“Shortage on the floor, too many patients, not enough nurses. The usual.” I chugged from my water bottle. “Good workout?”
“I guess.”
“She feels terrible, you know,” he said, peering over the top of his screen.
“You have no idea, Alan. There’s so much more to the story, stuff she doesn’t . . .” I stood up to keep myself from saying anything else. “Forget it. I need to shower.”
I make myself not look at the window. Is there a screen? I can’t remember. My hand is still on Cameron’s beating heart. He does not say a word.
Leave, I repeat.
He isn’t laughing anymore. Now his arms are folded. All right, then. Here I go. He takes a step backward. Now he turns and puts his hand on the doorknob. I’m leaving. He is through the door. With one glance back, staring directly at me with hard eyes, See me leaving?
The door closes behind him.
I run to it and push the lock button in.
When I turn, Cameron is still on the bed, frozen. Get up. I see that the window does have a screen. Scissors, I say.
Finally he understands, gets up, and goes straight to his dresser drawer instead of his desk. What he comes up with are not scissors but a knife, a big one. I stare at it for a second wondering why he has a big knife in his room. I open the window. Cameron starts to cut the screen.
Hurry, I say. Hurry.
Cameron cuts the screen with the knife.
The doorknob wiggles. You locked me out. I can’t believe you locked me out. You know it would be easy for me to break this door down . . . just one good shove. Cameron’s father’s voice is still big, almost like he’s right in the room with us.
Cameron cuts. I pull. Then the knife slips and falls behind the bed. We look at each other and his dad pounds the door again. I take the window screen and pull as hard as I can. Pieces of wire poke into my hands, stinging me and drawing blood.
For the first time I start to cry. Because I know if we don’t get out it’s going to be bad. And then it’s quiet on the other side of the door, which feels almost worse than the pounding. I keep pulling the screen even though my hands hurt so much. I got it, I say. There is a hole in the screen big enough for us to climb through.
You go first, he says. He helps me out and I land on the dirt. My ankle hurts, and so does my head, where a little bit of my hair got caught and pulled out. Cameron climbs through and lands next to me.
He takes my hand.
We run.
As my eight-years-later self, I stood under the shower and let the water stream over me. I could almost feel my hands still stinging from the window-screen wires. There should be scars, I thought, and lifted my hands to my face to examine them. There should be evidence. But the skin was its usual shade of pinky-beige; a couple of torn cuticles but nothing else. I was the one who got us out, me, scared little Jennifer Harris. The memory of how it felt to escape and Cameron himself were the only evidence I had.
I woke up after midnight, thinking I heard footsteps outside my window. It’s not the kind of neighborhood where you should be hearing footsteps anywhere near your house after dark. Usually it ends up being a cat or raccoon, but you never know. I listened, ready to run into Mom and Alan’s room if necessary, but heard nothing more and fell back asleep.
CHAPTER 15
“LAST CHANCE FOR COFFEE,” ALAN SAID, POKING HIS HEAD into the bathroom while I finished up my morning routine.
“Save me a cup. I’ll get it in a sec.” My hair would not do anything I wanted it to. There were dark circles under my eyes and my skin looked dull and PMS-y. I had some hair pomade in my gym bag, which I’d left in the car. I scurried out into the chill.
When I put the key in the car door, I gasped. The passenger seat was tilted all the way back, Cameron’s long legs stretching under the dashboard. With his jeans jacket tucked around his shoulders and eyes closed, he looked so much like his childhood self. I opened the door carefully and crouched next to him. “Cameron?” I said softly. “Cam?”
He opened his eyes, blinking at the morning sun. “Hi.”
“What are you doing?”
“Sleeping in your car.”
“I see that.” I glanced back at the house. “Do you want to come in? And have some breakfast?”
He nodded and got out of the car. I led him up the walk, through the front door, and into the kitchen where Mom was making her lunch. She looked up, surprise only crossing her face for a second. “Well. Good morning, Cameron,” she said. “I think there’s a cup of coffee left if Jenna doesn’t mind sharing.”
