“Then I’ll meet you guys at the arcade.”
Inside GSW were acres of shot glasses, snow globes, wind chimes, toothpick holders, keychains, bumper stickers, bobbleheads, and assorted novelties. It was rest stop heaven. Cam got to work. She could have paid for things with her check from Disney, but she had unfortunately become a little addicted to the thrill of shoplifting.
“This will be the last time,” she told herself. She knew that was what addicts said, but this really would be the last time.
She found the perfect gift for Perry right away. She was standing in front of a rotating rack of plastic, personalized coffee mugs, and they actually had a “Perry.” It was for a boy Perry—blue, with a big soccer ball bulging out from the side of it—but that was perfect. Perry hated that her name was “gender-neutral,” and when she wrote it herself, she spelled it “Peri” and dotted the I with a big daisy. She had changed herself into a prefix.
The mug would piss her off for a second, but then it would make her laugh. Cam slipped it into the front pocket of her hoodie, and then for her mom she stole a googly-eyed frog made out of seashells. Her mother detested seashell arts and crafts. She vowed that she’d never have seashells as part of her décor. Especially in her bathroom. Cam would insist that this frog live in their bathroom in Maine.
Not that they’d come close to securing a room in Maine. Cam was pretty sure this hotel did not even exist. She slid a flamingo-shaped backscratcher down her pants. She was wearing her multipocketed cargo pants that tied at the knees so she could really pull in a good haul. And then she got a text from Lily:
YMSYCTAI [Your Mission Should You Choose to Accept It]: Btl rckts from Rckt City + Roman candle.
They were stopping at Lily’s in about an hour, and Cam couldn’t wait. If Lily wanted bottle rockets, then Cam would get bottle rockets.
South Carolina was one of the few states left that didn’t have laws against letting your kids blow their fingers off with M-80s. Cam pretended to browse her way out of the gift shop and made it across the road to the fireworks store Rocket City. It was next to the gas station, which seemed to Cam like some bad planning. Who would put an explosives shop next to the gas station? Anyway, it was an easy mission to complete because the toothless woman at the counter was busy watching a monster truck pull on TV.
The long fuses from the bottle rockets scraped Cam’s legs as she walked past the defunct, decrepit, and broken-down Sombrero Ride, the train, and the roller coaster, which would be fixed next month, according to Carlos, who stood guard at the empty gate.
Cam found her mom and Perry at the arcade. Perry, a white unicorn galloping across her left cheek, was pleading with her mom to get her biorhythm chart from an old faux wood–paneled machine from the seventies.
Alicia was still on the phone, listening once again to the busy signal of the only hotel in Promise, Maine.
Perry eventually won her negotiation. Alicia fed a dollar into the machine, yellow lights flashed around a blinking swami’s head, and Perry put her finger in a clamp that looked like the one Cam had to use in the hospital to measure her oxygen levels. The lights blinked again, and then the machine spit out a card that said Perry would be lucky in love.
No shit, thought Cam. She’s a blonde Scandinavian goddess. Did they have someone sitting inside this machine?
“You try it, Cam. Go ahead.”
“Right. And if it says I’m lucky in love, we know it’s a sham.”
Cam placed her finger in the clamp, the lights blinked, the swami’s head blinked off entirely. The machine spit out Cam’s card halfway and stopped.
She could already tell that her card was different than Perry’s. There was no pretty red border around it, and when she tried to pull it out, it was as if the swami were pulling it back. He wouldn’t let go of it. Cam tugged harder, using two hands, but it wouldn’t budge. She put one foot up onto the machine and yanked one last time. When the card finally unstuck, she fell backward. She looked down. In her hands was a blank piece of paper.
She turned it over to see if something was printed on the other side. She looked back into the slot, but there was no other ticket. The swami’s wax face seemed to smirk at her.
“It’s blank,” Cam said, disappointed in spite of herself.
“See,” said Perry. “You have to believe in it, or it won’t know you exist.”
Cam crumpled the card in her palm. Maybe her oxygen levels were just really low. She’d been feeling weak since Atlanta, and she should probably go to the hospital. But she knew if she could get a good night’s sleep, she’d be fine in the morning.
