“So, you girls want to do the scavenger hunt?” he asked, changing the subject. “I’m in charge, and it’s pretty fun.” Asher handed Perry a list of things to find.
They decided to split up. On the top of Cam’s list was a green balloon. She scanned the streets for green, but the only things that weren’t red, white, and blue were the flamingos. A few had wandered away from the flock and strutted down Main Street like aliens from another planet.
As Cam was looking down at her scavenger list, Alec with a c snuck up behind her and slid a hand around her waist. She bristled (in disgust or arousal, she wasn’t sure—she was confused when it came to Alec), but all the hair on her body suddenly stood on end. “Oh, so you know me today?”
“I am sorry,” he said. “Autumn, she is very, how you say? Jealous.”
“Right. Well, I am very, how you say? Revolted. Revolted by you, so you may remove your hand.”
“Campbell, come on. Let’s go get a cup of coffee. Autumn is busy. Sunny makes her wave flags around with the band.”
“No, Alec. I will not have coffee with you, thank you very much. I’m in search of a green balloon.”
As Cam walked away, she started to feel dizzy. Her palms were sweaty. She was having trouble catching her breath. Would they know who to call if she died there on the spot? Would she never get to say good-bye?
Maybe it was how she woke up this morning, but she was thinking about death a lot today. She thought about how it would happen. . . . Her lungs slowly filling up with fluid, drowning in her own bed, suddenly finding herself without breath, and then without sight or hearing, and then eventually without even the capacity to dream. Without love. That was the saddest and scariest part about it. To be suddenly, eternally without love.
Cam tried to stop these thoughts because they were not helping the situation. She began to hyperventilate, and then she fell over, and once again, everything went dark.
“It was a panic attack, Campbell,” Alicia told her.
“Huh?”
“I don’t want you thinking this was some bad episode. You simply had a panic attack. Your numbers are all fine. The doctor can prescribe some medication. A little Ativan. Something to take the edge off. And you’ll be good as new.”
“Did your pizza win?” Cam asked groggily, taking in the sterile doctor’s office around them.
“I didn’t have time to enter it, but we can eat it when we get home.”
Perry was sitting on a chair by the window, busy with the keypad of her phone. Next to the chair was a paper bag overflowing with the random stuff from her half of the scavenger-hunt list. A clothespin, a sun visor, a plastic baseball bat . . .
“I did it again, didn’t I, Perry?”
“What?” she asked, her thumbs still wildly texting.
“Ruined something you were looking forward to.”
“That’s okay.”
“No. It’s not. Can we at least go home and eat the pizza?”
“Sure. There’s plenty of it. I had so many tomatoes. You can invite some friends,” Alicia said.
“Ha!” said Perry without looking up from her phone. “Like she has any of those.”
As if on cue, Asher, Sunny, Royal, and Autumn sans Alec walked into the doctor’s office.
“We just wanted to see how you were doing,” Asher said.
“Well, that is a miracle,” said Perry. She took out her notebook and said out loud as she wrote, “Number forty: Campbell . . . has . . . friends.”
“Thanks a lot, Perry,” Campbell said.
Perry just gave her a little wink.
“Let’s get out of here,” Alicia announced. “Pizza, anyone?”
“Perry, you should write this down in your notebook.”
The pizza was magical. The dough had a chewy, bendy, bouncy quality, and the cheese pulled away from your mouth in thin strings. Which was perfect. Biting into pizza should be a silent operation. Noiseless. There was nothing worse than a crunchy pizza with cheese that slid off in one piece.
And the sauce. The sauce was an inspiration. Not too sweet or salty or tangy, but a blend of those flavors that perfectly glued the cheese to the bubbling dough underneath. Alicia walked around serving endless trays of it to their guests.
Everyone they knew was there. Her mom’s hula friends, Perry’s tweeny friends, Cam’s catalog kids, who had thankfully shaken their patriotic alter egos and returned to their pretending-to-be-effortless style. Even Elaine was there with Smitty, the cook from the lobster pound. It was a wonderful, spontaneous gathering, the kind that used to happen to Cam’s family before everything changed.
