Sweethearts

  He glanced over at our table, where Katy and Steph were waiting.

  “If you want,” I added. “You don’t have to.”

  The line started to move again. We were holding things up. “It’s all right,” he said. “Tell them I had to go see the school office about my locker combination.” He moved with the line and I went back to the table.

  “Well?” Katy asked.

  Steph watched me. “You okay, J.V.? For a second it looked like you tripped or something.”

  “Yeah. Um, he had plans.”

  “Already? I knew it,” Katy said, slapping her hands on the table. “Stupid radar!”

  CHAPTER 7

  “WHERE ARE YOU GOING?” ETHAN HAD CAUGHT ME IN THE HALL hurriedly shoving stuff into my backpack. The hours between lunch and the end of school had been excruciating. I tried not to let it show.

  “Home . . . you know. Nothing exciting.”

  “You didn’t even wait for me after class.” He watched as I tore and crumpled papers that were keeping my backpack from zipping. “What’s the rush?”

  “My mom wants me to do some stuff around the house before she gets home from work.” I couldn’t look into his eyes. I concentrated on his mouth, instead, which I hadn’t kissed all day. “I’m sorry. I can pick you up for school tomorrow if you want.”

  “Yeah, okay.” He leaned into me and slipped his hand around my waist, letting his fingers rest on the skin above my jeans. “When can we be alone?”

  The first time Ethan had done that — touched my skin that way and talked to me low — I thought I’d pass out. We were at the Gateway Mall, a week after I ran into him at the library over the summer, just walking around and shopping when we stopped at the top level rail to watch people walk by below us. He put his arm around me, touching my skin with his warm fingers and talking close to my ear. I like you, Jenna. It was the first time a boy had ever touched me like that. It surprised me. We’d been friends from school but it wasn’t like I’d been harboring a crush on him or anything. That day at the mall he touched me and I decided I was attracted to him and it was about time I had a boyfriend and just like that we were a couple. Sometimes I worried that I should be feeling more for him than I actually did, but I tended to push those worries aside and focus on how it felt to be part of it, to be seen by everyone as worthy of couplehood.

  Now, I didn’t feel much other than worry over the time and the need to be home so that I could pull myself together before four o’clock. But I kissed him as sincerely as I could and promised I’d call that night. When I headed toward the student lot, I sensed that he was still standing there, watching me walk away. I was in too much of a hurry to look back.

  3:48

  It wasn’t a panic attack. I know this because I looked up “panic attack” online when I thought that’s what I was having. Nor was it generalized, free-floating anxiety, which were also listed on the Web site. I knew why I felt the way I did. My heart pounded; I worried I would throw up. At 3:50, I went to the kitchen and let a spoonful of honey melt in my mouth. It coated my tongue and slid down my throat and momentarily calmed me.

  3:54

  The thing was this:

  After that day at Cameron’s house, because we’d never said anything about it, I sometimes wondered if it happened. I dreamed it, maybe, or made it up. Maybe my mom and all my teachers were right back then about my imagination and how it was very nice and important for children to have imaginations, but not when it kept them from living in the real world.

  But I think I know the difference between things that happened and things I imagined happening.

  This had happened, just like the ring and the walks home from school and the I Love You.

  3:57

  It was very possible that I should be worried. What did I really know about Cameron Quick, anyway? What Gretchen said about him growing up to be a school shooter popped into my head and I couldn’t let it go. Here was this guy I hadn’t seen in eight years who tracked me down and knew where I lived and turned up at my school for no good reason. Like a stalker.

  4:02

  I remembered:

  The fall before he went away, we were walking home from school and took a detour. There was an office park a few blocks from my apartment building. It was nice, for an office park, with manmade ponds and fountains and a stand of aspens between one of the buildings and the Jordan River Parkway. We wandered into the aspens and lay on the ground hoping for a breeze so that we could hear the leaves clatter — that’s what aspen leaves do, they clatter.