Or maybe not. Maybe her future was blank, after all.
SEVEN
LILY’S DRIVEWAY, LITTERED WITH PINE NEEDLES, WOUND INTO THE tall, piney woods and opened up on to a newfangled log cabin–style home. The way Log Cabin syrup is “maple-style,” it was an enormous, diluted, imitation of the real thing. The severe horizontal lines of the architecture were broken up by beautiful arched windows and softened by a completely chaotic English-style garden growing out of control in the front yard. The wet grass of the backyard sloped down to the lake.
It was only eight o’clock, but Cam was tired. It had taken them less than an hour to get to Lily’s from South of the Border, and during the ride, Cam hadn’t been sure she would make it. Her head throbbed and everything ached. She almost had to resort to the little dropper of morphine she kept in the secret knee-pocket of her cargo pants for emergencies, but she didn’t want to be crabby and irritated when she saw Lily, so she drank a ton of water instead and took some of her stolen calendula root from Whole Foods. But the sight of Lily’s house eased some of Cam’s pain. She’d only been there once before, but the house felt instantly familiar and comforting. People here knew what it was like.
Cam stepped out of the car and stretched her arms in the air. Before she could even put her shoes on, Lily bolted out the front door, grabbed her wrist, and pulled her down the hill toward the water.
“Ouch, ouch, ouch,” Cam chanted as she tried unsuccessfully to dodge the pine cones that kept ending up under her feet.
“Watch out for those,” said Lily, who whisked ethereally around them in a white, flowing dress like a tiny wood fairy.
They tiptoed out to the end of the dock, where Lily had set up two Cokes, a box of cigarettes, and a big abalone shell she was using as an ashtray. The fiberglass of the motorboat squeaked as it occasionally rubbed up against the tires nailed to the side of the dock. The only other sounds were the chorus of the crickets and the lip-smacking noise of the water as it lapped up against the boat. The moon cast a glimmering yellow path on the water, as if inviting you to walk on it.
“So, I did it,” said Lily as she lit a bottle rocket and sent it screaming off the dock. It exploded with a pop that echoed over the lake. Turned out Lily was quite the pyrotechnics expert—or pyromaniac, Cam wasn’t sure. “What else did you bring me?” she asked, hungrily digging through Cam’s bag for another explosive.
“Wait! Back up. You did what?” asked Cam. From the looks of it, Lily had done a lot of things differently since she and Cam had bunked together at their last clinical trial in Memphis. Her hair, normally spiked in a punk pixie and highlighted with green, was back to its natural dirty blonde. It was now tamed, shoulder-length, and held back with a thin, unadorned headband. She had stopped using her bold, liquid eyeliner and instead wore some soft blue (blue!) eye shadow that matched the crystalline of her eyes. “What did you do, Alice, jump down the rabbit hole?”
“I guess you could put it that way.” Lily smirked. She sat next to Cam at the end of the dock and put her feet in the water.
“You did it, it?” asked Cam, seeing how far she could splash and then watching the water settle in concentric ripples.
“Affirmative.” Lily kicked out her foot, sending a few drops of water about two feet farther than Cam’s latest splash.
“With whom?”
“Ryan,” said Lily, and she c
ouldn’t stop herself from smiling.
“Who is Ryan?” Cam asked. She was shocked that this was the first time she was hearing about this. They talked to each other every day. How had Lily failed to mention that she had a “lover”?
“I met him at church.”
“You go to church now?” The surprises just kept on coming.
“And youth group,” said Lily as she pulled her foot out of the water. She shivered a bit, grabbed her bright orange beach towel, and wrapped it around her. She snuggled up next to Cam, shoulder to shoulder.
“Aren’t you youth group people against premarital sex?” Cam asked, wondering how Lily could possibly be cold. It was still eighty degrees and humid in spite of the slight breeze wafting in over the lake.
“Publicly.”
“And privately?”
“Like rabbits.”
“Ahh. Thank you for finally solving for me the mysterious allure of youth group,” said Cam. “So do you go to Christian rock concerts now?”
