The two questions came into my head again: How could you have left me? Why didn’t you say good-bye?
I missed myself the way I missed what Cameron and I had before that day at his house, and how time almost stopped when we were together. We didn’t have to explain it or understand it or talk about it, ever. Everything was innocent. It just was. Nothing, nothing could be as simple as that ever again.
CHAPTER 8
CAMERON’S PRESENT IS A DOLLHOUSE. IT IS RIGHT IN THE middle of his bedroom and made out of wood. It’s not fancy like a Barbie Dream House. It doesn’t have furniture or anything, just a wooden back and two wooden sides and a slanty roof and it’s open in the front. The side walls have little windows that are almost square but you can tell Cameron did it by hand, with a tiny saw, maybe. Because they are a little bit crooked.
He looks at me, still holding limp Moe in his arms. It was too big to bring to school, he says.
It has two stories inside and comes to my waist. I can picture how I’ll put Rufus and Bitty, my toy mice, inside. I run my finger along the inside edge of one of the windows. Anything that could make a splinter has been sanded away.
You made it?
He nods.
Cameron’s father laughs. Okay, okay. It’s the worst dollhouse you’ve ever seen in your life, right? Just tell him. He knows.
No, I say. It’s good.
Me saying that the dollhouse is good makes something change in Cameron’s father. Now he’s looking back and forth at us in a way that makes me wish I hadn’t said it. But if I hadn’t said it then Cameron might think his dad was right, which he wasn’t. So I don’t know what I should have said.
If you like it so much, why don’t you play with it now?
It’s confusing the way he talks. I wouldn’t mind playing with the dollhouse, but Cameron doesn’t move.
His father studies me and scratches at his dark mustache. I thought he was sweet on you but now . . . now I’m not so sure. I think maybe he just wants someone to play dolls and hopscotch and dress-up with. Yeah, that makes more sense, now that I take a good look at you. You’re not really the type to be anyone’s girlfriend, are you?
This lines up with the kind of thing I hear people say about me at school and I wonder what is wrong with me that even Cameron’s father can look at me and see the truth: that I’m ugly and fat and no one wants to be my friend. It makes me feel guilty. The fact that Cameron does want to be my friend somehow makes his dad act mean like this. If I were thinner and prettier, if I had the right clothes like Jordana and Charity, then maybe it would make Cameron’s dad see him in a different way. A better way.
I think I have to go home, I say. Not so much to Cameron’s father but to Cameron himself, who is just standing there next to the dollhouse, his eyes big but his lips clamped shut.
When I was Cam’s age I had games I liked to play with my little girlfriends, too. But it sure as hell wasn’t hopscotch and dollies. We played house. We played doctor. That’s what normal kids do.
His father is leaning against the door, getting comfortable, and his face lights up the way my mom’s does when she has a good idea about what to fix for dinner.
Maybe you just don’t know how, huh?
CHAPTER 9
IT’S AMAZING HOW ADAPTABLE WE ARE; HUMANS, I MEAN. LESS than twenty-four hours after seeing Cameron again for the first time in eight years, back from what I’d believed was the dead, I’d already adjusted to the new reality. When he walked across the cafeteria to our table, the sight of him seemed almost ordinary. Almost. Because while the sight of Cameron now seemed ordinary, the fact that I was sitting at a table full of social non-pariahs, including a boyfriend who was mine, was what seemed wrong.
Watching Cameron come toward us I could see why Katy used the words “hot” and “gorgeous” to describe him — he definitely had nice hair and a long, lean body with broad shoulders, and the eyes. I wondered what Jordana would think now if she saw him. He set his tray on the end of the table, not particularly near any of us.
“Everyone,” I said, “this is Cameron Quick.”
Ethan stood to reach over the table and shake his hand. “Hey. I’m Ethan.”
“We were . . . we both went to the same elementary school,” I said, even though they’d heard that basic explanation already, “and then he moved, and . . . now he’s moved back, so he’s here. Here he is.”
