Sweethearts

  “I don’t know. I started to picture one of them pulling up and finding me there and . . . I panicked.” He rummaged through the garbage bag in his lap angrily. “My tools were gone. They probably already sold them.”

  “Tools?”

  “How I make my living. Or made my living in California. Handyman stuff, day labor for subcontractors. Like that.”

  I thought about the dollhouse. I wanted to say something like, Yeah, you’ve always been good at that, like with the dollhouse. But we still hadn’t discussed any details of that day, so I didn’t say anything. Cameron interpreted my silence as something else.

  “I know it’s not like being a nurse or a college professor like your parents, but it’s what I can do and people always need stuff fixed and built. Even if it’s all I do the rest of my life there’s no shame in it. You can make good money doing that, you know.”

  “I think it’s great,” I said. “You’re smart enough for college, though. Look how fast you’re catching up at Jones. You could do anything you want.”

  “What about you? What are you going to do?”

  I shrugged. “I’ll just go to the U. I can get a tuition discount through Alan. I’ll probably be an English teacher or something.” Not that I’d given it much thought lately. I’d just sort of always assumed that’s what I’d do, English being the only subject I remotely cared about or was any good at.

  “At least you know what you want. I don’t know what I want.” Then he was quiet for a long time. We were almost home before he said, “Just want to be with you. Like this.”

  My heart sped up. I made a joke. “That’s probably not a viable career option.”

  “Yeah,” he said, laughing a little. “Probably not.”

  By the time Mom and Alan got home, Cameron was asleep on the couch and I was attempting to get at least a little homework done before bed. Concentrating was impossible, so I typed an English paper that was already pretty much done.

  I heard them come in the back door and met them in the kitchen. They looked rosy and happy from wine and snacks. I jumped right in: “So, Cameron is asleep on the couch. And basically he’s homeless.”

  Mom blinked a few times. “Excuse me?”

  “He’s emancipated from his parents.” I was matter-of-fact, just like she had been when she’d told me the Quick family saga. Also, the complicated drama of everything that had gone on that evening had worn me down; I’d switched myself nearly off. “Right now he can’t pay his rent. Because he’s trying to finish school.”

  “What about his mother?” Mom asked. “What about his brothers and sisters, his family?”

  “They’re in California. His dad is still with them, too.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “Hm,” Alan said. It was a loaded “hm,” no doubt because the image of Cameron sleeping in my room was fresh in his mind. “I’m not too sure about this.”

  “Well, we have to let him stay here tonight,” Mom said, glancing toward the living room, “clearly. It’s late and we’re all tired and we can deal with this tomorrow.”

  Alan looked at her, unconvinced. “He’s a big, grown guy, honey, whom we know little about. And we have a teenage daughter.”

  “Well, I do know him,” Mom insisted, “and there’s nothing to worry about.”

  Alan opened his mouth like he might be about to tell her about the bedroom incident. I interrupted, “Really, Alan, there’s not.”

  He continued, starting to sound a little annoyed, “What I was going to ask is how do we know he’s emancipated? How do we know he’s not just a runaway? What is our responsibility here if we let him stay?”

  “Trust me,” Mom said, unwinding her scarf like the issue was all settled. “If there’s one teenager in the world with legitimate reason to divorce his parents, it’s Cameron Quick. I can’t believe Lara would let that man back in their lives.”

  “It’s just one night,” I added. “That’s all we’re deciding on now.”

  Alan threw up his hands. “Fine. We’ll discuss it tomorrow evening. Everyone needs to be here for dinner.” He looked at my mom. “No overtime.”

  She nodded and wandered off to their room. I watched her go, knowing our talk was coming soon. I felt it in me, ready to escape. Alan stayed in the kitchen, looking at me hard. “I’m going to check on you in the night,” he said. “At random intervals of my choosing.”

  “I figured.”

  CHAPTER 19

  WE ARE RUNNING THROUGH CAMERON’S YARD, DEAD LEAVES at our feet.

