Close Your Eyes, Hold Hands (21 page)

“You think?”

I shrugged. I looked at the other girls, but none of them was going to be of any help whatsoever. “Look, I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t mean anything.”

She glared at me and then dropped the cigarette butt on the sidewalk. “Where do you go during the day? You tell me the library, but no one ever sees you there.”

“I am at the library.”

“No you’re not.”

“I am. I’m upstairs. In the fiction section.”

“With the made-up shit?”

“I guess.”

She seemed to think about this. “You know what I should do?”

I shook my head.

“I should call those numbers you made from my phone. See who picks up. Maybe then we can learn whether Miss Abby Bliss is a lot of made-up shit. Maybe we’ll learn if you really have any reason to be so high and mighty.”

My stomach lurched when she mentioned the calls I’d made on her phone. I hadn’t thought about whether someone might wonder who I was calling and try the numbers. That first morning, I hadn’t understood the politics of the shelter—the fact that I was a newbie and needed to fly way under the radar. I guess Camille must have thought I was pretty ballsy when I asked to make those calls on her phone.

“I don’t think you’re fat. I think you’re pretty. And I like the name Camille,” I told her. I figured it would be way worse to beg her not to call those numbers—you know, draw attention to it. That might make it absolutely clear that I had something to hide. But I know my voice must have sounded pretty pathetic and beaten and small. Already I was wondering if somehow I could steal her phone for a minute and delete those calls from its history.

“How much do you like
me
?” she asked.

“I like you,” I said, not actually answering her question.

“Then kiss me,” she said, and she turned the side of her face toward me. She tapped her index finger on a little Rorschach of freckles just below her cheekbone. “Kiss me right here.”

I saw the other kids were staring at me pretty intensely. Two were smiling just the tiniest bit. They loved this. It was even better than lion-devours-gazelle because it was right in front of their eyes. So I kissed Camille exactly where her finger had been. It was a pretty dry peck, but it was all she really wanted. This was just about making sure everyone knew I was her bitch. I figured that would be it. Nope. She reached her hand out and began to finger the earring dangling from my right earlobe. Remember that antique necklace I told you about? The Danish one made of moonstones that my mom loved? Well, these earrings weren’t antique, but they were made of moonstones and silver and by the same jewelry company. My parents had gotten them for me for my sixteenth birthday. They were kind of valuable and meant a lot to me. I know they were my favorite pair of earrings I’d ever owned.

“I sure do like these earrings,” Camille said, trying to hit that perfect tone between seductive and bullying. I knew where this was going, but didn’t say anything. I’d been wearing those earrings, except when I showered and slept, since Reactor One had exploded. I put them under my pillow when I went to bed at the shelter, because I knew someone might try to steal them. But I had never imagined that someone might try to take them from me while I was actually wearing them. I mean, who steals your earrings right out of your ears? No one at Reddington Academy, that was for sure.

“I think we can be friends, Abby Bliss. But you need to show me a little love, too,” Camille murmured.

I didn’t want to give them up, but I also didn’t want her to call the numbers I had left on her phone. At the very least, I needed to stall for time so I could try to delete them. (I would expend a
lot
of effort at the shelter stalling for time—especially when I was trying
to prevent Edie from calling my pretend parents or the high school in Briarcliff.) So, I didn’t even wait for Camille to ask: I pulled the hooks out of my ears and dropped the earrings one at a time into her hand. I didn’t cry—I almost did, but I didn’t—and I’m very glad about that.

But you know what? When I look back on that moment now, I kind of wish I had gone up to Camille a few days later, when I was on my way out the door of the shelter, and gently touched one of the earrings in one of her lobes and said, “Those earrings, bitch? Pretty fucking radioactive.”

I got no great insights into life the one time I did windowpane. They—well, Andrea—said most of the time I was just curled up naked on the floor of the shower, super depressed. But I also don’t think it messed up my brain any more than it already was.

And I was pretty clean when I was with Cameron. I did a bowl the weekend we finally came in from the cold, but that was it. Let’s face it, I had to have my head on straight. I was all that little guy had.

I years had been from home
,

And now, before the door
,

I dared not open, lest a face

I never saw before

Stare vacant into mine

This was one of my favorite poems Emily Dickinson wrote. It’s more about memory than it is about returning home and wondering what sort of welcome awaits. It’s more about change.