  The ground was cold against my back and at first I worried about bugs, but after a few minutes of lying there with neither of us speaking, the sound of cars on the nearby road faded out and the afternoon sun blazed behind the trees making green-gold light all around us. I turned my head so that I could see Cameron. His hand was inches from mine. I wanted to take it, or at least stretch my fingers out to see if they reached his. But we hadn’t touched since the day at his house, with his father there watching, making it something it shouldn’t have been. I pulled my hand closer in and looked back at the sky and the quaking leaves.

  4:09

  I watched from the living room window as he came up the walk. The impossibility of it struck me again — that he would be back, that he would find me and show up in my life. But there he was, all six-plus feet of him in the jeans and shirt he’d worn earlier, taking long steps toward the house. I moved to the door and resumed my watching through the peephole. He stopped on the first of the three stairs up to our porch and stared at our house. I imagined that he could see through the walls, like a superhero, see me on the other side of the door, and then through me, through my skin and into my heart, which he would see was afraid.

  Who would he expect me to be?

  He stood so long on the bottom step that I worried he was going to change his mind and turn around, and before I really knew what I was doing I opened the door.

  “Hi.”

  “Hello.”

  “Do you want to come in?”

  He walked up one more step and shook his head. I went toward him. We were the same height now, him on the second step and me on the porch, and I could see right into his eyes. “Maybe we can sit out here,” he said.

  “Okay.” I lowered myself into the aluminum rocker, slowly. I had this feeling that if I moved too fast, or touched him, he’d disappear. He finally came all the way onto the porch and sat in a plastic chair a few feet from me. “Hi,” I said again.

  “Hi.”

  “You’re here.” I studied his profile. It was so exactly how I remembered it — the way he always had his head tilted slightly down, looking out at the world as if from underneath something. “Sorry,” I said, “for staring.”

  “Go ahead and stare. I don’t mind.”

  “You look different,” I said, “but also the same. It’s weird.”

  “You, too.”

  He stared back at me for so long that I wanted to look away. Instead, I closed my eyes, trying to make a picture of little Cameron materialize. I saw him in that striped T-shirt and his jean shorts, skinny legs and falling-down socks. Him sitting across from me in Mr. Lloyd’s office during speech therapy, squinting with effort every time he got to a word with an r in it. I remembered the way he’d look at me when he got it right, shy and proud, a Cameron Quick that no one else at school ever got to see. And the time he handed me a half-squished Fig Newton, still warm from his palm, at lunch. I had more memories of him than I thought, and they were coming at me quickly now, too fast to really hold on to.

  Cameron, big Cameron, said, “Are you there?”

  I smiled, keeping my eyes shut. “I’m staring at you in my head now.”

  “Where are we?”

  “Mr. Lloyd’s.”

  “Your hair is in two braids.”

  “Crooked braids,” I said. “My mom was always in a hurry.”

  I sat still and held the picture in my mind, as real as when I’d lived it. Big Cameron
breathed next to me, his own eyes closed for all I knew. Or maybe not, maybe still looking at me. And beyond that, the sound of leaves on cement every time a breeze fluttered by. Still farther, cars passing a few streets away.

  And I turned the image in my mind around so that instead of facing Cameron, I was looking at myself: Jennifer Harris, braided hair and secondhand clothes and missing teeth and baby fat. She would leave Mr. Lloyd’s office and end up home alone, in an empty apartment, standing in the middle of the room with her backpack at her feet. It seemed like she — I — had lived an entire lifetime on that green, threadbare couch, equidistant from the TV and the refrigerator.

  She looked back at me with two questions: How could you have left me? And Why didn’t you say good-bye?

  I assumed they were questions for Cameron. I opened my eyes, ready to ask, but knew that if I even attempted to say those words the tears would start. Instead I asked, “How did you find me?”

