Almost Crimson (5 page)

EIGHT

MAGIC

 

 

CECE LOOKED THROUGH THE BACK window where Doris had stood. The yard was enclosed only because all three neighbors had a fence or a thicket around their properties. The stellar feature for this small yard was an arching tree in the corner with two thick trunks. CeCe had attended one of Doris' Fourth of July parties and remembered wanting to pull the library book from her bag and sprawl out beneath that tree.

CeCe started to walk through the house when the voices in the kitchen shifted from jovial banter to hushed, official tones. There were three small bedrooms, two baths, a dining room, and a living room. CeCe stood in the living room estimating how many books might fit into the wall's cubby shelves when she heard a voice behind her. She spun around, shrieking.

“I'm sorry, CeCe,” the man said, stepping back and spreading his arms to draw CeCe's eyes to the round belly buttoned inside his salmon-colored shirt. “It's not often I'm able to sneak up on anyone.”

CeCe held on to her chest, willing her heart to stop racing. She grinned at the short, portly man with a retreating hairline. She was arrested by his emerald green eyes, the way they smiled at her.

“I'm Brian Clark,” he said. CeCe shook his outstretched hand as Doris soft-soled into the room.

“Well, we know who's not getting invited to any haunted houses,” Doris said.

Everyone laughed. CeCe wondered if she'd actually heard this stranger call her by name.

There was a brief, clumsy silence, like would-be lovers uncertain of who should kiss who first.

“Doris has herself one helluva house, huh?” Brian said.

“Yeah,” CeCe replied. “I've only been here once, but it was so full of people I really didn't get a chance to see all of her touches. I mostly remember the yard.”

“The tree,” Doris said. “That's right. I remember.”

“I still feel like I know the house,” CeCe said, looking around them. “Doris talked about it all the time. She loved this place.”

Doris and Brian smiled at CeCe, then at one another.

“That's a high compliment, don't you think, Doris?”

Doris nodded, her eyes shining.

CeCe's antennae went up. This guy was no renter, but he wasn't a friend, either. She'd never heard Doris mention anyone named Brian Clark. CeCe looked at the dumpling of a man and hoped Doris wasn't trying her hand at playing Cupid again. Matchmaking was one area where her friend was not gifted, though she gave great advice once the connections were made. CeCe felt Doris' eyes on her and resolved to humor her dear friend for as much of the afternoon as she could bear. At least he had a sense of humor, CeCe thought. Their lunch date wouldn't be too painful.

“Tell me, CeCe,” Brian said, slipping his hands into his pockets and talking at his shoes. CeCe braced herself for the awkward exchange. “Can you picture yourself in this house?”

CeCe's brows raised.

“Picture myself?” CeCe said, tilting her head to one side. “What do you mean?”

Brian looked to Doris, so CeCe did, too. Her friend's eyes were wide with anticipation and her bright berry lips were pursed together. CeCe could see her friend wanted to explode.

“I've known some pretty amazing women in my life,” Doris said with a deep breath. Her hands were clasped together in front of her chest, like prayer. “In big ways and small ways, I wouldn't have been able to finally make the life I wanted for myself without them.”

CeCe waited for another story about the Ladies, but Doris stepped forward and took CeCe's face in her hands. Doris had never positioned herself as a mother figure for CeCe, but they both had cherished the obvious opportunity for their friendship to fill aching spaces: Doris' miscarried baby girl so many years ago and CeCe's miscarried childhood. Doris' hands were soft and warm, like her eyes. CeCe didn't know why, but she wanted to cry.

“You're one of those amazing women, kiddo,” Doris said, her voice plush and sweet. “You've got a good head on your shoulders and a great heart in your chest. From the first day I met you, I knew I was going to like you.”

CeCe's tears began to brim. So much love they'd harvested in that food court. Doris had given her advice and confidence and reality checks and courage. She was humbled to know Doris had seen a fighter in her all along. Doris smiled at her and used her thumbs to wipe away her tears.

“When Doris called me about revising her will,” Brian's voice broke in and the women took a step back, “naturally, I introduced a number of options for her properties. Her boys. Area nonprofits. We even talked about making it a free residence for college kids working at the mall through the summer.”

CeCe frowned at the idea of keg parties spiraling out of control in Doris' back yard.

“Doris reminded me this is more than a house,” Brian continued. “This home is the icon for freedom and success.”

“Good God, Brian, you sound like you're delivering the Ten Commandments,” Doris said. “Move, smarty-pants.”

