Camp Utopia & the Forgiveness Diet (9781940192567) (24 page)

You taught me that @ Chuck E Cheese.

when i get to back to Baltimore, if I ever get back to Baltimore, I'll be sure to stop over and swim. Or not. Definitely not.

Thanks for not believing me and thanks a lot for your signature.

~Bee

43

LULLABYE

BY LATE AFTERNOON, Cambridge, resting on Gabe's bed, complained that she'd been bitch-slapped with the world's worst hangover. Chin supported in one hand, she channel surfed, willing her droopy eyes open. Gabe, back at his laptop, searched the Internet for engine-drying remedies.

“You should relax,” he said now, his back toward me. “Take a nap or something.” He tapped at a picture of a truck on the computer's screen. “Lily told me you never slept. She said you snuck food from the mailroom every night.”

My face burned. “Not true,” I lied.

When Gabe turned around, I wanted to say something about his stupid band T-shirts and his polluting non-driving truck, but he lowered his voice and tilted his head, indicating he was verging on saying something important. “You should sleep now, Bethany.” He threw a pillow over his shoulder. “It'll help keep those rages in check.”

Oy. Couldn't my mom at least have pretended to be worried? Maybe I'd been kidnapped. Murdered. Why did everyone assume I ran away from Utopia because I was unhappy and angry?

Don't answer that.

“Rumors of my rage have been greatly exaggerated,” I quipped. “And sleeping now would be the dumbest thing I could do.” Of course, right after I said it, sleep became the only thing I wanted. I wished Gabe would leave us alone so I could fling off my bra, loosen my sweatpants, and dream sweet pancake dreams. “I have to stay awake,” I said drowsily. “What if they know we're here?”

Gabe gathered a fuzzy Southwestern blanket and draped it over me. “No one would believe I had two girls in my room. Besides, the truck will start tomorrow. I promise.” He tucked the blanket around me. “Did you ever decide where you're going?”

Had we? I wondered. So bent on running away, I'd forgotten all about a destination. We'd missed that San Francisco bus by a day or so. There'd be other Greyhounds, of course. Other Amtraks. Why now, I wondered, on the brink of telling Gabe my mission to get back to Baltimore, did it sound so FUBARed? “I honestly have no idea,” I admitted. “I was going to head back home, but now I don't know.” I counted the tiles on Gabe's ceiling, blinked back the tears that had sprung out of nowhere. I guessed all those e-mails from my dad pushed everything forward. I guessed seeing Hollywood marathoning past Copernicus Dining Hall hadn't helped either. Suddenly, everything converged like some demented triangle from geometry class. How much crap I'd gotten myself into at Utopia. How much more crap waited for me at home. My head throbbed from unsuccessfully holding back the tears that slid down my cheeks. “It's hard to decide where to go. Every option looks pretty bleak.”

Gabe had the courtesy to avoid looking at my tear-streaked face. “You could stay with me,” he said to my feet, “for as long as you want.”

I shook my head. He had nerd camp and his sister to look after. It seemed everyone had a place to be. Or a place they wanted to be. “I'll figure something out.”

He rubbed his chin. “You could always go back to Utopia,” he said. “I mean I know it's not exactly a paradise there, but I'd rather be building rockets than dealing with my parents at home. They would've had me working at Del Taco. And if Lili could spend her life at Utopia, she would. She only bitches about it because you do.”

I felt a little guilty for bursting Liliana's bubble. Not everyone was sent to Utopia against her will, I had to remember that. Some people went gaga over California too. Hardly noticed the damp chill or the earthquakes.

Gabe leaned against the dorm's cinder block wall like he was weighing my options, sticking variables in for X and Y. He scratched his head. He wasn't what you'd call hot, but he was definitely handsome in a quiet way. It wasn't obvious at first, but the more you looked at him, the more you saw it, like those 3D posters. Something about him made me comfortable. Maybe it was because he had a sister. Or that his room was decorated with fantasy novels and sci-fi DVDs. I felt like I could tell him anything. “Maybe I'll go to San Francisco and redefine myself. Isn't that what everyone does in California?” I wiped away tears on the sleeve of my university sweatshirt. “I'll get my GED. Fill out some apps at Del Taco.”

“You could,” replied Gabe. He must've had his eyebrow pierced at some point, only now the hole had closed into a purple scab. A thin hoop hung on the lobe of each ear. “Or you could join a band.”

“Evidently you've never heard my voice. I'm actually prohibited from singing in public places.”

