Sweethearts

  But it wasn’t working.

  The memories of that day at Cameron’s house wouldn’t stop. I told myself that it was useless thinking, since I couldn’t change anything now. I couldn’t go back in time and make it unhappen. I told myself it was okay, that I’d grown up into a regular person and had a normal, productive teenage life. I told myself that worse things had happened to other kids — much, much worse things that you could hear about every single week if you just watched the news.

  I worked at getting different Cameron memories in my head, better ones — the day in the aspen grove, the note in my lunch box — but they wouldn’t stick. All I wanted was to talk to him. Without a phone number or e-mail or an address that I knew, he was as unreachable as he’d been the last eight years.

  I closed the closet door with my foot and finished the ice cream.

  CHAPTER 11

  I WOKE EARLY sATURDAY, FEELING LIKE CRAP —HEADACHE, nausea, intense thirst. I promised myself I’d be very, very good for the rest of the weekend and got up for a glass of water. Alan’s laptop was open on the kitchen table but he wasn’t there. I wanted to see his crooked, comforting face. I found him standing at the fish tank, in the bleach-spotted blue sweatpants my mom pretended to hate, his curly hair matted to the back of his head from sleep.

  “What’s the prognosis?” I asked. “On the fin rot, I mean.”

  He turned, a little startled. “Oh, hi. I think Estella is okay. But now I’m worried about Monty. Does he look lethargic to you?”

  I studied the little pink-and-black platy hovering near the bottom of the tank. “I don’t know. Maybe he’s not awake yet.”

  Alan sprinkled some food over the water. We watched as fish darted up to the surface to eat. “And what are you doing up?” he asked. “Trouble sleeping?”

  “Kind of.” I checked the tank’s aerator. The living room was dim and the house was quiet and I knew Mom would probably be asleep for another hour. It seemed like I could say things then and there and maybe not have them be as real as they would be if I said them when the sun was all the way up. “This . . . kid I used to know in grade school started at Jones Hall this week. We were, like, pretty good friends.” Monty swam across the tank to catch a flake of food that had been slowly sinking. “There he goes.”

  “I didn’t know . . . you . . . had any friends from back then,” Alan said carefully.

  I rested a finger on the cool glass of the tank, considering what to say, what to not say. “Just this one boy.”

  “Ah. A boy.”

  “In fact, yes,” I said, turning away from the tank and toward the kitchen. “Is there coffee?”

  “Of course.” He followed me into the kitchen and we both got a cup. I sat at the table and watched him. There was something about his bare feet on the kitchen floor I liked: his big crooked toes with gray and brown hairs sproinging all around, the knobby ankles sticking out from his too-short sweatpant legs. I kept my eyes on his feet as he tuned in NPR on the radio, toasted his English muffin, and covered it with peanut butter.

  “How’s the car running?” he asked.

  “Great. I think I’ve only put twenty miles on it. The horn doesn’t work, though.”

  “I’ll take a look. Probably just a fuse.” Alan settled in front of his computer, chewing his English muffin and sipping his coffee. “So tell me about this friend, this boy.”

  “Well,” I started, and then wondered if Mom had told him about Cameron Quick. Maybe Alan already knew more than I did. “It’s complicated,” I finally said. “How’s the writing?”

  “Oh, that. I’ve abandoned the poems for the time being. I do have this idea for a screenplay, though.” Alan, a creative writing hobbyist, proceeded to give me a rough outline of the story while I drank my coffee. My headache was starting to subside, and I tried to tune my brain in to the day before me: homework, chores, eating right, getting some exercise, Ethan. I figured I should probably touch base with Katy and/or Steph at some point. “. . . and finds the treasure on the ranch, exactly where his grandfather said it would be,” Alan was saying. “So what do you think?”

  “I like it,” I said, nodding thoughtfully as if I’d been listening.

  “Hm.” He rubbed his beard. “It sounds terrible to me.”

  “Don’t overthink it. I’m going to get back in bed and do some reading for English.”