They sat around a long table that Asher had set up in the front yard overlooking the bay. They waited for the orcas to make their ritual leaps out of the ocean, and then they waited again for darkness to fall and for the fireworks to begin. Someone was launching them from behind the lighthouse, and they had the perfect vantage point from the lawn of Avalon by the Sea.
Cam watched as Perry and her friends honed their flirting skills on Asher. He was the perfect hot-but-innocuous person to practice on, and he was extremely patient with them, lighting their sparklers again and again, as they pretended to be too frightened to do it themselves.
Cam hadn’t gotten the gene that allowed you to flirt. She was convinced it was genetic. You either had the capacity for coyness, or you simply could not pretend to be stupid. Which was what guys really wanted. They wanted you to prove to them how much smarter they really were, and Cam’s ego was too big for that. Which, if you thought about it, was just stupid. If Cam were smart, she would pretend to be stupid, so that she would end up less alone.
She was glad Perry could do it. It made her worry less about her.
Asher had hooked up the outdoor speakers, and her mom put on the sound track from “The Spirit of Aloha.” Cam was dying to dance but was suddenly terrified to do it in front of Asher. Maybe she did have some coyness in her.
“Come on!” said her mom. “Campbell, this is your number.”
“Oh, God.” Cam finally hoisted her pizza-stuffed self off the bench. “Just for a minute,” she said. But when she lost herself in the music, one minute became a half an hour, and she’d forgotten all about who might be watching. She did the entire volcano goddess hula, which describes the origins of the dance. Pele the volcano goddess needed to escape her sister, the sea. The sea kept dousing her flames, so Pele traveled to the top of the highest hill and found a home where she could truly express herself. Then she danced in celebration.
When Cam was through, she sat down to take a rest. She watched Perry as she very animatedly told her unicorn theory to a bunch of people who’d gathered around her, eating their s’mores.
Cam had heard Perry tell this unicorn story a million times. Her theory started with the idea that there are too many references to dragons for them to have been a complete myth. The idea of dragons could not possibly be entirely fictitious. Someone must have seen some kind of flying lizard who breathed fire.
“There needed to be an origin,” she said now. Her audience was rapt. “And the original dragon was probably—like the Loch Ness Monster, who, by the way, is also not a myth—a dinosaur. At some point a very, very long time ago, dinosaurs must have walked the earth with humans. Not a lot of them, mind you, but a few stragglers who had woken up after the Ice Age like iguanas can sometimes do after a long cold winter when you think they are dead. Cold-blooded things can wake up when they get warm. So a few of these dinosaurs—or pterosaurs, actually, because they could fly—must have woken up and existed, and man must have seen one, or there would never have been stories about dragons.
“If you have to believe that there were dragons, then you have to believe in unicorns because people were telling stories about them around the same time.”
Cam wondered, between her and her sister, who was Pele and who was the sea. She didn’t have to think too long about it. Her sister had an imaginative, erupting spirit, and Cam continued to douse it with her wet-rag cynic
ism.
“That was something else,” Asher said, straddling the bench next to Cam at the picnic table.
She started to say that yes, Perry would someday make a great unicornologist, when Asher interrupted, “The hula stuff. Pretty amazing. You’re really good.”
Cam wanted to say something sarcastic, but just then the first rocket went off, announcing the start of Promise’s Fourth of July fireworks spectacular, which, when you’re used to Disney fireworks every night of your life, was pretty darn pathetic. Pathetic in a way that made Cam start to like it here.
Cam felt happier. Maybe it was the pizza in her stomach, but she felt content. She felt brave enough to text Lily for the first time since they’d arrived.
Today was a good day, she wrote. She hoped it was positive enough to warrant a response.
TWENTY
“HELP ME GET HIM INTO THE U-HAUL.”
