The Probability of Miracles (14 page)

Not surprisingly, it had only taken Perry two days to infiltrate Promise's sparkly pink tween underground. Once on the inside, she quickly rose to the top of its ranks, organizing a small Ugg-clad army of giggling attendants to do her bidding and make things right in Perryville. In just one week, Avalon by the Sea had been the host to two slumber parties in the basement, where poor Tweety had to be subjected to off-key, high-pitched karaoke girl-pop long into the night.

Cam shifted the telescope to take in the figures on Avalon by the Sea's front lawn. Alicia's Hula 101 class was fully enrolled, with ten lumpy retired women now filing in the front door wearing bright muumuus. Each carried a foil-wrapped loaf of something to enjoy after class with their tea. Cam's mom had asked her to assist in teaching, but Cam had been dancing for so long, she wouldn't know how to break it into its parts.

She focused the scope on the jolliest of her mom's students, a dark-haired woman whose eyes squinted when she smiled. She let out a big belly laugh that Cam could hear all the way on top of the house.
It's been way too long since I've done that
, thought Cam.
Belly-laughed
.

When the last of the hula dancers was in the house, Cam was about to walk away from the telescope. She knew she should. She tried. She looked up for a second and began to forcefully take a step back toward her room. But she had to do one more thing. She turned around, bent her head toward the eyepiece, and scanned the town's brick storefronts, looking for Asher.

She found him sitting on a wooden bench in front of the lobster pound, taking a break from his shift and drinking a vanilla milkshake. He had placed the football he carried around with him underneath the bench and was reading something. Cam couldn't catch the title of the book.
A jock and a braniac
, she thought. “A person can be too perfect, you know,” she said out loud.

She secretly loved how his calves, covered in soft, curly blond hair, dead-ended into his perpetually untied construction boots. She moved the scope up to view his face. He had a little beauty mark to the side of his right eye and a chicken pox scar in the middle of his forehead. It was his only imperfection.

Perhaps she'd meet up with
him
one day at a keg party, she joked to herself. He seemed sweet enough to help her take care of item number one on the List.

“Uh-oh,” Cam said. “Incoming . . .” A girl, leggy and blonde, like a Barbie doll in short white shorts, slid next to Asher on the bench and tossed her gleaming hair. She giggled and stroked his hand with her finger. She laughed and grabbed his shoulder. She guffawed and took hold of his knee.

Tossing the hair. Excessive touching. These are the top two
Cosmo
Signs that She's Into You, and yet Asher, a seemingly healthy eighteen-year-old boy, was having none of it. He wasn't outright rude or anything. He just sat there and politely answered her questions until she got up and strutted away without realizing that the dusty bench had left a huge gray splotch on the back of her shorts.

Asher turned back to his book, which Cam could see now was
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
. He took one last slurp of his milkshake, took the straw out of his mouth, squinted for a second, and then seemed to look directly into Cam's scope. He winked. Then waved.

Cam hit the deck. She turned her head to the side and pressed her cheek into the scorching wooden planks, trying to disappear beneath the treeline.

A half-inch splinter lodged itself right into the meat of her pinky finger, but she was too mortified to feel anything. Had he really seen her?

If her mom thought she was isolating herself before, she hadn't seen anything yet. Cam would never leave her room again.

At least she could cross off
Dabble in some innocent stalking behavior
from her Flamingo List.

HOMER NEEDED SOME FRESH SALTWATER.

Cam's pet lobster lived alone in the basement of the house, where Cam had found an unused twenty-gallon tank built into the brick wall. She'd filled the bottom with sand and rocks, thrown in some faux coral and seaweed, and then added a big upside-down SpongeBob pineapple for Homer to hide in.

She tapped on the glass, and Homer climbed up the side of the tank to greet her. Then he swam around, performing big, loop-de-loop figure-eights that seemed more ice skaterly than lobsterly.
He's happy here
, Cam thought. Or else he was trying to get out. She couldn't really tell.

Cam had done some research on lobsters and found out that their genus and species name was
Homerus americanus
. Another fun fact about lobsters was that they were once, like Samoans, rumored to be cannibals. They got a bum rap because someone found lobster shell in the stomachs of some dead ones. But they didn't actually eat each other. They just ate some of their own personal molted shells so that they'd have enough calcium to grow new ones. It was nutritional genius, not cannibalism. They were misunderstood creatures, and Cam immediately identified with Homer.

She grabbed her big yellow saltwater bucket with one hand and then tugged at the handle of the basement's sliding glass door with the other. It wouldn't budge. She yanked again without looking up and then gasped. The door flew open a couple feet, nearly tossing her onto the ground. Asher stood on the other side of the glass with his hand on the door handle. “Sorry,” he said. “I didn't mean to startle you.”

He helped her heave the heavy door open the rest of the way as it scraped on the rust and pebbles of the track. “I need to grease that,” he said, combing a hand through his wavy hair. He had caramel-colored skin and eyes that were amber and brown. His nose was the round triangular shape of one of those plastic noses that hang from the gag disguise glasses you get in the joke shop. But smaller and in perfect proportion with the rest of his face.

“How do you do that?” asked Cam.

“Just some WD-40. Not a big deal.”

“No. I mean, how do you appear in moments of need like a brave knight for a damsel in distress?”

Asher shrugged and stuffed his hands into the pockets of his jeans, revealing a perfectly flat, tan stripe of belly between his too-short T-shirt and the waistband of his underwear. Cam found herself wanting to slide her finger across it, which was not like her at all. She was a realist and did not engage in fantasy. Asher would never want anything to do with her. From what she'd been able to piece together from snippets of overheard conversations between him and the fawning Perry during their daily chess game, he was the town's humble football star. And he was, as the saying goes, seriously out of her league.

