Is this okay with you, Jenna? For him to stay here?"
"Yeah," I said. "It's good. You have no idea what it takes for him to ask for help."
I spent all evening in Alan's office, reading at his desk and keeping Cameron company. Mostly he slept, snoring lightly and once in a while murmuring unintelligible something into his pillow. I turned my chair so that I could look at him whenever I wanted, at his face or at the bare foot that stuck out from under the covers, or at his arm dangling off the side of the sofa bed.
Around eleven, when I was ready for bed, Cameron woke up. I brought him broth and crackers. "Hi," I said.
"Have you been here all this time?"
"Most of it."
Alan's beige pajamas looked small and uncomfortable on Cameron. "You don't have to," he said. "I can take care of myself." He reached for the broth. I watched him slurp straight from his bowl, everything about him becoming younger and more boyish by the second-rosy lips on the white rim of the bowl, wrists without enough pajama sleeve to cover them, cowlick hair and sleepy eyes.
"I know you can. But you don't have to."
"Well..." He finally looked at me. "Thanks.
I won't drink at the party," he said quickly. "If you don't want me to, I won't. I swear it right now. My hand is on a stack of Bibles."
I paused. "That's very chivalrous."
"Chivalrous would be my middle name, if I could spell it.
We're going to trick-or-treat," she said. "I don't care how old we are. We are going to exploit the free candy situation to its maximum potential because it might be our last chance, ever.
Sara ZarrI remember sitting here," he said, "and watching you over there." He pointed, but I didn't have to look. Before Cameron and I got close, I spent a lot of lunches the same way, starting off eating and reading on my special bench on the other side of the yard, followed by walking the perimeter of the playground, balancing on the small cement curb that separated the blacktop from the landscaping, around and around and around, hoping I looked busy and like it didn't matter that I had no friends.
I sat next to Cameron on the bench. "What did you think when you used to watch me?"
He leaned his head against the building. "That I understood you. That you'd understand me."
"Do you remember the first time you talked to me? Because I don't. I've been trying to remember for years and I can't get it."
"You don't remember? Wasn't me that talked to you. You talked to me."
I scooted forward on the bench and looked at him. "I did?"
"You walked right across the yard here at recess," he said, pointing. "Came straight up to me." He laughed. "You looked so determined. I was scared you were gonna kick me in the shins or something."
I didn't remember this at all, any of it.
"You said you were starting a club," he continued. "Asked me if I wanted to join."
"Wait..." Something was there, at the very edge of my memory, coming into focus. "Do you remember if it happened to be May Day?"
"That the one with the pole and all the ribbons?"
"Yes!"
"Yep. All the girls had ribbons in their hair but you."
Jordana wouldn't let me wear ribbons. She said my hair was too greasy and I might give someone lice, and somehow I submitted to her logic. "I do remember," I said softly. "I haven't thought of that in forever. I kept thinking that you were the one to make friends with me first."
"Nope." He smiled. "You started this whole thing. I wanted to, but you were the one with the guts to actually do it."
"I think of myself as being a coward, and a baby, scared all the time."
He got quiet. We watched kids in the schoolyard playing basketball. "You're not," he finally said. "You know that." He got up suddenly. "Let's go. We got one more stop.
We don't have to do this," I said.
His jaw set in a way that reminded me of how he'd look some times back in grade school, standing around the fringes of s kickball game or on that bench by Mr. Lloyd's room. "We do, though."
I shook my head, staring at the house. Right then, a woman walked out, carrying a bag of trash. "Let's ask her if we can go in," Cameron said.
"Go in?"
He turned to me. "Yeah."
I lowered my voice to a whisper. "Shouldn't we, like, talk about it first? About what happened?"
"Why? We know what happened."
"I can't."
"But I'm with you. We're together."
My eyes filled. He looked out the window. The woman went back in the house and closed the door. "We can come back some other time," I said, "after we've talked." I put the car in drive. "Let's go somewhere. Coffee. Something."