“You know he’s a donkey, right?” Asher said. “And a spoiled donkey. He’s not just going to do what I say.”
“Sure he will. Come on, James Madison,” said Cam as she clicked her tongue and pulled him with the lead.
James Madison pulled back. He shook his head, and then he actually sat down, which Cam did not expect.
“Isn’t she going to realize he’s a donkey and not a white horse? He doesn’t exactly have a mythical, magical physique.”
“James Madison!” Cam gasped. “Are you going to take that? Stand up and show him your physique.”
James Madison just sat there and brayed. It almost sounded as if he were saying “U-Haul.”
“Right, James Madison, U-Haulll. Get into the U-Haulll,” Cam said in donkey language.
“Are there any air holes in that thing?” Asher asked as the donkey finally stood up and began taking tentative steps out of his corral and into the driveway.
“It’s only five minutes to the house,” Cam said, pulling again at the lead.
“This just feels like a lie, that’s all. And we’re also stealing, which is not exactly comfortable for me.”
“You’ve never stolen anything?” Cam asked. “Everyone steals something. Even if it’s an ice pop from the freezer when you’re six.”
“Not that I know of.”
“God. That’s cute. We’re borrowing, Slasher. We will bring him back. That’s the definition of borrowing. Taking something and then returning it,” Cam sighed, dropping the lead and taking a break from trying to pull the burro. She picked it up and pulled again. “Like a library book,” she continued. “Elaine’s a librarian. She understands borrowing.”
“Borrowers have permission, number one, and you have never seen Elaine when she is angry,” Asher said. He picked up a thin stick and tapped James Madison on the bottom. The donkey took a few steps forward.
“She can’t be worse than my mom,” Cam said as they approached the Vagina Train. There wasn’t a place near here to return the U-Haul, so they had paid the rent on it and were going to return it when they got back to Florida. Returning the U-Haul on time was the kind of detail that just fell away when you were worried about dying.
James Madison only fell out once.
It was when they took the big curve in front of the lobster pound a little too quickly. They heard his hooves sliding around and then something like an elephant tap-dancing on a garbage can. Then it got quiet, and the drag on Cumulus got suddenly lighter. And when Cam checked the rear view, James Madison was standing motionless in the middle of the road.
“Don’t panic,” she told Asher, and she herself popped one of those Ativans that the doctor had given her after her panic attack. They were tiny and dissolved into chalky silt beneath your tongue. She was allowed to take them whenever she felt jittery because what difference did it make at this point if she developed a tranquilizer addiction?
They backed the U-Haul up a bit so that it was directly in front of the donkey. Cam decided to ride him into the trailer. She mounted James Madison and bent down close to his ear, whispering to him to calmly get back into the U-Haul. The donkey straightened, as if listening, and walked forward into the belly of the truck. Cam knocked on the wall of the trailer to signal Asher to take off. She stayed with the donkey inside the tiny dark space until they got back to the house.
“I think you can take it from here, A. W.,” Asher said.
The only downside to the whole operation was that Asher now got to call her the “Ass Whisperer,” which she deserved, she guessed, after enlisting him in an afternoon of donkey-napping.
They had successfully transferred James Madison from the U-Haul, through the carriage house, and into the secret tunnels of the Underground Railroad. The donkey stood in one of the bunkers, tied to a cot as he feasted on some hay and a carrot. Cam attempted to attach a tinfoil-covered waffle cone to his forelock with some bobby pins. But the magical horn kept flopping to one side.
“Rats,” she said. “I don’t think I can get this on right.” She was feeling drowsy from the Ativan and getting frustrated. Her moods were swinging all over the place. She was so gung-ho a minute ago, and now she just wanted to give up on this crazy idea.
“Maybe some duct tape,” Asher offered. “I think I have some upstairs.”
Cam followed Asher back up the ramp and through the sliding bookcase into the carriage house. He was neat for a guy, but not pathologically neat. He had hung his barn jacket on the back of the kitchen chair instead of hanging it right away in the closet, like Mr. Rogers. But he hadn’t just thrown it on the couch.