On their drive in, signs at business after business congratulated the regional high school's win in the state football championship. Cam couldn't get over how pathetic that was. A whole county glorifying a little boys' game. Girls never got the chance to be celebrated like that. To be made into demigods. First they made girls go to church to learn how to worship a male god, and then they made mere boys into mini-gods for girls to worship here on Earth. She vowed that one night, she would drive out in Cumulus and change all the signs to read CONGRATULATIONS, LADY LOBSTERS FIELD HOCKEY: THIRD PLACE!

“Do you need help with that?” Asher asked, pointing to the bucket.

“What? Um, no. No, I can handle it,” she said, finally looking away from Asher's stomach. She blushed.

Asher went back to the carriage house, and Cam walked across the lawn and down the steep rocky path to the house's own private beach. The beach was so rocky you couldn't walk on it with bare feet. Cam plodded along in her black Chuck Taylors and waded into the water with them still on. The water was so cold, she swore it had to be part of the Arctic Ocean. She could actually feel the blood vessels in her legs start to constrict and throb like a big bruise. She didn't know how Perry and all her newfound friends could scamper around in it all day long. She squatted for a moment on a rock and watched the waves wash in, suck up rocks, and then spit them back onto the regurgitated shore.

Her new skinny body, wracked as it was from disease, was so accessible to her sometimes. She could squat there for hours with her knees bent up beside her like the tiny poisonous frogs they saw at the National Aquarium in Baltimore on their way up the coast. She could never have done that when she was “heavy.”

She looked down into a little tide pool and saw a starfish stuck to a rock. She had a window on an entire world. The starfish, the kelp waving back and forth, a snail, some sea worms, plankton, grains of sand, molecules of grains of sand, atoms in molecules of grains of sand, protons, neutrons, and spinning electrons.

Infinity fascinated her. How systems and universes could keep getting infinitely smaller in one direction and infinitely larger in another. How the shape of an atom so precisely mimicked the shape of the solar system. How there wasn't an end to anything. Except her own life, she guessed. That was going to end pretty soon, but everything else was going to keep spinning without her. It gave her a sense of vertigo to think about it, and she stood up so she wouldn't topple over.

“Crazy how nothing stops, isn't it?” Asher was standing about ten feet away, where the bluff slammed perpendicularly into the beach. There was nothing gradual about the topography of this place. No sloping hills or molded dunes. One thing just fell into another at steep angles.

“Would you please stop sneaking up on me? That's something that can stop right now.”

“Shhh. Look!” Asher pointed out at the middle of the whitecapped waves.

“Did you just shush me?”

“Look,” he insisted, lifting his chiseled, tan, and perfectly veined throwing arm. Cam's eyes caught on a yellow piece of plastic around his wrist. Was he wearing a rubber Livestrong bracelet? He was.
Please don't tell me it says Jesus on it
, thought Cam.

She looked out to sea. And that's when she saw it. She actually heard it first. A pregnant silence. And then
whoosh
. A mother orca and her baby leaped ten feet out of the bay at the exact same time.

“Holy Shamu, Batman,” said Cam. The rest of the bay maintained its workaday bayness. A lobster boat chugged slowly back to the dock. A few dinghies remained moored to their buoys as they rocked back and forth. A seagull sat motionless on her nest atop some wooden pilings. And the sun began its everlasting gobstopper descent behind the lighthouse. No one even seemed to notice that two whales had just performed a circus trick that people paid top dollar to see in Orlando.

“Watch. They'll do it again.”

“How do you know?”

“They do it every night at sunset. Animals are creatures of habit.”

And sure enough, the whales circled around and leapt up into the air again, shiny and black, like a mismatched pair of patent leather shoes.

“Amazing.”

“The sun rises and sets on this place,” said Asher as he picked up a flat gray rock and skipped it seven times across the water.

“Well, I'm glad you don't take it for granted. You do
own
a piece of the ocean, which is pretty obnoxious,” Cam said, even though Asher was anything but obnoxious. He owned a beach. Girls threw themselves at his feet. And yet he seemed so pensive and alone.

“No, I mean the sun literally rises and sets in the same place,” Asher explained. “Behind Archibald Light. The lighthouse. Haven't you noticed?”

“That's impossible,” Cam replied automatically, but then she thought about it and realized that it seemed true. She was able to watch the sunrise and sunset from the same window of the widow's walk.

“It's probably caused by pollution,” she reasoned. “My grandmother says that the sunsets off the New Jersey Turnpike are caused by gasses rising from the landfills. That's probably the deal here too. It looks like the sun setting, but it's just some extra methane wafting up from all those cows in Vermont.”

“That's a lot of methane,” Asher said as he skipped another rock.
Why must boys always throw things?
wondered Cam.

“Cows eat a lot of grass. And they're making a hole in the ozone.”

“So you're saying our sunset is a big cow fart?”

“I am.”

“That's a bold assertion.” Asher smirked.

“There's an explanation for everything,” said Cam.

“Right,” said Asher. But from his tone, Cam could tell he didn't agree.

“It's past my bedtime,” she said, and she walked with her big bucket sloshing behind her, back to the house. She was tired and cold and looking forward to snuggling up in the widow's walk and watching the movies she bribed Perry to get her from the town library. Maybe someday she would take Asher on an expedition and show him where the sun was really setting. In the woods behind the house. A place called
the west
.