“You can have it,” I said to him. “I’ll get some on the way to school.”
“Thanks.”
Mom got a mug down for him and pointed to the half-and-half. “I’m off,” she said, putting her lunch stuff into a paper bag. “Nice to see you, Cameron. Tell your mom I’d love to catch up with her.” She gave me a kiss. “Be good.”
“I will.” We hadn’t had any follow-up conversations since Sunday and I knew she was waiting for me to give some sign that I wasn’t mad. I kissed her back, which made her smile.
“When are you ever not good?” Cameron asked, after Mom had gone.
“She says that to me every morning. For her it’s synonymous with ‘good-bye.’ How did you get into my car?”
“You left it unlocked.”
“Oh.” The more obvious question was why did he get into my car, but that could wait.
We heard the jingling of Alan’s keys. He leaned into the kitchen. “Bye, Jenna.” His eyebrows went up when he saw Cameron. “Oh, hi there.”
“Hi,” Cameron said.
“Good to see you again.”
“You, too.”
“Well,” Alan said. A long, awkward pause followed, during which we all glanced at one another and smiled politely. “See you tonight, Jen?”
“See you.” He left, and I turned to Cameron. “So.”
“You didn’t call me last night.”
“Was I supposed to?”
He looked down. “Just figured now that you had my number . . . Kept my phone on all night, just in case.” He laughed. “I started to worry that it didn’t work. Actually went out to a pay phone to test it.”
“You could have called me. The way you left me after lunch on Saturday, I figured . . .” I ended there and shrugged, not wanting to be mad at him or get into any kind of argument. “Anyway, after auditions I went to the gym with Steph, and I’m so behind in my homework it’s not even funny.” Of course I’d punched in his number about eighteen times without actually ever calling him. I wasn’t sure what I’d say, and worried about how I’d feel if he didn’t answer.
“I shouldn’t have left like that on Saturday.”
“Yeah, well.” I waved my hands. “Don’t worry about it. I have to finish getting ready. There’s cereal and stuff . . . just make yourself at home.”
“I saw him walking to school,” I told Ethan, “and I pulled over and offered him a ride. Like I would for anyone I know.”
It’s not like I wanted to get into this lie-telling habit with Ethan, but I really couldn’t see any possible way he would understand Cameron sleeping in my car. I didn’t even understand it. And Cameron, on the ride to school, had not offered any explanation.
“Okay, so why were you late?” Ethan asked.
“I was slow getting ready this morning. It happens.”
He didn’t look at me or hold my hand or do anything else to reassure me as we walked down the hall to government. “It’s your first detention ever, Jenna. And — what a coincidence — it comes on a day when you show up with Cameron?”
“Yes.” We got to our room and I held Ethan’s arm to keep him from going in. For a second, I wondered why I was trying to stop him. I wasn’t feeling liked or understood or even tolerated by him. But then maybe that was my fault, a result of all the lying and hiding and being someone I wasn’t. Feeling desperate, I played Steph’s card, even though it was a total fantasy. “I?
??m trying to get him and Katy together. I want him to hang out with us so that he can be around her and warm up to the idea.”
Ethan snorted. “What makes you think he’s going to go for Katy?”
“Opposites attract?” The warning bell rang.
Cameron came up to us, like he was waiting to go into the classroom. We were sort of blocking the door. “Excuse me,” he said.
Ethan swept hair out of his eyes, jutted out his chin. “Hold on. I’m not done making out with my girlfriend.” Then he pulled me against him and kissed me, being thoroughly obvious with his tongue and the groping of my butt. When he finally pulled away, Cameron was still standing there, staring.
“That supposed to impress me?” he asked, and went into the classroom.
My face was hot, and not because the kiss was so great. “Why did you do that, Ethan?”
“Because I wanted to.” His face was as red as mine felt.