The décor was very masculine, with leather furniture and Oriental rugs. A billiards table sat in the far corner. He slept in a vaulted loft space above the kitchen. As he fumbled through some kitchen drawers for the duct tape, Cam looked around. Sepia-toned photos of Asher’s industrious ancestors hung on the wall behind the desk. The bearded men wore hats and suspenders and the proper ladies wore corsets and buns. Another photo was of a beautiful woman with long, curly hair to her waist. She was not corseted like the others. Her dress was a loose calico, and she sat, profile to the camera, looking down at her hands, a little like Whistler’s mother. Someone had written Olivia, 1896 in the bottom right-hand corner.
There was a tinge of shame in the way she wouldn’t look into the camera, yet she was dignified, too, in the straight way she held her spine. Cam knew at once that this was the woman who had spent many years in the widow’s walk.
Then she saw the photo of Asher with his mom. It was so brightly colored compared to the muted tones of the older photos that it was hard to miss. He wore an orange hooded sweatshirt, and his little brown-eyed face, already with the dimple, was looking through the rungs of a blue ladder as his mom held him from behind to help him get to the top of the slide. She was a very beautiful version of Elaine, with golden hair and Asher’s glinting brown eyes. They looked happy. Glowing. Never guessing that the day would come when they would be forever apart.
“Where is your grandfather?” Cam asked.
“Dead,” he said.
“But I thought you said—”
“I need to assume he is dead.”
“Why couldn’t Miracle Town save him?”
“Because he left, and he never came back. It happened to my mom and dad, too. They died on their way to Hawaii.”
“I know.”
Cam felt his burden all over again, the same leaden suit she had worn when she danced his life at Elaine’s house. He was the keeper of the house, the keeper of the memories, and, aside from Elaine, the sole survivor. No wonder he didn’t want to take some scholarship. Leaving this town for him would be another kind of death. Not the kind Cam was facing, but a death nonetheless.
“You have some serious abandonment issues, Slasher,” she said.
“You think?”
“I do. Years of therapy.” Cam winked.
“And what about you? What brings you to Miracle Town?”
“I’m dying,” Cam said.
Asher stood leaning on the counter with his right hand. He kept his hea
d down for a minute, and Cam stared at the veins bulging from his forearm. He sighed and shook his head. Living here, he had obviously heard this story before. Cam wasn’t the first pilgrim to come here seeking a miracle. “That’s bad news for me and my abandonment issues, Ass Whisperer.”
“You’ve got to stop calling me that.”
“I will. I just need to work it out of my system.”
“Speaking of the ass,” Cam said, changing the subject, “did you find the duct tape yet? I want to perform this miracle right at dusk, so she can see him but not too clearly.” She could hear James Madison rustling around downstairs, probably getting restless and claustrophobic.
“Here you go.”
“Aren’t you going to help me?” Cam asked.
“I have to shower. I have, um, someplace to be, and I don’t want to smell like ass.”
Cam lost her breath for a second and waited for it to come back. The way he said it, Cam knew he was going to meet a girl.
It was difficult not to rush people through their dinners. Cam tried to slow herself down by chewing each mouthful twenty times. But mac ’n’ cheese doesn’t take much chewing, so she tried other things, like putting her fork down and taking a sip of water after every bite. When it looked like her mom and sister were done, she cleared the table and made a stack of dishes next to the sink. She checked the window while she was there to make sure James Madison hadn’t strayed. He was still there, about thirty yards away, tied to a tree.
Cam had covered him in flour to make him white. He was looking pretty good if Cam did say so herself. She had molded the tinfoil of the horn into a swirly shape, attached it with the duct tape, and painted it white and gold. From a distance, James Madison looked like a squat unicorn.
“Whoa, Perry. You better get busy. That’s a lot of dishes,” she said.
“What is going on, Martha Stewart?” her mom asked. “Why are you suddenly so invested in home economics?”