The End of the World (11 page)

Of course I know in theory that cake can’t kill ducks, but it doesn’t stop me from worrying about them. It’s not that I wanted to dump the rest of it in the lake, but we ate and ate until my sides hurt from expanding and it wasn’t like we could just plunk the leftovers on the kitchen counter for everyone to help themselves. The scenario is as predictable as Mrs. Bowden complaining about the screeching volume of Maria’s voice at the crack of eleven o’clock in the morning. Pete would ask for a piece and Maria would cry for a piece and Mr. Bowden would demand the rest of the pieces which would lead to questions about where it came from. Which would then lead to accusations of how it was paid for. Which in turn would lead to an immediate demand for disclosure about where I kept my stash of money.

My mother left me that money. There’s no way I’m giving that information up. Not for anyone. I have plans for it, every last cent. Firm plans. Necessary plans. Plans no one knows about. Truthfully, not even me. But I think it’s my right to figure out a plan eventually, which is what I’ll do. Eventually.

“You’re worrying about the ducks, aren’t you?”

“No,” I lie. “Why would you ask me that?”

Shaye smiles. “Well, it’s either that or you’re counting things in your head again. Which one is it?” She points out this flaw often, and like every other time this question comes out of her mouth, I have to pretend to have no idea what she’s talking about.

“I’m not counting. Why would you ask that? I don’t count. I never count.”

She gives me a look. “I ask that because you count everything. How high the staircase is. How many crackers you dole out to Pete. I even saw you mentally calculate how high the bunk bed was on the first day I showed you to your room.”

“I was not calculating the—”

“How high is it?”

“Seven feet, four inches. Give or take a millimeter or two.”

Even through the crunch of fallen leaves and disintegrated pine cones, I hear Shaye’s soft laugh. More and more, I’m coming to realize that I live for those moments, as though I’m literally counting the seconds in between all the things I say that register a twitch of her mouth, a full-on grin, a breathy giggle, or a side-splitting laugh—then trying harder to make the seconds shrink in duration before one of those reactions happen again. Some people dream of becoming doctors or artists or veterinarians or teachers. I dream of the day Shaye laughs without stopping, and when she does, it will be only to take a breath before starting over again.

“So what’s the reason? You just really like math or something?”

And this is it. This is the point where I shut down, call it quits, press my lips closed so tightly that all four corners and the upper and lower centers touch without the slightest possibility of air getting through, hugely increasing the possibility that I will hyperventilate or faint but leaving me undeterred, nonetheless. It’s my defense mechanism. My automatic response. The way things have been and the way things are and the way things always will be forever and ever.

Which is why I’m stunned when my mouth opens against its will and I hear myself start to talk. I’m seven words into my story before I realize it. By then, I’ve spilled the most important details and it’s too late to shove the words back inside.

“My mom was killed when a man drove by our house and shot her through the kitchen window. She homeschooled me, and we were sitting at the table in the middle of a math lesson when it happened. I was eight, and just like that, double-paned glass exploded all over me and I didn’t have a mom anymore. The guy was going for his ex-girlfriend. He laughed when he found out he hit the wrong house. In perfect irony, I cried every night for two years.”

It’s quiet when I finish, so quiet even the air seems to stop moving. I’ve never told that story to anyone and I can’t grasp what possessed me to share it with Shaye, but somehow I feel better. Like the sum of a thousand unsolved equations just deciphered themselves right in front of me, and after all these years of trying, I finally won first place on the algebra exam. The blue ribbon goes to me.

For the longest time she doesn’t say a word. And when she finally speaks it’s like she punches me in the chest with perfect precision. Her words are that dead-on accurate.

“So since you were in the middle of a math lesson when it happened—by counting and adding and deciphering all the time—you’re keeping those last moments with your mom alive.” She looks over at me just as the house comes into view. “Am I right?”

Hearing the words out loud makes me want to disappear. I shove my hand in my pocket, thinking at least I can hide that one part of me. “I guess so.”

“You know so,” she says.

And I roll my eyes, a move wasted solely on me since it’s too dark out here for Shaye to see. “Fine. You’re right. Happy now?”

Again, another soft laugh from Shaye. And just like that, I’m suddenly ready and willing to endure another round of embarrassing statements on my character flaws. “Not really,” she surprises me by saying. “There’s only one thing that would really make me happy.”

Her words trail off, something I’ve learned is a ploy, a trick used by females worldwide to make sure guys like me are really listening, and I might be a lot of things, but I’m not an idiot. I take her bait. I bite like a trout grabbing onto a hot dog thinking it could be the last meal it eats before lying in pool of butter on some chump’s dinner plate.

Trout eat hot dogs. I discovered this last year when a solid hour of digging for worms generated nothing but loose bits of gravel and four bloody fingertips.

“What would make you happy?” When her arm lands on my shoulder, I know I would willingly ask the question a thousand more times.

“Knowing you’ve figured out how to live in the present. Because today is hard enough without having to relive yesterday over and over and over.”

I fight my own inward smile, knowing she’s talking about herself as much as she’s talking about me. “True. Maybe eventually we’ll both learn to—”

“Cameron, do you see that?” The lightness in her voice is gone in an instant, replaced by an urgency that makes the hair behind my ears stand at attention. A light is shining through the living room window. The house was bathed in darkness when we left. This isn’t good.

But it isn’t until we tiptoe up the front steps and crack open the front door that my suspicions are confirmed.

Two seconds later, a pair of thick arms grab me from behind and I’m body slammed against the front picture window, my face pressed against the glass. If I don’t pass out from the pain in my left cheek, I’ll do it from the strange way Carl has my arm locked behind my back.