  “Good,” he said. “Conserve your energy, because I think your mom has a lot of raking planned for us today.”

  Once in my room, I shut the door behind me and cleaned the wrappers and ice cream container and napkins out of my closet, putting them in two layers of plastic grocery-store bags and then shoving those into the bottom of my trash can. When that was done I made my bed and straightened my room and brushed my teeth and put on clean pajamas, and then I felt okay again, like the night before hadn’t happened, like I was handling my life just fine.

  We —Mom, Alan, and I — were out front doing the garden work when Cameron came walking up the hill. Mom saw him first. “I hope this kid isn’t selling those coupon books,” she said under her breath. “Say we already bought one.”

  “He’s my friend,” I said, wondering if she’d recognize him, if I could get away with giving him a fake name.

  Alan stopped bagging leaves and rose slowly from his squatting position. His knees popped audibly. “Ow.”

  As Cameron got closer, I laid down my rake, straightened my hair, wished I’d put on some makeup. Mom had now stopped working, too, and lifted her hand to shield her eyes from the sun. “Do I know him?”

  “Yes.”

  He was just a few yards from us now.

  “Oh my God,” Mom said. I tried to read her expression, but her hand still mostly covered her face.

  “Hi,” Cameron said to us all.

  Mom looked at me, incredulous. “Jenna, why didn’t you tell me?”

  Alan extended his hand. “Alan Vaughn.”

  “It’s Cameron Quick,” Mom said to Alan before turning back to Cam. “You’re Cameron Quick. Come here and let me hug you.”

  I watched them, Mom standing on her toes to reach around Cameron’s neck, him bending low. I hoped for her to say something like, We thought you were dead, proving me wrong about her lying. Instead, she asked, “How is your mother?”

  “Fine.”

  “Cameron goes to Jones Hall now,” I said.

  “You go to Jones Hall? Here in Salt Lake?”

  “Just started Thursday,” he said.

  “I never thought . . .” Mom said, shaking her head. “Jenna, I can’t believe you didn’t say something.”

  They talked, and I waited for her to point out the obvious: that Cameron had been dead and now he was alive. But she never said it. They talked about Cameron’s mother and his little brothers and sisters, which I’d somehow completely forgotten he had, but she never made one mention of his death. I glanced at Alan to see what he knew, if anything, but he was distracted with a lawn bag that wanted to blow away.

  I almost said it: Isn’t it amazing? We thought he was dead, but here he is, right in our very own front yard! When I opened my mouth, Cameron said to me, “I thought you might want to go get some lunch or something.”

  “Now?”

  “Yeah.” He looked at the piles of leaves. “I’ll help you finish this first.”

  “Go ahead,” Alan said, “we can handle it.”

  Mom smiled a strained kind of smile, her eyes never leaving Cameron. “Sure. Go on.”

  We ended up at Crown Burgers, across from each other in a small booth near a window.

  “You didn’t tell your mom about me,” he said.

  “I didn’t have a chance.”

  “Okay.” He took a bite of his burger and chewed slowly before saying, “What. Just say it.” Two days and already he could read me better than any of my friends.

  “Is it that obvious?”

  “Can’t hide anything from me. You know that.”

  “I’m just . . . confused.
Because we thought you were dead. At least, I thought you were dead.”

  He laughed. “Dead? Why would you think that?”

  “I heard at school,” I said. “And I told my mom, and she didn’t say that you weren’t.”

  He was quiet; chewing, staring.

  “And,” I added, “why else wouldn’t I have heard from you?”

  “I came back.”

  “Eight years later!”

  “You’re mad at me,” he said.

  “No,” I said, shaking my head. “I’m not.”

  “Yes you are. It’s okay. I’d be mad, too.”

  “I’m not! I’m . . . not.” I stabbed into my Greek salad with my plastic fork. “Anyway, never mind. You’re not dead, you’re here, I’m happy to see you and happy you’re alive.”

  “Not that simple, though, is it.”