“Oh, come on,” said Gabe, covering his mouth with his hand. “Let me hear it.”

“I'm not kidding. I can't sing. At all.”

“Well, keep in mind,” said Gabe, grabbing his deodorant stick from the dresser, “the best ones never can.” Then he closed his eyes and belted out some old-skool Nirvana, head banging à la grunge circa 1993. His voice was god-awful, it might even outsuck mine. I laughed through my tears and concluded that if Gabe and his paint-peeling voice attended Baltimore Magnet, we would hang. I could see us being friends. Hell, if I had wandered into another story, one where I'd showered and brushed my hair, one where I didn't happen to be a fat camp offender, I might've flirted with him. Of course in that story, I knew how to flirt too.

44

WHEN YOU PLAY WITH FIRE

EVEN THOUGH GABE'S singing voice could've roused coyotes in Nevada, Cambridge snored peacefully on the other bed. And, as afternoon wore on, my own eyelids grew heavier.
Well, maybe just for a few minutes
, I thought, drifting, drifting—and I was out too.

In my dream a police officer stood before me and yelled, “Miss Stern, I don't think you comprehend the gravity of your situation. I have a gun, and I'm not afraid to use it.” I focused on his gun, wondering reasonably if it was made of licorice. The cop pulled the trigger. Pop, pop, pop. KA-BOOM.

I startled awake, feeling embarrassed. Had I screamed? Drooled on Gabe's pillow? Outside it was nearing dark. It had to be—

“Six thirty,” said Gabe, reading my mind. “You slept six hours.”

He was poised on the edge of his desk, feet in the chair, headphone wires looping around his neck. His chin rested on his fist like that famous sculpture of the dude thinking. I wondered how long he'd been staring at nothing. “Feel better?” he asked.

I nodded. I nearly inquired if his room had a gas leak, but unlike me, he appeared wide awake. He'd even showered.

I pointed at Cambridge next to me. “Looks like she's going for the record.”

“She was up for a bit, but then fell back asleep.”

Something that felt a lot like jealousy twisted my gut: that she'd been awake when I wasn't. As if sensing this, Gabe said, “She smoked a few cigarettes and launched firecrackers at campus security when they knocked on the door.”

“What?”

“Joke.” He patted the space beside him on the desk. Another pop, pop, pop. KA-BOOM. “Happy
Día de Independencia
, Bethany. Come see.”

I sat next to him on the thankfully well-constructed desk. Outside his window, smoke trailed upward. “You picked a good time to run away because security's too distracted with illegal fireworks to even worry about you guys,” he said knowingly. “This entire dorm is filled with future rocket scientists.” A sizzle and a crackle rat-a-tat-tatted below. I was momentarily hopeful. If students ignored the hands-can-be-mutilated-for-life warning concerning fireworks, maybe Gabe was right, they'd also overlook our fat camp departure.

There in the trees I noticed firecracker cylinders smoldering. Amateurs. TJ could manipulate fire paper before he was ten, and these frat boys couldn't properly launch a bottle rocket. Gabe opened the desk drawer with his foot and removed a box of sparklers. He offered me one, lighting it with Cambridge's lighter.

“
¡Salud!
” he said, tapping his sparkler against mine. “They look like birthday candles, no?” He bit his lip. “Make a wish, Bethany.”

With my bare feet swinging off his desk, I searched my mind for a request. “I wish I knew where to go or what to do. I wish the right option would—”

“One wish. Sheesh. Pick one.”

The sparkler burned brightly. “I want this story to have a happy ending,” I said, then huffed a breath. The sparkler sputtered but didn't go out. Gabe licked his fingers and extinguished the flame.

“You girls and your happy endings.” He rubbed his chin. “You know my dad, a wise Indian chief, always asked me ‘
Hijo
, what do you do when you've dug yourself in a hole and there's no way out?' ”

A few pyrotechnics whistled past the window. “If he was an Indian chief, why was he speaking Spanish?”

“Good question,” replied Gabe, his dimple vanishing again when he smiled. “Most people usually fall for that, but I forgot you aren't most people.” I looked at him, then instantly looked down. “It was actually in a movie, but the guy said ‘If you're in a hole with no way out, your best bet isn't to run away.'
Entra más profundo
, see. You go in deeper.”

Gabe paused as if to let the sheer sophistication wash over me. Instead, I observed that sometime during my nap, he'd abandoned the blue shirt and now sported a short-sleeved button down. It was newish looking. Kinda dressy. He'd changed into khaki shorts too, with an excess of pockets. On his knee I saw a scratch, raw and bloody. I wondered if he'd gotten it last night.