  “I’ve followed you for a long time.” He must have mistaken the look on my face for alarm or fear, and said, “Not literally. I just mean I never lost track.”

  But it wasn’t fear, or anything like that. It was an instant of realization I’d have a lot in the coming days: I’d been thinking of him as coming back from the dead, but the fact was he’d been there all along. He’d been alive when I cried in my room over him being gone. He’d been alive when I started a new school without him, the day I made my first friend at Jones Hall, the time I ran into Ethan at the library. Cameron Quick and I had existed simultaneously on the planet during all of those moments. It didn’t seem possible that we could have been leading separate lives, not after everything we’d been through together.

  “. . . then I looked you up online,” he was saying, “and found your mom’s wedding announcement from before you changed your name. I didn’t even need to do that. It’s easy to find someone you never lost.”

  I struggled to understand what he was saying. “You mean . . . you could have written to me, or seen me, sooner?”

  “I wanted to. Almost did, a bunch of times.”

  “Why didn’t you? I wish you had.” And I did, I wished it so much, imagined how it would have been to know all those years that he was there, thinking of me.

  “Things seemed different for you,” he said, matter-of-fact. “Better. I could tell that from the bits of information I found . . . like an interview with the parents who were putting their kids in your school when it first started. Or an article about that essay contest you won a couple years ago.”

  “You knew about that?”

  He nodded. “That one had a picture. I could see just from looking at you that you had a good thing going. Didn’t need me coming along and messing it up.”

  “Don’t say that,” I said quickly. Then: “You were never part of what I wanted to forget.”

  “Nice of you to say, but I know it’s not true.”

  I knew what he was thinking, could see that he’d been carrying around the same burden all those years as me.

  “You didn’t do anything wrong.” It was getting cold on the porch, and late, and the looming topic scared me. I got up. “Let’s go in. I can make coffee or hot chocolate or something?”

  “I have to go.”

  “No! Already?” I didn’t want to let him out of my sight.

  “Don’t worry,” he said. “Just have to go to work. I’ll be around.”

  “Give me your number. I’ll call you.”

  “I don’t have a phone right now.”

  “Find me at school,” I said, “or anytime. Eat lunch with us tomorrow.” He didn’t answer. “Really,” I continued, “you should meet my friends and stuff.”

  “You have a boyfriend,” he finally said. “I saw you guys holding hands.”

  I nodded. “Ethan.”

  “For how long?”

  “Three months, almost.” I couldn’t picture Cameron Quick dating anyone, though he must have at some point. If I’d found Ethan, I was sure Cameron had some Ashley or Becca or Caitlin along the way. I didn’t ask. “He’s nice,” I added. “He’s . . .” I don’t know what I’d planned to say, but whatever it was it seemed insignificant so I finished that sentence with a shrug.

  “You lost your lisp.”

  And about twenty-five pounds, I thought. “I guess speech therapy worked for both of us.”

  He smiled. “I always liked that, you know. Your lisp. It was . . . you.” He started down the porch steps. “See you tomorrow, okay?”

  “Yeah,” I said, unable to take my eyes off of him. “Tomorrow.”

  I stayed up late IM-ing, at first just with Ethan, about an English assignment and auditions for The Odd Couple and what we were going to do that weekend — everything but what was really on my mind. Talking to him was the last thing I wanted to do. What I wanted was to go over and over the conversation with Cameron, remember every detail of his voice and the way he cleared his throat and how his eyelashes were long and soft over his big eyes. I wanted to think about how I was going to break the news to my mom.

  Mom! Mom! Guess what? Cameron Quick is alive!

  No.

  Because he was never dead. I’d been thinking about this. If I was a mom and my daughter came home and told me that her only friend — who’d recently moved away, which was hard enough — died in a freak accident, I’d do some checking. I’d do some asking around. I’d make sure she got to send flowers to the funeral or something, had the chance to talk about it and remember him. Instead she gave me two days off of school and told me to move on and make new friends. I knew she was busy back then, but I couldn’t believe she was too busy to have done a better job helping me deal with it.