  I’d forgotten this about Cameron. How he didn’t play games, never pretended, never just filled the quiet with meaningless words the way regular people did. If he opened his mouth to speak, it was to say something that mattered to him. That was part of why he never fit in. I used to be like that, too. Now I was a professional maker of small talk, filler of conversational space, avoider of awkwardness.

  I was doing it even now, at Crown Burgers, too easily going from talking about Cam’s alleged death to babbling about unimportant things like my problems in trig and auditions for The Odd Couple. “Hey, why aren’t you in the drama class, anyway?” I asked. “Everyone has to take it.” It was right there in the Jones Hall charter; the founders thought drama was important for our social development.

  “They made an exception for me. I have too much catching up to do in real subjects.”

  I watched him eat, the way he followed every bite of a burger with exactly two fries and a sip of his drink. The curve of his fingers as he dipped into fry sauce, the shape of his lips around the straw — it was all information, all part of filling in the missing years.

  “Do you want to help with the play?” I asked. “There’s a lot to do even if you’re not in it.”

  “If you want me to,” he said.

  “I do. I want you to. It will be fun,” I said, trying to convince myself. “You can get to know everyone.”

  He appeared as unexcited as I felt at the prospect of him bonding with all my friends. “If you do something for me.”

  “Sure. What?” The way he looked at me, I knew that what he was going to ask was serious. Not like helping with a school play. “What?” I said again, quieter this time.

  “We need to go back.”

  I put my fork down. “Where?” But I knew where.

  “To all of it. The neighborhood, the school. My old house.”

  Our surroundings seemed to spin a little. I held the edge of the table for support. “That’s why you came back.”

  “Partly.”

  “Is he . . . Do you still live with . . .” He shook his head. “Okay,” I finally said. “All right.”

  “Tomorrow?”

  “Tomorrow? As in the day after today?”

  “That one.”

  The last thing I wanted to do was let him down, but when I thought about taking that trip back in time everything in me seized up. “I can’t, Cameron,” I said. “I need more time. It’s only been a couple of days. Let me get used to the idea of you being alive, and then —”

  “Nothing to be afraid of. I’ll be there with you.”

  “I know, but . . .”

  Something in his face closed, a door behind those eyes swinging shut. He looked at his watch. “Gotta be at work soon.”

  “Where do you work? Let me give you a ride.”

  “Don’t worry about it. I’ll get a bus.”

  And he left. I watched him walk out — he didn’t say good-bye, he didn’t even look back.

  It scared me, how easy it was for him to do that.

  CHAPTER 12

  THAT NIGHT, MOM AND ALAN COOKED DINNER, WE ALL SAT AND ate, Mom talked. She talked and talked about the garden, the fish, the wine they were drinking, errands she needed to get done over the weekend, the other nurses on her floor, whether or not the scalloped potatoes were an accurate facsimile of her mother’s. She addressed every single possible topic except the obvious one: Cameron. Even Alan barely got a word in.

  He and I loaded the dishwasher while Mom made her Saturday night call to her sister in Maine.

  “You know what’s funny?” I finally said to Alan, handing him a rinsed plate.

  “No. What?”

  “We all thought Cameron was dead.”

  He stood up straight and took another dish from me. “Oh?”

  “Yeah. He died. I mean, in fifth grade, I heard he died. I was really upset. I fainted at school when I heard. Mom took off work and everything.”

  “Huh.” He placed our glasses on the top rack and closed the dishwasher door. “When did you find out that he wasn’t dead?”

  “Tuesday night.”

  “You mean . . .”

  “This past Tuesday night. My birthday. He left me a card in our mailbox.” Alan scooped some decaf coffee beans into the grinder, his bushy eyebrows furrowed. I wiped the counter down with a paper towel and polished the faucet. “So it’s kind of strange,” I continued, “that Mom didn’t seem surprised that Cameron is alive.”

  “Well. Hm.”

  “Yeah. Hm.” I tossed the paper towel in the trash. “I’m going over to Ethan’s.”

