What Happens Now (21 page)

I watched as Mom’s glance swept back up my body, the
change in her expression happening slowly. It looked like it might be the beginning of a smile, maybe even a laugh.

“I don’t . . . ,” she started, then restarted. “What . . . why are you dressed like Satina Galt?”

I couldn’t answer right away.

“You should see it with the wig,” said Kendall, who was holding Satina’s hair. This was not the response I would have gone with, personally.

Mom glanced at the wig, both confused and amused now.

“I went to the fair this way,” I finally said. “Me and some other kids.”

“To the
fair
?”

“It’s called cosplay.”

“We took photos of them re-creating some scenes from an episode,” added Kendall.

“‘Ferris Wheel,’” I said.

“Ari was amazing,” said Kendall.

My mom shook her head, maybe trying to speed up the processing of all this information. “Which other kids?”

“Some new friends.”

“Have I met them?”

“No, Mom. This is what you’re going to focus on? They’re just some kids we met at the lake. They’re nice.”

Mom stepped forward and took the wig from Kendall, who had been twirling a few strands around her finger.

“It’s good, right?” I said. “Exactly like her.”

Mom looked at the wig for a long time, her mouth twitching
further into a smile. “Yes, it’s good,” she finally said. Her expression flatlined. “But I need to meet these friends. Or at least, the boy. Because there’s a boy, right?”

I sighed.

Mom scanned my costume again. “And you need to change before going to the store. It’s weird enough to walk around the fair like that, but—”

“
Of course
I’ll change. I was about to when you showed up.”

I took the backpack from Mom and started to move down the hall toward Kendall’s room.

“Wait a minute,” said Mom. “Why are you still in the costume now if you wore it last night?”

I froze. Opened my mouth, but nothing came out.

“I dared her to sleep in it,” said Kendall quickly. “She was complaining about how she didn’t want to take it off.”

I nodded. “I got kind of attached. I mean, look at this!” I motioned to the tunic with a flourish.

“Well, there’s always Halloween,” said Mom dismissively. “Go get dressed now, please. I told Richard you’d be there at ten.”

“Yes, sir, Captain,” I said.

On my way to Kendall’s room, I stole a glance back at my mom. She was still holding Satina’s hair, staring at it like she’d just run into an ex. Like she couldn’t decide what to see, the everything between them or the nothing at all.

“Here,” Mom said as she handed me the wig when I came
back, changed, a few minutes later. She paused. “Be careful with it. Satina was always so particular about her hair.”

A few hours later, I was driving Richard’s car on my way to pick up some paint at a warehouse in the next town over when my phone rang. It was sticking out of my bag so I only saw “CA” on the screen. But that was enough to make me pull over.

“Do you think I’m an asshole?” he said when I picked up.

“I don’t know,” I lied.

“
I
think I’m an asshole.”

“Don’t think that.”

“Now you see I’m not that confident, carefree guy you thought I was.”

I was about to say something along the lines of
And I like you even more for that
, but a gigantic truck thundered by.

“Where are you?” asked Camden.

“By the side of the road on Route 44-55.”

“Well, crap. Call me back later.”

“It’s okay. This is actually the most privacy I’m going to get for a while.” I rolled up the windows and leaned the seat back. “Let’s talk.”

I heard him take a long breath, and maybe heard it shake a bit.

“Last night was . . . amazing, really.” His voice lower now. I closed my eyes and tried to pretend we were on his bed beneath the universe, and with that voice came hands and fingers that touched me.

“I thought you said it was a mistake.”

“I guess it was both,” he said after a pause, sounding pained. “I keep thinking of you next to me, letting me see your arm. I wish I could stay in that moment infinitely.”

“
That’s
the moment you wish you could stay in?”

Camden laughed nervously, then his voice got soft again. “There were a lot of moments, Ari. But I guess that one . . . that was where I felt the least freaked out. Knowing you’d been through stuff, too. Survived it. Can we get back to that part, where you were telling me about the scars?”

That was before I’d told him about last summer. I was more than happy to go back to that part.

“Where did I leave off?”