But when, nine months after Reactor One exploded, I struggled back home to Reddington—filled with self-loathing because of what happened to Cameron and having given up on my own life completely—I interpreted it both ways. It felt like years since I’d been there. And I wasn’t sure what face would greet me in the mirror in my own bedroom. (I wasn’t worried about who would greet me, because I knew the Exclusion Zone was—at least supposedly—deserted.)

Also: I promised you I would be honest. I promised myself I would be honest. If I am not going to be miserly with the truth, I should rewrite a sentence from that last paragraph. Here goes:

But when, nine months after Reactor One exploded, I struggled back home to Reddington—filled with self-loathing because of what I had done to Cameron and having given up on my own life completely—I interpreted it both ways
.

Sometimes I just wish I could go back in time. God. I so really do.

Other times I do this: I try and imagine what’s going on in someone else’s life at the exact same moment that something is happening to me. Sometimes I focus on how unbelievably monumental shit is going down somewhere, at the same time that the rest of us are just going about our daily lives. I mean, think of all the people who were just grocery shopping in Concord, New Hampshire, or Austin, Texas, when Reactor One exploded. Some woman somewhere is putting a jar of pickles in her metal shopping cart at a Price Chopper at the exact same time that another woman—my mom—is being blown into who knows how many little pieces. (I will never know how many little pieces. But I do know they were all radioactive.) And sometimes it’s comparisons that are not quite that extreme.

But here is another one I think about: What was I doing at the
precise moment when a seriously nasty dirtball named Bob Rouger took his hammy, middle-aged fist and popped it into a nine-year-old kid’s eye?

When I was first thinking I was going to tell you about Cameron’s foster dad, I started yet another poem I didn’t finish:

The G was hard as in rug
,

Not soft as in rouge
.

I didn’t finish it because suddenly I wasn’t sure if “rouge” would be considered a soft G. My bad. Anyway, Rouger’s name was pronounced “roux” as in something to do with cooking and “grrrrrr” as in batshit-rabid dog.

I ask you: What kind of bastard punches a nine-year-old kid? Seriously: Who does that?

And yet—for ten thousand reasons—Cameron would have been a lot better off if he hadn’t run away after his foster dad socked him. I wish he had gone to school the next day with that black eye, because I have to believe that some teacher would have said “Whoa!” and immediately called social services. And while all that would have meant for Cameron was another foster home, it would have meant that someone might have handed Rouger his ass on a plate. Maybe even jail. A girl can hope, right?

So, what was Cameron’s crime? He was taking a twenty out of Rouger’s wallet so he could go to the Montshire Museum on a class field trip and not have to be, once again, the usual, pathetic foster kid charity case. When he’d asked Dee Rouger, his foster mom, for the scratch, she’d said no, they didn’t have it—though, of course, they always had the money to pay for field trips for their three real kids. So, he thought he’d just take a twenty. And he got caught. Not good, I know. But, you have to admit, it has a little moral grayness to it. Besides, things had been pretty nasty all six months that Cameron had been there. Bob Rouger had slugged him before. Dee Rouger had slapped him before. And their real kids? They didn’t trust Cameron as far as they could have thrown
him—and, according to Cameron, they couldn’t have thrown him more than a foot. Two prissy middle school girls and one six-year-old boy.

So, what was I doing the night Bob Rouger was trying to make a nine-year-old kid’s eye socket the width of his fist? What was I doing that very moment? Maybe it was the exact second when I was standing outside the Kappa Sig Something fraternity house on Main Street, blowing into my hands and wondering if I looked too skanky to fuck some UVM frat boy who was back on campus so he could drink and ski. It would mean a warm room, and I was freezing. But, in the end, I decided no frat boy who really was from a place like Briarcliff would want anything to do with me. I’d left Poacher’s by then and I was kind of a mess.

The Rouger household was Cameron’s fourth foster home. After Bob Rouger got medieval on his face, Cameron had had enough. As I said, we didn’t see each other later that night, but we were both camped out in that empty coal plant down by the waterfront. I came there from outside the fraternity house, and he came there from the Rougers’. It was the next day that I would see him and learn all about his duct tape art and his precious mummy bag—and realize that for all his swagger, the kid was in at least as much trouble as I was.

Cameron was nine and Maggie was nine, but they didn’t have the same birthday. Just an observation. And, obviously, Maggie was something like sixty-three years old in dog years.