Brian dropped his head to hide a blush as Doris elbowed past him to take CeCe's hands again. Her eyes were soft and proud.

“On the outside, we don't have much in common, you and me,” Doris said. “You know what's the same about us?”

CeCe shook her head.

“We're good-hearted people patiently waiting our turn for a little good luck, right?” CeCe turned it over in her head and conceded a nod and sideways smile. Doris tugged at their hands and pulled CeCe closer. Her expression turned serious.

“The other thing we have in common is that we never learned how to dream. I was never allowed to and you never had the luxury. Nothing like magic or good luck had ever blown our way before.”

Doris clasped their hands together and pressed the knot of their fingers to her chest. CeCe was pulled off balance, startled by Doris' strength. She looked at her friend with confused anticipation, ready for another gut buster. The women stood eye to eye at five-foot-one, and Doris' eyes shone with tears and affection.

“I want you to have this house, CeCe,” Doris said. “Have it. No money and no strings. Just some lucky magic to help you see that you are greater than your circumstances. You are stronger than the things in life that have made you afraid.”

CeCe snatched her hands from Doris' grasp to try and catch the squeal rocketing from her throat. She couldn't believe the sounds her ears were taking in. Did Doris say she was
giving
her a house? A whole house?

“You could put the universe in your handbag, if you wanted to,” Doris said, her eyes electric now, “but, kiddo, you gotta learn how to dream. You deserve to learn.”

CeCe looked from Doris to Brian in disbelief and then around at the empty walls of the house. Her house. She couldn't intercept the wailing, not this time.

NINE

SPIDERS

 

 

CECE CLENCHED HER FISTS UNTIL the crunch of gravel beneath the school bus' tires gave way to smooth, paved road. CeCe braced for a forgotten shoe or dental retainer, flat tire, anything that might turn them back. She exhaled after three highway exits, certain they all were finally free. CeCe leaned back, closed her eyes, and promised herself never to look forward to anything so desperately again.

Eight weeks earlier, CeCe and four dozen kids had ridden on another yellow bus along this stretch of highway from Prescott and onto the gravel road leading to Camp Onondaga. At that first sound of stones popping and spraying from beneath bus tires, CeCe had trembled with excitement. The bus rocked and bumped, all the kids' heads and shoulders moving in a wobbly choreography. This was the first day of summer camp for them all, and CeCe's first time away from her mother.

With her small, nervous hands gripping the seat beneath her knees, CeCe looked through the front windshield, taking in the approaching view. Brilliant bars of liquid sun reached through the canopy of forest, and the trees seemed to salute their passing bus in curved formation. Pushing deeper into the forest along the narrowing gravel road, the bus reached an open glen, where four handsome young people in matching blue T-shirts stood around a flagpole. They were the staff of camp counselors who, CeCe would learn, were mostly college students earning money for the summer. That they weren't driven to create lifelong memories for each camper—like the brochures said—would be the least of CeCe's disappointments.

CeCe had been skeptical about the idea of camp at first, mirroring her assessments of her newest social worker. She especially didn't like the way this one, Ms. Petrie, tried to scrape about by asking the same questions in six different ways. After one of their meetings in the second room of the guidance office, CeCe went directly to Mrs. Anderson with the Camp Onondaga brochure.

CeCe wanted to feel excited, but she was suspicious of Ms. Petrie. Or maybe she felt uneasy with the tendrils of guilt snaking around her ankles. Ms. Petrie said her mother would be in a special hospital and arrangements had been made for CeCe to have an extended registration at summer camp. Mrs. Anderson helped her decide what to do with the thoughts and feelings she couldn't name.

“I know it will be hard to think about having fun,” Mrs. Anderson had said, leaning closer to CeCe, “but your mother will be getting the help she needs while you're gone. Having fun will be perfectly acceptable.”

CeCe had come to rely a lot on Mrs. Anderson over the years. Books about puberty, recordings of Motown artists, decoding the condescension of some of her white teachers, and advice on how to keep the curl in her bangs. If it hadn't been for her reassurance, CeCe might not have made the bus. CeCe absorbed every one of those earliest impressions, because she wanted to tell Mrs. Anderson everything about her summer. CeCe filed away mental pictures of huge wooden stumps, big enough to sit on, and clusters of wood cabins situated on top of slats and stilts beneath voluptuous oak trees.

She'd tell her mother, too.