  My hand, stinging, is in his.

  As we round the corner of the house, toward the driveway, I see the boots first.

  I knew it. In one lunge, Cameron’s father has him by the arm and his hand is yanked from mine. His father’s face is red. You ruined that window screen.

  I stop running, too, even though I could easily get away now. Cameron’s father is shaking him, shaking him hard, and his yelling gets louder and louder and more words come faster and stuck together.

  . . . what were you thinking? You are going to pay for it you can count on that.

  He looks at me. Still dragging Cameron with one arm he reaches his other for me, close enough that I feel the air near my body move. He reaches for me again; I step away.

  And Cameron, for the first time since this began, says something to his father, screams it: Leave her alone! Leave her alone!

  He screams it so loud that a lady in the house next door sticks her head out a window to see what’s going on and tells Cameron’s father to Shut the **** up or I’m going to call the cops again. Why the hell can’t you leave those poor children alone for once?

  Cameron’s dad lets go of his arm. Cameron, who has been pulling so hard to get away, falls down. His dad leans over and looks into Cameron’s face, talking low so that the lady can’t hear but I can, You are going to pay.

  Then he stares at me, long and hard, a slow smile spreading on his face. Better run home before certain nosy neighbors stop watching and I change my mind about letting you go.

  And I do, all the way home, choking on tears. And I get inside the apartment and Mom is still at work and I wash the blood off my hands and eat the cookies and the Milky Way and some honey. And when she gets home I want to curl in a ball in her lap, but she is running late and throwing her work clothes off to put on her scrubs for school and asking me about my day but asking it quick so that there’s no time for real answers.

  How was your day, kiddo? Mine was, hah, a challenge, to say the least. Can you heat yourself up some soup for dinner? Good. I’m so sorry, sweetheart, about this. Tomorrow — no, I guess the day after tomorrow — I’ll be home all day. Promise.

  She pulls me into a hug smelling like grease and pancakes from the Village Inn. I hide my hands in my sweatshirt pockets.

  Lock the door and don’t answer it for anyone, okay? She kisses the top of my head. Be good.

  CHAPTER 20

  GETTING THE TWO OF US TO SCHOOL WITHOUT ANYONE FIGURING out that we’d originated from the same house was a challenge. First, Ethan called, apologetic and begging me to let him give me a ride to school so we could talk. I told him I was going to work out with Steph after rehearsal so I needed to have my car.

  “She can drive you home from the gym,” he said.

  “It’s out of her way. Also, her driving scares me.”

  “Okay, but when are we going to talk?”

  “Soon.” Putting Ethan off wasn’t doing either of us any good, and I knew it, but I just wasn’t sure yet exactly what to do about him.

  The next problem was finding a way to arrive discreetly without going to ridiculous lengths like dropping Cameron off a block away from school or making him wear a disguise or something. “Wouldn’t it be easier to tell the truth?” Cameron asked as we got near Jones Hall.

  “No.” We pulled into the lot. The coast was clear. “Go ahead,” I said. “I’ll see you later, okay?”

  “Yep.”

  Later turned out to b
e rehearsal — he’d disappeared at lunch and everyone was asking me about him and where he was and how come he never ate lunch with us after that first time, requiring me to believably act like I knew nothing.

  When Cameron walked into rehearsal, Ethan said, “Hey, man,” and sounded reasonably nice about it. Katy skipped over, her low-rise jeans threatening to fall off her skinny hips. With some girls, that was a sexy look. With Katy, it made you nervous. “Cameron! You’re here! Yay.”

  “Hi.”

  “Where have you been lately?” She was probably trying to flirt, but it came out a little whiny. “I see you in class but you come in at the last minute and leave the second the bell rings.”

  “Nowhere.”

  “How about during lunch and stuff ?”

  “Library.”

  “The library!” Her voice was loud. “We are much more interesting than the library!” She looked at me for help. “Right, Jenna?”

  Bingry walked in with a cup of coffee. “Ethan — get these people off book. Jenna? Is this your whole crew?”