Steph looked at me like she knew I needed help, and said, “I’m Steph, this is Katy.” Katy smiled and waved; Steph pointed down the table, “Gil, Freshman Dave, Junior Dave, and obviously Jenna.”
Cameron finally spoke, mostly to his lunch tray, “Hi. Nice to meet you all.” I watched him to see if he sneaked any looks at Steph, like most guys did when they first met her, dazzled and intimidated by her starlet body and model face. He barely seemed to notice.
Ethan took a bite of his burrito. “So you and Jenna were in the same class when you were kids?”
Cameron glanced at me. “Basically.”
“What was Jenna like back then?” Gil asked. “Got pictures?”
Cameron smiled. “Don’t need pictures. I got her up here,” he said, tapping his forehead. I groaned, making a joke of it, while inside I worried over what he would say. He might tell them I was fat, or about my lisp or my thrift-store clothes or how much I’d changed. “Two braids. Sweet eyes. Good heart. Adorable. Just like she is now.”
Gil looked at Ethan.
Katy studied her apple, eyebrows raised.
Steph said, “Jenna has all that and more, except maybe the braids. Which is why everyone loves her. I dare you to find one person in this school who does not like Jenna Vaughn.” Based on the color of Katy’s neck, I think there might have been one person who didn’t like me, at least for the moment. “So, Cameron,” Steph continued, “auditions for the school play are next week. You should come. We need more males of the species to try out.”
“Not my thing,” Cameron said.
“Okay, so you don’t want to be onstage. You could be back-stage.”
“With Jenna,” Gil said helpfully. “She’s the stage manager —”
Ethan talked over Gil. “But if it’s not your thing,” he said, “it’s not your thing. You don’t even have to have a thing if you don’t want.”
“Right,” Katy said, “no thing required.”
Cameron didn’t respond, didn’t even act like anyone was waiting for him to say anything. He just ate his lunch, scooping spaghetti onto a piece of bread and folding the bread over into a sort of sandwich before putting it in his mouth. I was fascinated by the most mundane little details of him — how he held his paper napkin in his left hand while he ate with his right, the space he took up when both his elbows were on the table.
I was suddenly aware that I’d been staring at him, and everyone else at the table was staring at me. They were all done with their lunches. I wondered how much time had passed.
“Um,” Katy said to me, “are you all right?”
Steph caught my eye and smiled slowly.
“Oh, yeah.” I concentrated on my half sandwich trying to think of something witty to say, but I was in total Jennifer Harris territory now, spacing out and forgetting how to make simple conversation.
Cameron picked up his empty tray. “Nice to meet you all. See you later.” He lifted a finger toward me. “Bye, Jennifer.”
We watched him leave, then Gil said, “How come he calls you Jennifer?”
I crumpled up my lunch bag. “Because that used to be my name.”
“Really?” Ethan said. “I didn’t know that.”
“I changed it a long time ago.”
“He’s shy,” Steph said, still watching the spot where Cameron had been sitting.
Katy smirked. “Not with Jenna.”
Ethan surprised me by coming to Cameron’s defense. “That’s because they’ve known each other forever. I’d be nervous, too, if I were meeting all you retards for the first time.”
“Good
point,” Junior Dave said.
I drove Ethan home after school even though what I wanted was to talk with Cameron for a hundred more hours. We sat in front of his house — his family had a bungalow near the park, a small brick thing that barely held him and his parents and his two little sisters, Carly and Hannah. He took my hand and wiggled my fingers one by one. “You look nice today.”
“I do?” Hard to believe, as lumpy and tired and out of sorts as I felt.
“Yeah.” He got closer, played with my earring. “Your hair is all . . . wavy.”
“Thanks for being so nice to Cameron.” I don’t know why I said that right then, totally ruining the mood Ethan was obviously trying to get me in. But talking, flirting, having a normal conversation about our usual things felt impossible. He stopped playing with my earring and leaned back.
“Sure. I mean, I’ve got nothing against the guy.”
“Exactly,” I said, nodding.