“Where is he, you little punk? If that kid gets hurt, it’s your butt on the line, not mine.”

“Who?” I say, trying not to listen to Shaye’s distressed whimpers behind me. I can’t see a thing, and I have no idea what’s happening to her, but I’m sure it isn’t good. Carl’s hand twists my arm upward into an angle I didn’t know it could go. I hear a pop and pray to God it didn’t just break. But when he speaks, all the pain I feel ceases to register.

“Pete. He’s not in his bed. He’s not anywhere in this house. His social worker will be here in the morning and he needs to be in one piece when she gets here. If something happens and she doesn’t think everything here is perfect, I’ll kill you myself.”

Shaye

W
e’ve spent the
last forty-seven minutes looking for him. I know this because I’m ticking off the seconds in my head like there’s a bomb strapped to my chest keeping time with my racing heartbeat. If we don’t find him soon, one or both might explode. Still I’m counting. I can’t find Pete, and this is how a habit forms. This is why Cameron has counted and counted all these years, aside from the understandable desire to keep his mother’s memory alive.

I can’t find Pete, my arm still hurts from the grip of Tami’s hand, and counting is the only thing keeping me sane.

I’m on the front porch, and it’s been forty-eight minutes.

“Any luck?” Cameron sneaks up behind me, startling me out of my panic attack. Or asking me to join him in his; from the sound of his voice drifting across the black night, it’s hard to tell.

“None. I looked in all the bedrooms, every closet, under the beds, the kitchen cabinets…there isn’t a room I haven’t checked.” My voice grows higher pitched with every word and I realize I’m two syllables away from a meltdown, but for all my complaining and all my resentment, I love Pete. I love him like I would love a real brother, if I’d ever been part of a family long enough to have one. And if something happens to him…

“Where are Carl and Tami?” Cameron asks, jolting me back to the crisis at hand.

It takes work, but I try focus on his question. “Last I saw, Carl was heading upstairs with a drink in his hand, saying he was going to look in the attic. Tami said she would stay to watch the other two kids, but I have a feeling she’s gone back to sleep.” I don’t feel bitter saying it. It’s just the way things are. The way things have always been.

“Then we don’t have any help from them. It looks like it’s up to you and me to find him, I guess.”

A sob chokes me at the same time a small piece of my sanity cracks and floats to the floor, taking a few tears down with it. My cheeks become wet with them. It’s my worst weakness, the rapid way in which I cry. I wish I could be tough and control my emotions, but they wear me like a decades-old sweater—I’ve never been able to force them into line no matter how determined I try to be.

Cameron sees it and does what he does best; he controls them for me. He looks straight into my eyes and frames my face with his hands, running his thumbs across the skin just above my cheekbones. It’s a move normally made by someone much older, and for the slightest moment—a single breath, really—I forget he’s nearly fifteen. “We’re going to find him, and he’s going to be okay.” He says it with such a fierce determination that I almost believe him. For now, almost needs to be enough.

I swallow, then nod my head in agreement. “Okay, where should I look now?” My voice sounds tiny, thin. But I need direction and I need my friend Cameron to give it to me.

“This time let’s stay together.” He starts walking toward the lake. The lake. Why didn’t I already check the lake? It’s the one place that could end in disaster, the one place that could rip everything familiar about the last three years like a rug out from under my feet. I can’t go back to being alone. I won’t go back to being alone, even if most of the time I’ve lived here has been awful.

I hesitate for a moment, but I know I have to go. Even if Pete is there—even if he’s huddled against a broken dock hanging on for dear life or even if he’s floating face down in the middle of the murky water—I need to be the one to find him. It’s only fair.

After all, where this house is concerned and for three years now, I’ve really been the only one who’s ever loved him.

*

Cameron

It’s like he’s
disappeared. It’s been nearly an hour and I’m out of ideas, out of options, and long past worried we’re already out of time. The lake turned up nothing but the remains of vanilla buttercream frosting and a family of ducks quacking for more cake. For a split second my heart stopped dead in my chest at what looked like the sight of a child’s white sneaker floating ten yards out. I jumped in without thinking and swam to it, feeling a weird sense of elation and despair when my hand yanked a partially disintegrated Styrofoam plate out of the water.

Elation because thank God it wasn’t attached to Pete’s tiny body.

Despair because where did he go?

And now add shivering and helplessness to the mix. Every part of my body is dripping and soaking wet, but I don’t have time to run inside for a coat or a change of clothes. If Pete turns up newly dead and I could have saved him if only I hadn’t wasted time looking for a dry sweatshirt, I’d never forgive myself.

Especially because Shaye hasn’t stopped crying in the last fifteen minutes.

“Did you look in the car?” I ask her. We’ve covered this already, but I don’t know what to say anymore. Right now my mind is really numb and talking is the only way I can keep myself from going crazy.

“I looked in the car,” she says. She passed impatient a long time ago and has moved straight into angry, but I can’t blame her. “I looked in the car and the laundry room and the back yard and the lake and every other freaking place I can think of, but of course you already know this because
I’ve already told you
.” More tears. More and more and more tears, and this time no amount of swiping at them with my thumbs will make them stop flowing. I’m a few short breaths from crying, myself.

“Did you find him?” Carl’s booming voice shoots across the yard straight for us, laced with anger, dripping with accusation.

“Not yet, but we’re still looking!” I yell back. Shaye isn’t in the right frame of mind to speak. I’m not either, but someone has to answer.

“Find that kid!” The front door slams.

Okay. We’ll find that kid and the checks will keep flowing and he can keep abusing and life can keep moving on as usual. It’s a simple demand really. The kind of simple demand that psychos often make.