“In the future, I’d appreciate it if you didn’t use my body to make a point.” The final bell rang; I pushed past him and went straight to my seat, pulled out my government book, and bit the inside of my cheek so I wouldn’t cry. I hadn’t cried at school since the day I heard Cameron died. Not crying at school was a key aspect of being Jenna Vaughn.
Mr. O’Connor made the mistake of being nice, coming up to me during a pop quiz to whisper, “Everything okay, Jenna?”
I shook my head.
“Would you like a hall pass?”
I nodded.
He went back to his desk, wrote me a pass, and brought it to me with everyone watching. Everyone except Ethan, who refused to look at me.
Leaning against the bathroom stall I had a total Jennifer Harris moment. I’d lost count of the number of times I’d cried at school back then for any and every reason: dropping my juice box on the playground, Mrs. Jameson accidentally sitting on my papier-mâché project, losing the rubber ball that went with my set of jacks.
Baby. Big fat baby.
“Sensitive,” “emotional,” “dramatic” were the words adults used. They seemed to think it was something I should be able to get a grip on. “You’re going to have to learn to pull yourself together, Jennifer” was what Principal Anderson said once after one of my episodes.
I ran a paper towel under the faucet and pressed it to my face, looking in the mirror to check the status of the redness of my eyes. Baby. Then a voice from underneath that, one I hadn’t heard before, talked back. You’re not a baby. Babies don’t tear away window screens with their bare hands to save themselves. I closed my eyes, wanting to hear more, trying to block out any image of Jenna Vaughn that obscured my view of Jennifer Harris. But apparently she’d finished talking.
Cameron wasn’t in detention, though he’d been late, too. I wasn’t surprised; he seemed to operate by his own rules, even with the school administration. Ethan was waiting for me outside the room when it was over; I pretended not to see him and went the other way. “Where are you going?” he asked, turning around when he realized I wasn’t tagging along.
“I have to get home early. My mom needs me to do some stuff around the house.”
“What about the play?”
I looked at him. I knew he was embarrassed and sorry for the scene outside government. And I knew that he expected me, as usual, to silently forgive him and act like everything was A-OK, restoring the balance of our little universe with a smile or a hug. But I couldn’t. “I’ll have to miss it today,” I said. “Sorry.”
He shrugged, obviously angry. “Whatever. We’re just making the final casting decisions. No big deal.”
“Well. Have fun.”
“Jenna . . .”
“What, Ethan?” I said it fast, annoyed.
“Never mind. God. What’s wrong with you lately?” He started to walk away, then looked back. “Oh, let me guess. Hormones, right? Why don’t you go home and take some Midol.”
“Yeah. I’ll do that.”
Cameron stood by my car in the student lot. “How come you weren’t in detention?” I asked, digging in my backpack for my keys.
He shrugged. “I’ll make it up tomorrow.”
My hands closed around my key chain, the one with the Statue of Liberty that Ethan had brought back from a family trip to New York right before school started. I wondered how much longer I’d keep it. “Do you need a ride?”
“No.”
I sighed. “Then what are you doing here?” He stared at the ground and I finally instructed him to get in the car. He obeyed, folding himself into the seat. We pulled out of the lot and I drove for a few blocks before asking him where we were going, even though I already knew what he wanted — to go back to where it had all begun. “I don’t think I’m ready, Cameron.”
“Come on,” he said. “It will be okay.”
We were at a stoplight; I glanced at him, wanting him to just say okay, we didn’t have to go, to suggest something else like a drive up one of the canyons, or sharing a plate of cheese fries. I wished, in that moment, that we could simply have a normal friendship based on the usual things instead of on our shared and individual histories of feeling like we didn’t belong in our lives.
The light turned green and Cameron asked, “Trust me, Jennifer. Just . . . trust me.”
I drove another block or two. “Why should I?”
“Why shouldn’t you?”