“No. I had to draw the line somewhere,” Lily explained. She still listened to Rancid, Propagandhi, Anti-Flag, and the Dead Kennedys, but she was straying away from Crucifux and Christ on a Crutch, for Ryan’s sake. Lord’s name in vain, and all that.
“What does he look like? I’m getting a gangly, freckly, pimply vibe.”
“Cam.”
“In a good way. I mean pimply in a good way.”
“How can you be pimply in a good way?”
“I don’t know.” Cam felt something. Was it jealousy? Was she jealous of gangly, pimply Ryan? Or envious that Lily was having this experience? Or furious that Lily had never told her about it? She was suddenly embarrassed that she had sloppily confessed her every private thought and desire to Lily, while Lily was up here leading a secret life. She watched a firefly hovering over the lake blink five times before asking, “So is Ryan, like, your boyfriend?”
“Once he breaks up with Kaitlin.”
“Right.” There’s a catch, thought Cam. There’s always a catch.
“No. I know he loves me. He’s just been with Kaitlin for a long time, so it’s difficult for him to extricate himself,” Lily said as she shook an American Spirit out of the box.
“Let me guess. Kaitlin does not believe in premarital sex.”
“Cam. He loves me. A woman knows,” she said through clenched teeth as she lit the cigarette with the South of the Border lighter Cam had stolen from Rocket City.
“Woman?” asked Cam. “He’s made a woman out of you?”
“Entirely,” Lily said, jutting her bottom lip out so she could exhale toward the sky and away from Cam’s face.
“Don’t smoke,” said Cam.
“Don’t nag,” said Lily, flicking the cigarette into the lake.
“But how do you know he loves you? Like, how are you so certain?”
“There are signs, Campbell.”
“Like in Bugs Bunny when his eyes bulge out and his head is encircled with a wreath of hearts and chirping birds, and his heart springs visibly out of his chest?”
Lily turned to her. “How’d you guess?”
“No, really.”
“I don’t know,” said Lily, fiddling with her pack of cigarettes and letting another one loose. She clamped it between her lips and lit it. “When he touches me,” she said, squinting one eye from the smoke, “there’s a vibration. An energy that shoots through my body. A visceral wisdom. I get goose bumps. All of my hair stands on end. Every time he touches me. And only when he touches me. That’s how I know.”
“Visceral wisdom,” Cam muttered. “Doesn’t that just mean you want him?”
“God, Campbell. Enough! I know what I know, okay?”
“Okay, well, good for you. Congratulations about Ryan,” said Cam. She tried to be happy for Lily, but she was skeptical. There was nothing hornier-sounding than a seventeen-year-old boy named Ryan.
“I have another confession to make,” said Lily, turning toward Cam. For the first time since she’d arrived, Cam noticed how thin Lily had become. Her skin was silvery gray and diaphanous, her fingers spindly, and her facial features—her nose and cheekbones—sharp.
“There’s more? I don’t think I can take any more,” said Cam. “You’re taking the cancerexia a little too far, by the way. Are you eating?”
“Yes, I’m eating, Cam, and I wrote a letter to Make-A-Wish,” Lily said. Cam and Lily had vowed never to do that. They weren’t going to join the cancer establishment or exploit their illness for free stuff. “I want to go to Italy with Ryan,” she said.
“What does Kaitlin have to say about that?” Cam asked.
“Shut up. You should do it too. Write to them.”
Aside from Dear Make-A-Wish, I wish I did not have cancer , Cam had no idea what she’d write. Dear Make-A-Wish, Can you please get me laid before I die? Come on. She’d trained herself for so long not to want or to hope or to wish, that she had a hard time pinning down something to ask for. And she was content. She had her car. She had her bird, and she was on the road, running. If she kept running, maybe the cancer would never catch up with her.
“I don’t have a wish,” she said.
“Yes, you do.” Lily leaned against her.
“Stop it. I don’t.” She leaned away.
“You do,” Lily said, flicking yet another cigarette into the lake.
“What’s with the littering? Dear Make-A-Wish, I wish my friend Lily would stop smoking and flicking her cigarettes into the lake,” said Cam.
“I’m going to write a letter for you then.”