CeCe would remember the sound of creaking springs and slamming screen doors, as well as cheerful, young white people in matching polo shirts and whistles. CeCe's young white person was named Hoot. Or, that's what CeCe and the other five girls she'd been clustered with were instructed to call her. Other groups were led by Trout, Blaze, S'more, Bambi, Foxy, Rainbow, Mudslide, Whiskers, Thunder, and Moss.

Once Hoot had shown them to their cabin and around the grounds, the small troop made their way to the mess hall for the camp's official opening session. There were a hundred kids, all grouped by age. Most of them would board for a week or two. CeCe's extended registration would have her at camp for eight. By her third welcome session, however, the experience felt less like a sweet treat and more like repeated loops.

Back at the cabin, CeCe studied the other girls while Hoot chirped on about buddy systems, lights out, water safety, poison ivy, and keeping the latrine clean. All six of them were nine or ten years old, but the similarities ended there. They were African-American, Samoan, and white. Suburban, rural, and hood. They were broken. Naive. Jaded. Faithful. Each on her separate way to becoming debutante, valedictorian, underachiever, bully, innovator, and lost.

She listened to their banter while building the courage to join in and
take initiative
, like Mrs. Anderson had made her promise to do. Mrs. Castellanos had given her a winding lecture about using this summer as her time to bloom. Though CeCe liked the notion of being compared to a flower, she felt more like a radish or, maybe cabbage, nothing overtly beautiful, but still something that emerges from the earth completely intact and completely without interference.

“I have those same pajamas at home!” the Samoan girl said excitedly, spying the Smurfette PJs in the redheaded girl's open duffel bag.

“They're my favorites,” Redhead said.

“I don't like the Smurfs anymore,” said Portia, one of the other black girls. “I like the Care Bears. I got a Care Bear lunchbox at home.”

From there, the conversation swirled around which of Strawberry Shortcake's friends was the best, which Super Friend was smarter, and whether
Ghostbusters
were real. They were unpacking their toiletries and sheeting their cots, while CeCe followed the bounce of their chatter from Ninja Turtles to New Edition to
ET
.

“You're awfully quiet, Crimson,” Hoot said as she walked into their small cabin. “I think I could hear everyone talking about their favorite things except you. I'd like to hear about your favorite shows.”

“CeCe.”

“I'm sorry?” Hoot replied.

“I go by ‘CeCe,'” she said.

“Oh,” Hoot said, a relieved smile lighting her face. “CeCe, it is! What's one of your favorite things, CeCe?”

The other girls perched onto the ends of their cots, waiting for her to speak.

“Um . . . ,” CeCe began, uncomfortable with the twelve eyeballs pointed her direction. “I don't watch much TV,” she mumbled. “I like to read, mostly.”

“Ain't you got a TV?” one asked.

“Yeah,” CeCe said, lying. “I just don't watch it much, is all. I like books better.”

“You like Judy Blume?” asked another from the next bunk.

CeCe hesitated, looking to Hoot. “I've read all of her books.”

“Me, too,” her bunk neighbor said.

CeCe felt optimistic. She hadn't been around unfamiliar kids since starting kindergarten at Neil Armstrong Elementary. She was a fourth-grader now, with years of compiled lessons on which classmates might turn their smiles on and off from day to day, which ones would mock her mix-and-match thrift-store clothes, and which ones would always call out a goodbye to her as their class spilled from the cloakroom. She couldn't yet know which labels to assign these new cabin mates and she felt anxious.

By the end of that following day, their first full day at camp, CeCe was convinced she'd boarded a big, yellow school bus to heaven. There was a brand new experience almost every hour; she engaged with kids from every walk of life. Hoot and the other counselors were unwavering in their excitement, and CeCe was stunned by the scenery around her. Her visits to the park were wholly unremarkable compared to this immersion in
nature
.

By the end of the second week, however, CeCe accepted that the other campers had not been eager to experience nature in the form of lilting wind songs, blinking jewels of sunlight, or sky-reaching trees. When the third arrival of cabin mates assumed the clique-ish and tittering obsessions of the departed first two groups, CeCe realized that other kids came to camp with an interest in the nature of boys.

“You should sit next to Brian at the campfire tonight,” one girl said to another on their group's walk from the lake. “My brother is in his cabin and said Brian thinks you're cute.”

CeCe considered herself average-looking and there were a fair number of boys her age, black, white, and a few Latino, for her to join her fawning peers. Instead, CeCe's skin tightened whenever the topic of boys came up, which was constantly. None of their bodies were blooming behind their shorts and tank tops, yet these other girls who occupied bunks each week all around CeCe were already painting their fingernails, wearing curlers in their hair and boasting encyclopedic knowledge on all things
boy
.