“You said you weren’t trying to kill yourself. But what set it off?”

I closed my eyes to the aggressive, almost obnoxious sunlight streaming in through the windshield. Maybe it was trying to scorch away the memory of that cold, midwinter night over a year ago.

“That’s the million-dollar question, isn’t it?” I said. “Thing is, I’m still not sure. My mom was in the final months of nursing school and always gone. I’d had a big fight with Dani because I was trying to finish a science report and she wouldn’t leave me alone. I knew Kendall was at a movie with some of her newspaper friends and didn’t invite me. On the outside, there wasn’t anything special about the day, except that it was one more in a long string of crappy days.”

I paused, opened my eyes.

“But on the inside . . .” I couldn’t articulate it to him. Didn’t want to. “Let’s just say, I had no control over it. It did what it wanted to. In a twisted way I was actually trying to manage it.”

After a few moments, Camden said simply, “I get that.” He was silent for another few moments, then added, “So what did you do with it? The blood, I mean.”

This I had an easy answer for. Facts embedded in a clear memory. “I watched it for a little while. Then I blotted it with toilet paper, and I watched that.”

A red-snake trickle down drip drip drip. The specific feeling of pleasure mixed with pain, gratitude mixed with guilt.

“What happened then?” he asked, almost whispering now. “Did someone find you?”

“No. I think that only happens in movies.”

“Ah, right.”

“I wasn’t sure what to do after I got tired of watching the bleeding. I was just sort of sitting there. I was maybe even a little bored. I’d made a lot of cuts and they were starting to hurt, because the peas were wearing off. So I left all the . . . evidence . . . and went out.”

I kept talking and telling. About my mother frantically calling my cell phone, then Kendall frantically calling my cell phone because my mother had frantically called her. I described myself driving north on Route 32 until an unexpected snow started falling, and I got nervous, then turned around and drove south until the car fishtailed at a stoplight.
That was when I knew it was time to go home and step into the situation I’d created.

We listened to each other breathe for a little while after I stopped talking.

“So how did you get here from there?” he finally asked. “How did you get better?”

“Therapy. Medication.” Bad decisions. Better decisions. Him. “I started believing in something I call the Possible.”

“Is that what you were doing last summer, at the lake? Believing in the Possible?”

“Yes.”

He didn’t respond, and I started to worry that we’d been disconnected. At last he said, “Keep believing in that, Ari.”

“I will.”

“Keep believing in me, too.”

Tears welled up in my eyes. It was all I wanted. That, and being able to reach through the phone and bite his ear.

“Okay,” I said. “But first, you’re going to have to meet my mom.”

“Arrowhead Mom?” he asked, sounding relieved, unburdened. “Uh, yes please.”

“She’s not really that cool anymore. Or ever.”

“Pshaw.”

“I’m talking about dinner with the family and everything.”

“A normal family dinner? That’s like a fantasy of mine.”

“My family isn’t normal.”

“Normal is relative.”

I sighed. “I guess you’ll see where we fall on that spectrum.”

“It’ll be fine, Ari,” he said, as if aware that he could make anything okay as long as he added my name at the end.
I’m going to chomp the heads off baby ducklings, Ari. Do you mind if I date two other girls while I’m dating you, Ari?

We said good-bye and I held the phone in my hand for a while, feeling its warmth as a substitute for the warmth of Camden’s skin.

“Okay,” I said to myself, moving the seat back into position. I turned the ignition back on, felt the blast from the AC hit me square on the cheek. I wasn’t sure what the conversation had accomplished, what we’d just agreed to. We were still nervous and uncertain, directionless and green. Maybe we’d simply agreed to be all these things together, and that was enough for now.

I pulled onto the road and drove toward the address Richard had given me, glad that at least in one respect, I knew exactly where I was going.

15

“Tonight, tonight, a
boy is coming over tonight!” sang Dani to the tune of her favorite
West Side Story
song, squeezing in syllables where there should not have been syllables. This was cute the first three times. Coming up on the twentieth, not so much.

Mom was at the stove, cooking moussaka. She was starting her new job the next day, which meant she had a lot of nervous energy. She’d vacuumed
and
dusted
and
brought out the linen place mats. It was all a little horrifying.