"Doesn't matte." His jaw was set again, his voice dead flat.
"It does matter, Cameron. That's the point. If it didn't matter I could just go in right now. I'm not ready. You can't just show up after all these years and expect me to be ready." He opened the door and started to get out. "Wait, where are you going?"
"Sorry I came here and messed up your life."
"That's not what I said!" But he was out of the car, walking down the block, away from me.
Why did you come back to Salt Lake?" I knew the answer before I asked the question and he knew I knew, and it was like you could see the shadow of it hanging there between us.
"I needed to see you," he finally said. "It's hard to explain."
"You don't have to."
"I tried telling my mom once what happed that day. Showed her the hole in the window screen and Moe and even after that she said it was complicated, that my dad's a complicated man and we all needed to try harder to understand him." His voice was shaking now. "And I thought, hey, maybe she's right. Maybe he was just playing around, you know. Maybe we didn't need to run."
"We did," I whispered.
"That's why I had to come, see?" He didn't move and I didn't move, but in a few seconds I heard him sniffling and he couldn't stop and I knew he was crying. "Cameron." I propped myself up, reached out my arm. "Come here." He got up and came to me, dragging his blanket behind him like a child. I scooted over in my bed to make room. "Come on."
He positioned himself beside me-I stayed under the covers, he was on top of them, his head next to mine on the pillow. I stroked his hair and thought of the week he'd lived at our house, the way we slept shoulder to shoulder in our sleeping bags in the living room and I got another good memory.
Jennifer, Cameron had said. You awake?
His voice was coming from across the room. I sat up. Yeah.
Look. He was standing by the living room window. The blinds were closed, but he had his hands on the cord, a big smile on his face. Ready?
I nodded, starting to smile myself.
One, two, three, Cameron said, then pulled the blind up, hand over hand on the cord like someone on TV. His smile got even bigger as he watched my face.
Snow. Giant flakes of it falling in front of the window even though it was only September.
Now, I fell asleep with my arm over Cameron's chest, thinking of how the flakes had been slow and white in the glow of the streetlights that lined the apartment walkways, and the smile on his face and on mine, like the snow was personal, a gift he'd given me himself.
Alan, as per his usual routine, got up early and peeked into my rom to check on me. What he found were his teenage stepdaughter and her childhood sweetheart curled up in the same bed, sound asleep and draped all over each other. He hissed my name, alarmed: "Jenna!"
"Wha-?" I sat straight up, immediately aware of what was happening and how it all looked. I clambered over Cameron, who was just coming to consciousness, and followed Alan into the kitchen.
"It's nothing, I swear," I said in a whisper. If Mom wasn't up yet, I wanted to keep it that way.
Alan shook his head. "It looks bad." He glanced toward my bedroom. "Was that Ethan? Tell him to come out here. I want to talk to him."
"Um, it's not Ethan. It's Cameron."
He put his hands to his head. "Jenna. Jenna."
"I know. Is Mom awake?"
"Not yet."
I kept my voice low. "Can we talk by the fish tank?"
He led, I followed.
"He came to my window in the night," I explained. "He needed to talk. I let him in. It was me. It was my idea. It was all...nothing happened."
"This isn't my area," Alan said, looking at the fish. "Your mom is supposed to do the tough stuff. We have a policy of laissez-faire when it comes to me and...this kind of thing."
"Exactly. So," I said hopefully, "go make the coffee and we'll pretend nothing every happened."
Cameron came into the room, his blanket wrapped around him. His hair was sticking up in the back, and his long eyelashes hooded sleepy eyes. "I just needed to talk to someone," he said to Alan. "Guess we fell asleep."
"Uh-huh." Alan cast an anxious glance toward his and mom's bedroom and said, "You couldn't talk in the kitchen?"
"We didn't think about it," I said. "That's how innocent it was, see?"
Alan stared at us, still shaking his head. "Look, Cameron, just get out of here before Jenna's mom sees you. Okay?"