  Ethan set his mom’s kitchen timer to make sure we got in an hour of homework before we did anything else. I didn’t mention my lunch with Cameron, but I sat there thinking about it, and the more I thought about it the more it bothered me that Cameron had come to my house with no warning like I could simply drop everything and go to lunch with him. And it bothered me that I did, when I had so much homework to do. And what he asked me to do bothered me — to go back to the scene of . . . everything. Just like that. My day had been fine and on schedule until he walked up and disrupted things and told me he wanted me to go back and relive everything. My life had been fine and on schedule until he left that card in our mailbox.

  He didn’t have any idea the steps I’d taken, the enormous mountain I’d climbed just to be able to do something as small as I’d done the second week of freshman year: standing next to Steph in the cafeteria line and saying, “So what are you going to get? The pizza looks okay.” And how much it had required of me to say yes when she invited me to sit at her table that day rather than pre-reject myself for friendship the way I’d done ever since Cameron left me. He didn’t know what a triumph it was for me to go one day without thinking of myself as Fattifer, to sleep through one night without imagining his father’s boots on the carpet. And now, to ask me to go back through it all at a moment’s notice, and to be upset that I couldn’t say, “Oh, yes, I’d love to,” well, maybe he was right. I was mad.

  “. . .auditions are Monday,” Ethan was saying while he doodled in his notebook, resting his head on his other hand. “You have to be there, too, so you can start taking stage-managery notes.”

  “Aren’t you supposed to be writing a history essay right now?”

  He gently bopped my knuckles with his pen. “Yes, Mommy.” He’d been sucking on cinnamon candy while we studied; his lips were ruby red. I leaned across the table to kiss them and sat back down. “There are still twelve minutes left on the timer,” I said.

  “Tease.”

  It was a nice scene — me and my boyfriend studying on a Saturday night. Except I wasn’t really there. Narration ran through my head: There is Jenna Vaughn kissing her boyfriend, there is Jenna Vaughn with her trig book open, there is Jenna Vaughn smiling and playing footsie and acting like she is exactly where she wants to be. What brings two people together, anyway? Maybe it was just convenience and coincidence that Ethan and I were a couple. Maybe if it had been another girl at the library that day, she’d be with him now at the kitchen table.

  I looked at Ethan, wondering if I loved him at all.
br />   “What?” he asked.

  Then the timer buzzed, and Ethan smiled, slammed his book shut, took my hands, and led me to the bedroom. I followed, pushing all thoughts of Cameron and my mom out of my head. When we sank into the warm, dark pile of blankets and I went even deeper into myself, far away, exactly where I wanted to be.

  CHAPTER 13

  I STAYED IN MY ROOM THROUGH BREAKFAST, SITTING AT MY computer, even though I could smell bacon cooking and hear the waffle iron beeping and fresh coffee being ground. My mom had been asleep when I got home from Ethan’s and I didn’t know if Alan had talked to her or what, and all I really wanted was to stop thinking about Cameron and his dad and Ethan and everything else for one day, one day, and get my homework done.

  Steph came online, her avatar in pajamas.

  Me: What are you doing up? It’s not even noon.

  Steph: I know. I haven’t been to sleep yet.

  Me: Have your parents ever heard of “rules”?

  Steph: No. Lucky for me. So what’s the latest with your little friend?

  Me: ?

  Steph: Cameron. What’s the deal. You thought I was gonna forget?

  Me: No.

  Steph: Katy wants him.

  Well, she’s not going to have him, I thought.

  Me: I know.

  Steph: Let’s make it happen. Unless . . .

  Me: Unless?

  Steph: Unless.

  Me: Are you typing in invisible ink?

  Steph: You know what I mean, hon. UNLESS you don’t want Katy to have him. For some reason.

  Me: Such as?

  Steph: Such as if YOU want him.

  Me: I have Ethan.

  Steph: You’re not married to him. Think about it. I’m going to bed.

  By noon I had to come out of my room to go to the bathroom and get coffee and food. Mom sat at the kitchen table, opening mail and paying bills. She glanced at me when I walked in and said, “There you are. I wondered when you were going to join the living. There’s still coffee.”