He fished out a piece of printer paper and folded it intricately. I studied his hands as he pressed down lines and angles, fashioning it into a rocket shape much like the airplanes he'd dispatched into our windows at Utopia. He slipped a sparkler into the plane's tail and lit it. Then he cast it out the window, where it performed a series of loopty loops and landed on another dorm's roof.

“You're good at that,” I said.

“There's not a whole lot to do in New Mexico,” he said. “You get creative.”

I'd never known anyone who'd embraced boredom so philosophically. “Like Lili,” he started. “She's a giant pain in my ass, but she can sew her face off. You should see her stuff.”

I'd only seen Liliana's bedazzler work, which was quite artistic. I remembered the night she'd sewn the words BITE IT in a semicircle across the seat of my pants. “Your sister has serious
huevos
,” I told Gabe, suddenly missing her.

Gabe flipped to a picture on his phone. It was Liliana, me, and Cambridge leaning out our dorm window. The light behind us was soft and yellow, all three of us smiling like we weren't hungry or pissed off.

“She covered for us at least twice,” I informed Gabe. “If we ever get out of this mess, I want to do something super nice for her.”
Nicer than the chocolate roses I'd sent her from Olive's dorm
, I thought.

Gabe tucked his phone in a drawer. “You could discover a cure for diabetes.”

“If only I were smarter I would. Cambridge has a shot. Ask her.”

His eyes searched mine. “I don't know about that,” he said. “My money's on you, Bethany.”

My molars ached in the way they usually do whenever anyone said something nice to me. A high-pitched firework whizzed past the dorm. Gabe cleared his throat.

“You know what else we do in New Mexico when we get bored?” A rocket launched a few windows down, penetrated a tree, shaking its leaves to the ground. He smiled crookedly. “We knock out.”

Knock Out. Duh.

Gabe's room was pretty bare, but he did manage to bring the basic boy essential: a beloved PlayStation. Which meant he also brought Knock Out—also known as KO—the game that anyone with a Y chromosome played nonstop.

He looked positively jealous when he told me a few minutes later that I was welcome to play the game while he went to watch the fireworks with Liliana. He boasted he had the bloodiest uncut KO version too, one that let you physically rip someone's head off. I looked at Liliana's brother now, bouncing around like a boxer, his sock tan noticeable on his Vans-less feet. He slid the special PlayStation glove on my hand with the enthusiasm of an engagement ring. “You can play as many games as you want,” he said.

Not like I gave a fat hootenanny about Knock Out, but I liked how generously he offered it to me. Then I remembered how last night he'd handed over his shoes to Cambridge without question. How cold he must've been walking home in the dewy grass. By the time we'd gotten back, it was chilly enough to see my breath. Yet he'd looked happy dragging the stoned corpse that was Cambridge up the stairs. Now here we were in his room, lounging in his bed, Cambridge spiraled in his striped sheets, me getting ready to knock out Holyfield or some other doofus on his PlayStation. What a guy. What a sucker.

45

KNOCK OUT

EVEN THOUGH HE said he'd check out the fireworks with his sister, Gabe never left. I mean he packed up food for Liliana. He put on shoes. He played a few rounds of Knock Out, but leave he did not. Then, at around eight, it started raining. The fat drops spattered on his window, causing the smoking fireworks in the trees to sizzle out. Within minutes it drizzled then poured. The sound, like meat frying, echoed off the roof and walls of Copernicus Hall. Below his window, students hop-scotched around puddles.

Knowing this was a very, very bad sign for Operation Engine Dry, Gabe turned to the UniTV station for a weather report. Only instead of cartoon gray clouds, and a weather girl twirling an umbrella, we saw someone else. It was Hollywood. Highlighted hair, tank top with an American flag waving across her breasts— Miss Perfect herself. “Oh, I'm very concerned for my safety,” she said into the microphone someone held in front of her. The wind picked up the ends of her hair and placed them back down, lovingly. “You heard what her mother said. She's unhappy and prone to rages.” Hollywood paused. “Rages. As in she's violent. Look, we all just wanted to help her, but ...” She looked into the camera. “These dangerous girls are closer than you think. If you hear explosions, don't think Fourth of July.” She moved a wad of gum from one side of her mouth to the other with her tongue. “Think Bethany Stern and Tabitha Nelson.”