. You’ll be attending Jefferson High, and Harrison…” Mom bit her lip and shook her head. She looked kind of defeated, like she’d been beaten down so many times she couldn’t peel herself off the ground again. “We’re still trying to figure that out.”

  “Riverside County? Jefferson High?” My hands curled into fists in my lap. This was worse than I’d thought. “I’ve never even heard of Jefferson High, and I’m supposed to spend my senior year there?”

  “Phoenix,” Mom warned, indicating toward Harry.

  Harry was twisted in his seat, his head moving from me to our mom like we were playing a tennis game.

  My nails were digging into my palms enough it hurt. I didn’t stop, though. “Do they even have a cross-country team? Do they even have a track? What’s an Ivy League school going to think when my application shows me transferring from one of the best schools in the state to Jefferson High?” My voice made it sound like Jefferson were Alcatraz. “Everything I’ve worked for…I’m one year away…and you guys are doing this to me?” I slammed the table in front of Harry. The cookies rattled on the plate. “To us?” I imagined Harry stuck in some new school. The kid would spend most of his classes probably stuffed in custodian closets and garbage cans.

  “I know, Phoenix. I’m sorry.” Mom’s eyes were welling again, but her voice was controlled.

  “No, you don’t know!” I shot out of my chair so fast my knees banged the edge of the table. The milk from my glass spilled over the sides. Another mess to clean up. “And if you were sorry, you’d be doing something about this instead of baking cookies.”

  In his chair, Harry looked like he was about to cry as he rubbed at his upper lip, but I couldn’t stay to comfort him. I had to get out of here. I had to get away from her before I threw the plate of cookies at her face. The cookies…yeah, because that made up for ruining your kids’ lives.

  “Where are you going?” she called as I stormed toward the door.

  “If I thought you cared, I might actually tell you.” When I’d shoved through the screen door, I paused long enough to fire a glare at her. “But it’s pretty clear you don’t give a damn about my future.”

  Life was back to normal.

  I wasn’t talking to my mom again. She wasn’t talking to me much, either. Maybe it was because we’d said enough or didn’t have anything else to add. We were moving out of the school district.

  It was such a helpless feeling, having my whole life pulled out from beneath me. I’d spent most of the week just trying not to think about it.

  It was easier to say than do most of the time…except those times I was with Callum. Or on my way to seeing him, like I was now.

  I’d just finished yet another long day of decoupaging and friendship bracelet weaving, and only a hard ten-mile run had helped me to recover from my bout with creativity.

  The rain had started a little while ago, but unlike everyone else, who’d grabbed one of the loaner umbrellas, I went without. It hadn’t rained in weeks, and the change in the weather was refreshing, if not a relief. The gray skies and rain more matched my mood than the blue-sky, sunny ones.

  The walk from the dining hall to the staff cabins was only a few minutes, but I was pretty much soaked by the time I bounced up the stairs to Callum’s cabin. He’d been leading an advanced group of mountain bikers earlier and should have gotten back a couple of hours ago. Usually, he stuck his head in the dining hall to wave and make sure I hadn’t taken a butter knife to my wrists after a papier-mâché project gone bad.

  Today, though, I hadn’t seen him. Not since our morning run, at least, which we’d actually completed. Without any “breaks.”

  So far, he’d taken his promise seriously. When we were supposed to train, we trained. When we were supposed to study, we studied. When we were supposed to take five-minute breaks…we usually took ten. Sometimes fifteen. Callum’s test scores were still improving, too. Mostly thanks to his efforts, but a little thanks to mine and
my creative strategies. But it was working. Callum and I were getting it right.

  It felt like the only thing in my life that was.

  When I knocked on the cabin door, I didn’t hear the usual rushed sound of footsteps approaching. I didn’t hear anything. I leaned over the porch railing to peek in the window. It didn’t look like anyone was inside. It was just late enough I guessed the other guys Callum bunked with were probably out doing their own thing.

  I knocked again, and when there was still nothing, I turned the doorknob. It was unlocked, so I pushed the door open.

  “Hello?” I called. “Anyone here?”

  No answer.

  “Callum?”

  I was about to let myself in to dry off and get a jump on studying, when the bathroom door at the end of the cabin opened a little. “Come on in!” Callum called, his head appearing in the crack of the door. “I’m just getting out of the shower. Make yourself comfortable. You know, if you can in a cabin shared by four guys.”

  He smiled the one that made my throat go dry, but it already was. Something about him mentioning the shower and me realizing he was very likely naked behind that door made my throat, knees, and heart malfunction.

  He was just ducking behind the door again when he stopped. “Did you swim through a river to get here or something?” His eyes moved down my body. More slow than quick.

  “Rain. Cotton.” I pinched the cuff of my sleeve. I felt like I was wringing a sponge. “It happens.”

  “Why don’t you grab a change of my clothes and throw them on? I just did laundry, so my dresser’s fully stocked.”

  “With clothes that are size Ripped?”

  “With clothes that are condition Dry.” He pointed at his dresser beside his bunk. “Come on. Everyone else is gone for the night, so you don’t have to worry about anyone seeing you not topping the fashion charts.”

  “Oh yeah, because that’s my priority.” I ran my hands down my outfit. Camp Kismet shirt, denim cutoffs, and Tevas. And a messy ponytail. Vogue had nothing on me.

  Callum chuckled, giving me another one of those looks. Another one of those looks he’d been giving me a lot lately. The ones that made me think he was picturing me the same way I was picturing him at the very moment. As far as acting on it, he’d been a saint. His hands hadn’t wandered out of bounds once, but his eyes sometimes told a different story. He could control his body, but not his thoughts.