“As long as he stays away from you, he can be my best friend if he wants.” He took my hand again. “Why don’t you come in? No one’s home for a while.”
This time it was me who pulled back. “He knows I have a boyfriend. We can still be friends, though,” I said, resisting the urge to tack a “right?” on the end of my sentence.
“Well, yeah. Within reason.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means ‘within reason.’ ” He turned away from me and stared out the windshield. “Jenna, think about it. If there was some hot girl who’d known me half my life and described me as having ‘sweet eyes’ and being ‘adorable’ and she suddenly turned up out of nowhere, how would you feel?” He made air quotes while he talked, and even imitated Cameron’s deep voice in a way that didn’t sound entirely complimentary.
“You’re friends with Steph,” I said. “That doesn’t bother me.” Which, actually, was not totally true. But I would never, ever let on that it bothered me, because no one likes an insecure, possessive girlfriend. No one likes an insecure, possessive boyfriend, either, a fact that Ethan did not seem to grasp.
“So you’re saying you’re going to be hanging out with Cameron?” he asked.
“I’m saying he’s my friend.”
“I’m saying you’re my girlfriend.”
“I’m saying I know that, and you have nothing to worry about.”
He sighed. “Why don’t you just come in?” He made puppy dog eyes at me and I said yes and we went straight to his room and closed the door. He needed reassurance. I needed reassurance. Which was probably why we ended up breaking our firmly established makeout boundaries in a big pile of Ethan-smelling blankets on his bed, with his cat, Milhouse, curled up near the pillows.
The kind of feeling I got from being with Ethan that way was something like when I ate, the same private sort of comfort that I got when I had my favorite foods all to myself. It didn’t seem quite right that it would feel like that. Because being with someone was supposed to be about intimacy and trust along with feeling good. The point was sharing something with the other person, making this special connection you weren’t making with someone else. That’s what my mom always said, anyway. Mostly, though, I went inside myself while I experienced it all — his hands on me and mine on him, his mouth, the warm climby floating, the intensity and release. I stayed utterly silent through it all, eyes shut, concentrating and not wanting it to ever be over and at the same time wanting it done. It was not unlike the way I always wanted food to last forever while also being anxious for it to be gone so that I could breathe again and go on with my life.
Afterward I curled into a ball alongside Ethan with my forehead on his chest. He pulled me close. “Was that okay?” he whispered.
I nodded against him.
“Are you sure? We kind of bent the rules, and . . . Well, I don’t want it to be like you felt like you had to or something.”
“Ethan, I wanted to,” I muttered. “It was good.”
“Okay.” He tucked the blankets around my shoulders. Milhouse stretched and jumped off the bed. “Because you seemed kind of, I don’t know. Far away.”
I thought about that, and what I should say back that wouldn’t make Ethan feel bad or make me sound weird, but then we heard the garage door go up and scrambled to realign all our clothes and arrange ourselves in a convincing configuration of textbooks and school binders. By the time his mom poked her head in his room, we were calmly discussing The Old Man and the Sea with the door open.
“Hi guys, I’m home.” She scanned the room, as if looking for evidence of something. Fortunately Ethan never made his bed so it didn’t look any more or less disheveled than usual. “Are you saying for dinner, Jenna?”
“No, thanks, Mrs. Green,” I said, closing the book I’d just opened, as if exhausted from an hour of studying. “I actually have to get home.”
Ethan walked me out to my car. “I didn’t mean to be an ass,” he said, holding the door while I climbed in the driver’s seat. “About Cameron, I mean.”
“I know.”
“Just . . . you know. I think he likes you.”
I laughed it off. “No, he doesn’t. Not like that.” Ethan couldn’t possibly understand it, what Cameron and I meant to each other and how different it was from anything like romance or a crush. “Pick me up tomorrow?”
“Tomorrow is Saturday, silly. But you’re coming over tomorrow night, remember?” He glanced toward the house. “My parents are leaving at six, then Carly and Hannah are getting picked up at six-thirty, so you could come at seven or something?”