What had Richard told her about Camden and his friends? And what had Dani told her about “the dude who Ari likes to swim with at the lake”? She wasn’t letting on. What Mom
definitely knew about Camden: that his mom was an artist, that he went to Dashwood, that he lived in a converted barn, that we’d met at the lake.

What Mom
didn’t
know: everything else.

Since that morning at Kendall’s, Mom and I hadn’t spoken about the cosplay at all. I’d washed the Satina costume and hung it in my closet, the wig in a bag hidden on a shelf where Dani couldn’t get to it. I’d almost put the boots in there, too, but after half a day in sandals I slipped them on again.

I brushed dirt off the left boot as I sat on the top step of our porch, waiting for Camden. Richard was mowing the lawn in the hazy early evening half-light. Crickets made a racket and I felt a very particular combination of anticipation and dread.

When Camden’s car drove up, I met it in the driveway. He rolled down the window and there was his face, that face. I leaned in, wanting desperately to kiss him. But I didn’t know if that was okay, with Richard there. If it was okay, after what happened at the Barn.

“Hey,” I said.

“Hey,” he said back, smiling like I’d said infinitely more than that. He looked way too excited, and way too handsome, to be here.

“They don’t know about your mom being away this summer.”

“Oh, I’m getting a debriefing?”

“Be quiet, I only have a few seconds. They also don’t know I stayed over on fair night.”

Danielle ran out of the house just then. “Camden!” she
yelled, her face lit up. Camden got out of the car and Dani threw herself into his arms for a hug. Mom stepped onto the porch in time to see this. Richard, who had stopped mowing, finally turned off the mower and walked over to the car.

“Camden, this is my mom, Kate,” I said.

They shook hands and I could see it on Mom’s face. That she thought he was attractive. She smiled.

“It’s a pleasure,” said Camden.
It’s a pleasure
. It was such a grown-up thing to say. I got the sense Camden had been saying
It’s a pleasure
to adults since he was three years old.

Mom smiled. “Same here,” she said. “So tell me, who are
you
?”

“Pardon?”

“In the
Silver Arrow
cosplay game.”

“Good God, Mom. It’s not a
game
.”

“It sort of is,” said Camden. “Well, I used to cosplay Atticus Marr. But now I’m Azor.”

Something softened around my mother’s eyes. “Azor,” she whispered, nodding.

“I hear you’re a fan, too,” said Camden.

My mom twitched. I may have been the only one who saw it. Or maybe I imagined it.

“Yes,” was all she said.

Camden reached into his car and pulled out a brown paper bag. “I brought some raspberries. We grow them on our property.”

Danielle grabbed the bag and opened it. “Yum!”

“Come inside,” said Mom.

She and Richard led the way, Dani following with her hand already full of berries.

I turned to Camden. “You’re good.”

He shrugged. “I’ve been around more adults than kids in my life,” he said. “I know how to work the system.” Then he leaned in close and whispered warm in my ear. “Do I get to see your room?”

I felt a chill go down my neck. Why was he able to make these innocuous questions sound so sexy?

“Sure,” I whispered back, casually, even though I’d spent the day cleaning it up.

We stepped inside the house and Camden took a deep breath. “Mmmm. Smells fantastic!” He said it loudly so my mom could hear from the kitchen.

I motioned for him to follow me down the hall. On the way, he examined the photos on the wall. Baby pictures of Dani, a wedding photo of Mom and Richard with me standing between them in a lavender dress. Camden paused and touched the me in the photo briefly with his fingertip.

When we moved into Richard’s house after their wedding, Mom had gone to work hanging photographs, like she needed these reminders that her life was full of people, that she had proof it had all happened.

“Don’t look at that,” I said as Camden examined a frame designed to showcase every one of my school pictures since kindergarten. Only the last opening was blank now.

Camden looked anyway. Hard. Grinning. “Why? Because it’s the most awesome thing ever?” He pointed to my picture from second grade. “Two front teeth missing. That’s a great look. I wish you’d kept it.”