“Great. They’ll probably send me to Disney World.”
The chirping soprano crickets and a few croaking baritone frogs filled the awkward silence. With the new Ryan development, Lily had ventured to a place Cam would probably never go herself. It was like Cam was suddenly playing Sandra Dee to Lily’s Rizzo from Grease, and Cam couldn’t get that stupid phrase “lousy with virginity” out of her head. She felt a rift deepening and widening between them. A crack straight through her heart.
“By the way, Kaitlin has strep throat, so Ryan’s going to take us on a picnic tomorrow. You’ll get to meet him,” said Lily.
“Terrific. And what am I going to do while you two are off sneaking into the woods?”
“Well, Ryan has a friend. Andrew.”
“Oh, God, Lily, no.”
“Oh my goodness, Campbell, yes.”
“You know I can play the sick card, right? I really feel like crap.”
“Trust me,” Lily said.
“Okay, fine,” Cam said. She wished she’d thought to put disastrous blind date on her Flamingo list because she felt certain she would accomplish that now.
“There’s something I want to do,” said Lily. She got up and moved behind Cam. Cam thought she was searching for some more fireworks or something, but before she could turn around, Lily muttered, “InthenameoftheFatherSonand-HolySpiritIbaptizeyouCampbellMariaCooper.” And then she pushed Cam off the dock.
It took Cam a few moments to make sense of what had just happened. To make whole the pieces of synaptic experience, connect the dots, and understand: pushing, falling, fear, wet, cold, splash, muffled sounds, underwater, lake! She let herself hang suspended for a second in the underwater quiet. She felt some soft seaweed tickle her foot and then kicked to the surface.
The water felt so clean that Cam dunked herself under again and then grabbed onto the white plastic ladder at the end of the dock and pulled herself up face-first.
Lily peeked over the edge of the dock with an impish look on her face. That fabulous glint in her eye that meant she was up to some harmless no-good. Like the time in the hospital when she raided the supply closet, stole huge white garbage bags, tied toilet paper around their heads, and made Cam march with her in the Halloween parade as “white trash.”
“Excuse me,” said Cam, spitting some water, “but did you just freaking baptize me?” Cam’s parents were agnostics and didn’t believe in religious rituals
that tried to set some people apart from others. How could dumping water on someone’s head help them gain access to heaven?
“Sort of,” said Lily.
“Lily! You can’t do that to a person against her will.”
“We do it to babies all the time.”
“I’m not a baby. Here, help me up.” Lily reached a hand out for Cam’s. Cam pulled on it, hurling Lily into the water headfirst.
“I can’t believe you fell for that,” said Cam when Lily resurfaced. “That’s the oldest one in the book.”
“I deserved it,” Lily said, trying to tread water. Their wet clothes weighed their skinny bodies down, so staying afloat was difficult. Cam held a hand out to Lily and dragged her to the ladder. She was so light.
“Yeah. How do I get unbaptized?”
“Sin. A lot.”
“You seem to be better at that than I am. I’m the pure one.”
“Except for the ‘thou shalt not steal’ thing.”
“Yeah, that’s getting to be a bad habit.”
The moon threw its light right onto Lily as if it were her personal spotlight. It danced behind her on the ripples of the lake.
“You don’t believe it makes a difference, do you?”
“I don’t know. Did you find Jesus?” Lily asked.
“Why? Is he under there?” joked Cam, ducking under the dock.
“Very funny. I thought it was better to be safe than sorry.”
“Um, thanks? I guess?” Cam tried to be angry, then figured that if it hadn’t mattered to her that she wasn’t, it shouldn’t matter to her that she was. Baptized, that is. Her Catholic grandmother would be thrilled. And it was sweet of Lily. It was her way of bringing Cam into the fold, into her new, Christian-y, Ryan-y life.
Cam climbed out of the water and wrapped herself in the huge orange towel. The two of them shivered as they picked up the Coke cans and the ashtray and the cigarettes. The house seemed to smile at them through a face of yellow-lit windows.
“Anyway, now you’re saved,” Lily said. She linked her bony arm with Cam’s as they hiked up the sloping lawn together and made their way into the house.