“Okay,” I said. He bent down to give me a slow, sweet kiss, and I drove off.
The farther away I got from Ethan’s house, the more I felt lost. I wanted to go back and see him again, or drive by Steph’s, or even call Katy. The things that made up my life as Jenna Vaughn seemed slippery and uncertain. I didn’t go back to Ethan’s, though, because I thought it would seem weird or needy, and really it wasn’t Ethan per se that I wanted, more the idea of him and the fact of us being a couple. I didn’t drive by Steph’s because I could tell she sensed something about me and Cameron I wasn’t ready to tell her. And I didn’t call Katy because I knew she’d only want to talk about how to get Cameron to like her.
Mom and Alan couldn’t make me feel unlost, either. I was almost certain now that Mom never really believed Cameron was dead. She was smart, she was a nurse, and she knew what he meant to me. If she’d believed the story about Cameron she would have found out more and talked to me about it. I knew she’d lied, but I didn’t know how to ask for the truth.
Right as I was thinking these things, I drove by Smith’s. I circled the block and pulled into the lot. I stayed parked for a few minutes, trying to talk myself out of what I was about to do, but soon the automatic doors were swishing open and I checked out the situation. The store was crowded with moms doing predinner shopping, and lots of their loud kids running around. I was just one of a dozen people in the candy aisle and it was easy to take the bag of mini chocolate bars and let it drop quietly into the gym bag I’d brought in, unzipped. Knowing it was there in my bag gave me some satisfaction, but anxiety about whether it would be enough and whether it would be the right kind of enough kept me walking up and down aisles until a bag of corn chips and a pint of cookie dough ice cream also ended up in my bag.
An employee walked by with some go-backs for the freezer and I imagined him looking at my open bag and my lack of any grocery cart or basket, so I moved down the aisle and tried to act like a regular shopper: frozen peas, a diet meal, some veggie burgers. I actually bought those things in the express lane. I had the money. I could have paid for the other stuff, too, but I didn’t.
CHAPTER 10
I HAVE TO GO HOME.
That is what I tell Cameron’s dad. I want Cameron to say something, but he is staring down at Moe.
Put that back in the cage, Cam, his dad says. We’ll deal with it later.
“That” and “it” is Moe. Cameron takes three steps
to the cage in the corner of the room, lifts the top, and sets Moe down gently. For a long minute he stares into the cage, not turning around. I keep my eyes on the back of Cameron’s head. Outside, more leaves fall by the window and I think how we could be outside, crunching them under our feet in the cool air instead of in this small, hot room that has one too many people in it.
The first thing you need when you’re playing doctor is to decide who’s gonna be the doctor and who’s gonna be the patient.
Cam turns around, finally, to see what his father will say next.
When I was a kid the boy was always the doctor. His father looks at me. But they’ve got all kinds of lady doctors these days so it could go either way. And frankly I don’t know if Cam has the nuts or the smarts to be the doctor, so it looks like you’re up.
I have to go home, I say again. This time I turn my body toward the door and take a step, then another, and another. Cameron’s father reaches his long arm in front of me and the door closes with a hollow click, leaving the three of us together in the tiny room.
Midnight. After Mom and Alan went to bed, I put on my pajamas and got the ice cream and a spoon and the bag of mini candy bars. I started out with my back against the door again, but once a small pile of wrappers accumulated next to me I worried that one of my parents could wake up and come to my room for some reason, and it would be hard to clear away the wrappers without being caught. So I moved myself and everything else into my bedroom closet, with the door open enough so that light came in and I could see as much as I needed to.
At first, I’d hold a candy bar in my mouth until it warmed up enough to start softening, then I’d take a spoonful of ice cream, which would make the chocolate hard again, just for a few seconds, until it all began to melt together. Then I’d take some ice cream and balance a candy bar on top of the spoon and put it all in my mouth at once and chew, even when the cold hurt my teeth, pressing my tongue into the bits of cookie dough to taste for the mix of salty and sweet.