  “Freshman Dave is supposed to be here, too.” I’d managed to talk him into it at lunch with reminders that it meant hours and hours of extra time hanging out in the same vicinity as Steph.

  “He’ll have to find us backstage,” Bingry said, “Follow me.”

  Cameron trailed behind as we trekked to the cafetorium/auditeria/gym where we’d actually be putting on the play. There was a storage room underneath the stage, filled with old set pieces and props and a giant pile of used lumber.

  “It’s all sort of coming back to me now,” I said, surveying the junk and remembering the hours spent building the previous year’s set for The Mousetrap. “How much work we have to do, I mean.”

  Bingry pulled a sketch out of his pocket. “Good. We can recycle some of this stuff, but we’ll need three or four more soft flats, ten feet high, four feet wide. Make sure you frame them up right the first time. Go to it.”

  He left, and Cameron started pulling the best pieces of wood out of the pile.

  “Do you really spend lunch in the library?” I asked, pulling my hair back.

  “Yep.”

  “You can eat with us anytime, you know.”

  “I know.” He made a bunch of noise rummaging in the tool bin. “I still can’t believe those crackheads at my old apartment took my tools. It’s almost a grand worth of tools and they probably sold them for fifty bucks.” He pulled out a drill and looked at it with disgust. “These tools are crap.”

  “It’s just a school play. I don’t think it really matters.”

  “It matters if you want to do something right.” His jaw was set, aggravation showing in the tilt of his eyebrows.

  “What is it?” I asked.

  “My stuff, Jennifer. It’s gone. All that’s left are some clothes and a few pictures. I had two pots, some dishes, books. I’m not like you; I can’t just call my parents and say I need new stuff.” He kicked a stack of half-empty paint cans. They clattered to the cement floor. “How am I supposed to make a living without my tools?”

  I wanted to reach out and touch his arm, his back, say it was going to be all right, but there in the dusty, quiet underbelly of the stage the world suddenly felt very small. Touching him might not be the best idea.

  Someone made a lot of conspicuous noise outside the storage room door; it was Freshman Dave, looking nervous and small. “Oh,” he said, “hi. I, um, it took me awhile to find you.”

  “That’s okay,” I said. “We haven’t really started.”

  Cameron showed him what to do and we worked in silence until Katy and Steph came to tell us rehearsal was over.

  “You’re kind of filthy,” Steph said, looking me up and down.

  I brushed the dust off my pants. “That’s what happens when you work.”

  “Acting is work.”

  “Okay.”

  “Are we still going to the gym, or did you exhaust yourself?”

  “We’re going.” It was, after all, my excuse for not carpooling with Ethan.

  Cameron kept working, pulling nails out of wood so that we could reuse it. He’d stripped down to his white undershirt; Katy stared at the muscles in his arms, transfixed. Steph was sneaking a few glances herself. “So, Cam,” Katy squeaked, “do you need a ride home?”

  He looked at me for guidance. When he realized I was going to continue pretending that our plans were completely unconnected, he said, “Sure. Thanks.” I wondered where he’d tell her to go.

  “See you tomorrow, Jenna,” he said, tossing a hammer onto the floor.

  “You were slacking in class,” Steph said, digging in her locker for hair stuff. “You don’t get results unless you really concentrate, you know.”

  “Yeah, I know.” My Pilates form was the least of my worries. I’d spent most of the class imagining Katy and Cameron driving around in her dad’s Volvo, her giving him the third degree about his life and the one-word answers he’d probably give and how she’d come to me later for more advice on getting him interested in her.

  “So what’s the deal with you and Ethan?” Steph rubbed some expensive-looking cream into her hair. “I could totally cut the tension with a knife at lunch. And you didn’t talk at rehearsal, either.”

  I sat on a locker room bench, deciding how much to say. As Jenna Vaughn, I didn’t like to have other people know my business, especially when it was something embarrassing like having a stupid fight with my boyfriend. But I had enough secrets to deal with.