He nodded. "I'll go get my boots."
I breathed a sigh of relief. "Thank you, Alan."
When Cameron shut my bedroom door, Alan said, "Jenna. This is the kind of situation that's very, very awkward, to say the least. If your mom were to find out, I would be in scalding hot water."
"She won't. Thank you thank you thank you."
"Now. I need my coffee." He shuffled off to the kitchen, ankles cracking. "I'm too old for this."
Back in my room, I watched Cameron get ready to go, thinking about everything we'd talked about and what it meant. "Where do you live?" I asked. "I'll take you home."
"I share a studio apartment with three other guys. It's a dump," he said, lacing up his boots.
"How come you were sleeping in my car yesterday?"
"Sometimes I don't want to be there." He pulled on his jacket. "I'll go straight to school, shower in the locker room. See you later." He started to open the window.
"Wait," I said. "You can use the front door, you know. Just be quiet."
"Okay." He paused on his way out of my room, looing back once to say, "Thanks.
Does all this have anything to do with Cameron coming back?"
"Basically."
She didn't put any letters down. Our game had effectively stopped. "I know you might think you want to be with Cameron that way," she said, "but remember it's been such a short time that he's been back, and-"
"It's not that."
"Are you sure?"
"I don't picture us together, like a couple. It's more like..."
"Like a brother?"
"Mom, could you just listen?" She clamped her lips shut. "Not like a brother," I said. "It's almost like nothing would be enough. Being a couple wouldn't be enough. Being like brother and sister wouldn't be enough. It's an endless sense of...I don't know." I could tell her it was killing her not to talk. I sighed. "Go ahead."
"Unfinished business," she said, with a rush of breath. "That's what I see between you two."
"Unfinished business?"
"Yes. And I think it will feel that way until the day you die."
I looked at her to see if she was serious. She was. "Great.
The doorbell rang during dinner. Alan got up to answer, saying, "If it's the missionaries I might let them in. I'm too tired to put up a fight.
Sara ZarrWait in the car." He opened the door and started to climb out.
"Hold on! How long should I give you? What if you don't come back in a certain number of minutes? Should I call the cops?"
"Don't do anything. Don't call anyone. I'll be fine."
"But what if you're not?"
"Then go home."
And with that, he got out and jogged down the street, like if I heard screams or gunshots or whatever I would just drive on home like nothing happened. Well, good for you, I thought, watching him climb a short cement staircase and put a key in the door. You don't need anyone. Fine.
I watched the clock. Three minutes went by, four. I thought about knocking on the door, having of course no idea what I would actually do once I got there. Maybe I'd have to break the door down, wrestle Cameron away from the bad men, and then carry him out the way you hear people when they get a huge burst of adrenaline. Except the person I pictured rescuing was little Cameron, in shorts and a striped T-shirt, his arms wrapped around my neck.
Then there he was, bursting out of the apartment door and bounding down the steps, a big garbage bag in hand. He ran to the car, fast. I reached over and opened the passenger door and he jumped in.
"Go."
You can't exactly peel out in a '94 Escort, but I did my best. Cameron breathed hard, clutching the garbage bag to his chest.
"What happened?" I drove a good fifteen miles per hour over the speed limit, convinced we were being chased by angry roommates with guns.
"Nothing. You can slow down."
I didn't. "Nothing? Nothing happened?"
"They weren't even there."
Then I did slow down. "No one was there? At all?"
"Right." His breathing had returned to almost normal.
"Then what's the deal with freaking me out like that?" My voice came out high and hysterical and I realized how nervous I'd been, imagining some dangerous scenario from which Cameron had barely escaped, an echo of that day at his house.
"I don't know. I started to picture one of them pulling up and finding me there and...I panicked.
« prima precedente
Pagina 10 di 12.
prossimo ultimo »
Data privacy
Imprint
Contact
Diese Website verwendet Cookies, um Ihnen die bestmögliche Funktionalität bieten zu können.