Because you left me, Cameron. After everything we went through. But I knew it wasn’t his fault, any more than it was mine. It wasn’t like either of us had control over our lives. We were at the mercy of our parents, both of us. Anyway, I’d already turned the car toward the freeway entrance. I turned on the car radio and we drove twenty minutes without talking. When the exit finally came into view, ugly warehouses and the new Wal-Mart looming before us, I said, “Let’s go to my old apartment first. I haven’t been there since we moved.”
“I’ve gone by it a couple of times.”
“Really?”
“Yeah. Living there with you was kind of my best memory.”
I imagined that, him going to the apartment and looking up at the window and thinking about me.
We were getting close. The area looked nicer in some ways, if you liked shiny chain stores and restaurants and mall developments. When I finally recognized my old street, my heart sped up. “There it is,” I said. Nearly everything at the old apartment building was the same — same beige paint, same carports with their rusting tin roofs, same cement walkways surrounded by too-green grass and manmade ponds. Now there were also yellow and green flags along the street like exclamation points, announcing the alleged fabulousness of life at West Valley Cove & Gardens.
“Move-in special,” Cameron said, pointing to a banner over the entry gate. “First month’s rent free.”
“So tempting.” We parked, and walked on the cement path toward building C, on the side of the property our window had faced. We’d had a lovely view of storage units, which I would stare out at every day after school. Now, my breath caught when I rounded the corner. They’d planted a small grove of aspens where there had been a dry, empty stretch of ground between me and the storage units. Like magic, the aspens were full grown, their leaves just turning from the green of late summer to the gold of fall. What would it have been like, I wondered, to look out at those white-barked trees every day instead of a dead lot of nothing?
A gentle wind came up and the leaves quaked. “Listen,” I said to Cameron.
He hopped over the fake stream running between us and the stand of trees. I did the same, and we walked deeper in. “They clatter,” he said. “The leaves clatter. Remember?”
I sat on the ground and then lay back. “Come on. Like we used to.”
The wind got stronger, and he stretched out next to me, arm’s length apart. We stayed like that, listening, for a long time.
“What are you thinking?” he asked.
I closed my eyes. “So many things.”
“Like?”
“My mom told me about
what really happened when I thought you died. I want to know what it was like to live in a shelter, and why you were sleeping in my car this morning. I want to know where you live now and what your life has been like for the last eight years and why you came back. Why you really came back. I want to know what was going on in your house and if what your dad did that day was . . .” I swallowed. “If it was the kind of thing he did a lot. To you.” I exhaled and opened my eyes. “That’s what I’m thinking.”
Before he could answer, my cell phone beeped the opening notes of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. I pulled it from my jacket pocket and saw Ethan’s number on the screen. I turned off the phone. My back was getting cold and damp but I didn’t move, just in case Cameron was about to answer even one of my questions. But he stood and stared down at me, extending a hand to help me up. “Let’s go check out the school.”
“That’s all you have to say?”
He was lit from behind by the afternoon sun, green-gold under the aspens. Maybe it was the sun or the fact that I had barely eaten that day, but the aspens seemed to spin around him in slow motion and I wanted to stay there forever and never go back to Jones Hall, never go back to Ethan. There was something inviting and consoling about the scenario Mom had posed: Cameron as my only friend, for all those years, my whole life. Just us enduring everything together with complete understanding and unquestioning loyalty, in a world that only we occupied. I wouldn’t have to fake anything anymore. I could see now, staring up at him, that it wouldn’t be so hard to slip back into that life, leaving everything I’d built as Jenna Vaughn behind.
He crouched down next to me. I put my hand on the hem of his jeans. It was the first time I’d touched him since that day in the cafeteria line.
“I’ve got so much to tell you,” he said, so quietly I almost couldn’t hear. “Been thinking about how to even start.”
“Start anywhere,” I whispered. “I just want to know.”
“I feel like I’ve already told you everything, in a way. I’ve been talking to you in my head for eight years, writing epics and sequels to epics, and sequels to the sequels.”