With each cohort, CeCe was one of a handful of other social misfits who actually poured effort and attention into weaving their dream catchers, roasting s'mores, discovering leaves on a hike, learning to wrap an ankle bandage. CeCe learned to maneuver around their giggling huddles in the arts-and-crafts tent, by the canoe docks, before and after meals. She let the crunch of twigs and leaves drown away their chatter as she walked another clipboard to the main office for Hoot or escaped into the quiet of a wooded path.

Befriending the girls made CeCe equally anxious. She couldn't tell when she was having a conversation or being sized up. CeCe was uncertain of Hoot, and the other counselors, as well. They didn't ask questions of her, the way Mrs. Anderson did. When they hugged her, the insides of their arms weren't warm, like Mrs. Castellanos'. They delivered spirited but unvaried welcomes at the camp kickoff week after week.

By CeCe's sixth week, she was all brood and silence. She was lonely, unhappy, and stuck. Hoot had given up on trying to legislate CeCe's good cheer and simply allowed her to wander the grounds, choose her own activities and exist along the periphery until their summer sentence could come to an end.

 

On a trek to retrieve oversized Band-Aids for Hoot, CeCe stopped along the trail to watch a rabbit. She stood in the middle of the pathway, quiet and still, when a boy's voice made her spin around. She knew his name was Dwayne, one of the most-discussed boys in her cabin. Two other boys flanked him, but CeCe didn't know their names.

“Chill out,” Dwayne said. “We're not bears.”

CeCe wanted to run, but forced her legs to settle themselves. It was easy to see why his name had taken root in the mouths of so many of her fellow campers. Dwayne was dark-complexioned and lean, with the promise of broad shoulders one day. His teeth overlapped and his smile glinted with mischief. More boys like Dwayne had started to join her student body at Neil Armstrong Elementary, now that the district was experimenting with expanded enrollment requirements. Boys like Dwayne came to her school with crisp outfits and a fresh haircut every Monday morning. She acknowledged the appeal of a boy like Dwayne in her innermost workings, but simply had no idea what to do about it all.

CeCe intended to slip her hands into the pockets of her shorts but missed. Again, she willed her body not to panic. Instead, she heard herself mumble.

“You'd be some small bears.”

“Small bears?” repeated one of the boys, his eyebrows raised in surprised peaks. “Man, she said we'd be small bears.”

Her chest seized. CeCe had seen how easily one lightly tossed joke could detonate into playground wreckage. Dwayne looked to his friend and back at CeCe.

“We'd be cute bears, though,” Dwayne said, winking that smile at her. “Girls like cute bears, don't you?”

She shrugged her shoulders, held her breath, and looked for an escape.

“Where you going?” Dwayne asked as CeCe resumed a more deliberate march toward the medical cabin.

“Med. We need Band-Aids.”

“Somebody got hurt?” Dwayne asked, his eyes light.

“Portia. A branch poked her in the arm.”

“She bleedin' real bad?” one of the other boys asked, impish curiosity pushing aside his cool.

CeCe waved away their wide-eyed attention. “Just a flap of hanging skin. She's bleeding, but not bad.”

The boys were visibly disappointed.

“Tonya is in your cabin, right?” Dwayne asked, taking steps toward the med cabin with her.

“Which one?” CeCe asked. “Tall Tonya is in Whisker's cabin. Short Tonia is in mine.”

Dwayne looking to the other guys for verification and confirmed, “Short Tonia.”

“Yeah, she has the bunk below me,” CeCe said, taking another step toward the medical cabin. The boys followed.

“You should tell her to meet me by the boating shed after lunch,” Dwayne said.

“I don't know her like that,” CeCe said, recoiling at the idea of initiating a conversation with one of the girls, let alone relay a message from Dwayne and embroil herself in the subsequent chatterfest.

“Get to know her like that,” Dwayne said. “Come on, CeCe, please?”

CeCe's head snapped around at the sound of her name trumpeting from Dwayne's throat. How did he know her name? How had he chosen her of all the people at camp who would willfully do his bidding? Why was he smiling at her that way?

“Well,” CeCe said, giving Dwayne a thin and bashful grin. “OK.”

 

CeCe returned to their cabin area with the Band-Aids as her group lined up for the cantina. CeCe paced herself behind Tonia as she bantered with another girl.

“I'm having fun,” Tonia was saying, “but I'll be glad to sleep in my own bed.”