  “We kind of had a fight last night.”

  “Seriously? You guys hardly ever fight!”

  “He called me a moody bitch.”

  She dropped her jaw in big, stagy surprise.

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “Were you? A moody bitch?”

  “Sort of.”

  An old lady walked right by us, naked, wrinkled and sagging and perfectly content with herself. We stopped talking until she passed by.

  “You know what you guys need? Is to have some fun. We all do. It’s senior year, and we haven’t had any kind of fun since school started.” She pulled on a snug fleece top. “Halloween party. My house. Costumes, candy, horror movies.”

  I shrugged.

  “You shrug? You shrug at my awesome party idea?” She closed her locker much harder than necessary. “Are you going to change, or just wear your gross, sweaty clothes all the way home?”

  “Um . . . the second one?” Only after I said it did I realize that in the past, even a few months ago, I might have taken Steph’s comment about my gross, sweaty clothes as something mean and personal, the kind of thing people said to Jennifer Harris. I’d changed more than I thought.

  We walked out to the parking lot, where the previously sunny sky was now filled with dark clouds. “I bet you anything it’s going to snow tonight,” I said.

  Steph turned on me suddenly. “Are you and Ethan breaking up?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “We haven’t had a chance to talk since last night.”

  “I mean, I know he can be a pain. And if you don’t care about him and you want to be with Cameron, you should. Just go be with Cameron and don’t make it into such a drama.”

  “Easy for you to say, Steph. You’ve never not had a boyfriend. I don’t know if I want to spend the rest of my senior year single. Anyway, I do care about Ethan.”

  “Listen to what you just said. ‘I don’t want to be single’ is a lot different than ‘Wow, I’m crazy about my boyfriend.’ And you care more about Cameron,” she said. “You care more about Cameron than you do about any of us, more than you care about school or the play or our whole four years of high school put together. I can just tell.” She threw her gym bag into the trunk of her car. “And it’s weird. Because you didn’t see him for, what, eight years? And he’s been back barely a week? What is it with you two?”

  “I . . . don’t know,” I said.

  “Really. I think you do. I had a lot of little boyfriends in grade school and
if one came back now I doubt I’d even recognize him,” she said. “No one is that loyal to a childhood friend unless he was, like, the love of your life.”

  “Or your only friend. Or if you went through something together that no one else would understand.”

  She tilted her head. “Yeahhh. Didn’t think of that. My point is, why deny yourself something you really want? I never do.”

  “It’s not that simple. Anyway,” I said, smiling, trying to lighten the mood, “you like the drama.”

  “This is true. I have to enjoy it while I can.” She slammed her trunk shut. “And you know what I enjoy? Things like a stupid Halloween party or seeing my friends with whatever boy or girl they want. If you want Ethan, have Ethan. If you want Cameron, have him. If it’s someone else, great. But don’t stay with Ethan just because you’re afraid of letting people down.” She looked at me and pulled the hood of my sweatshirt up, tucking my hair in to protect it from the drops of rain that had started to fall. “I know you, Jenna. You’re the type of girl who would go all the way to the altar with a guy who wasn’t right if you thought it would make everyone happy.”

  The rain came down harder; Steph got in her car and waved as she pulled out, while I stood there, stunned. Not by the suggestion that I should break up with Ethan or be with Cameron or any of that, but that Steph was right — she knew me. Maybe they all really did know me. Maybe what Ethan said was right: You’re here now, and you’re you.

  “I don’t understand, Jenna, why you couldn’t give him a ride home?” Mom struck the archetypal Mom pose — hands on hips, perplexed look on face, head tilted at that I cannot believe you came from my womb angle. “He walked home in the pouring rain. With a cold, I might add.”

  “I didn’t know he had a cold. I was at the JCC with Steph,” I said, knowing that was not going to fly. Cameron padded into the kitchen on bare feet, rubbing his hair dry with a towel.

  “It’s fine,” he said. “I didn’t have to walk that far.”