  Anyway, my immediate problem was Ethan, and since I’d been on a bad mini streak of neglect and lying, I needed to put all the other stuff aside and give him some attention. While I chatted with him, Steph came online and we started chatting in a separate window.

  Steph: It’s him, right? The WHO we were looking for yesterday. It’s that new guy.

  Me: Hold on.

  Ethan typed away; I contributed smiley faces and LOLs and OMGs as necessary, while figuring out what to tell Steph.

  Steph: You know Katy is already obsessed, right?

  Me: Yeah.

  Ethan: Come over Saturday night. My parents have a work thing. House to OURSELVES!

  Me: :)

  Steph: So what’s the deal? You don’t have to tell me. Okay, you have to tell me.

  Ethan: Is that a yes????

  Me: I think so. I have to ask my mom.

  Steph: Maybe I can help. You need someone to talk to. Just tell me!

  Ethan: We can order pizza. Pizza and a movie and who knows what else?!

  Steph: Hello?

  She was right; I needed someone to talk to. It wasn’t going to be Katy, and it most definitely was not going to be Ethan.

  Me: He came over today.

  Ethan: Who?

  I jerked my hands off the keyboard, realizing I’d accidentally posted to the wrong window.

  Ethan: Who came over?

  My fingers hovered. I knew I had to type something fast or it would only look worse.

  Ethan: Jenna??

  Me: Cameron Quick. The new kid? He stopped by to say hi.

  I’m not sure why I told him that, other than that I couldn’t think up a lie quickly enough.

  Steph: Are you there?

  I ignored her and held my breath waiting for Ethan’s reply. IM fighting is the worst, because you can’t see the other person’s face or hear any breathing like on the phone — nothing. Ethan could have been momentarily interrupted by a parent or he could be sitting there hating me and it would all look the same on my screen.

  Me: It was no big deal. He just wanted to see my new house. I didn’t know he was coming.

  Ethan: You didn’t know? Then how did HE know where you LIVE?

  Good question. I thought fast. Ethan didn’t know anything about my history. He didn’t know I thought Cam
eron was dead. He really didn’t know anything about me. As far as he was concerned, my life had started in ninth grade, when I walked into Jones Hall and promised myself I would smile, I would look nice, I would make friends.

  Me: His mom and my mom are friends. They stayed in touch, I guess.

  Ethan: Oh. His mom was WITH him? Today? Why didn’t you say so??

  I started to correct him and tell him no, Cameron hadn’t come with his mom. Then I backspaced over everything and started over.

  Me: Because I’m dumb? J

  Ethan: You’re not DUMB. Dummy. J

  We chatted a little more; Steph signed off after I hadn’t answered her. By the time I got up from the computer, my breathing had returned to normal after the stress of lying to Ethan, but I ended up in the dark kitchen anyway opening the fridge as quietly as I could so as not to wake up Mom or Alan. I needed sweet, I needed creamy. There was no pudding, no yogurt, nothing for making chocolate milk, no ice cream, not even any applesauce. All I found was part of an old bag of chocolate chips in the freezer. I dumped them into a bowl and heated them in the microwave until they started to melt. I got a spoon, went back to my room.

  I sat with my back against the door. The curve of the chocolate-coated spoon fit exactly right against my tongue.

  Sometimes I missed being Jennifer Harris. Obviously, being Jenna Vaughn was more of an overall advantage in life, but there were moments I missed being Jennifer the way you can miss versions of yourself when you get a totally new haircut, or a favorite pair of jeans finally wears out. Even though it was sad that I’d spent so much time home alone eating and reading, the truth was that those were some of my favorite memories. Getting lost in a book with something sweet or salty or hopefully both, like stacks of crackers with butter and jelly, seemed, in some ways, the closest I’d gotten to complete and total happiness.