Authors: Jennifer Castle
“Dinner?”
“Yup. And Eliza wants her thread.”
Camden ushered us out of the studio, turned off the lights, and gingerly slid the door shut. As we walked back up the hill to the Barn, I reached out for Kendall’s hand. She grasped it back.
Inside, we sat down at the farmhouse table, where James had poured wine for us all. There was a giant bowl of pasta and another giant bowl of salad. Garlic bread on a wooden cutting board, steam rising off of it.
“This looks amazing,” I said, then turned to Eliza. “Max did this? You’re lucky.”
“We’re all lucky,” she said. “It’s summer. Anything can happen.”
“To summer,” said Camden, raising his glass.
“To anything,” added Max.
We clinked glasses, then I watched everyone else take a sip of their wine while I put mine back on the table. The food, the drinks, the rising swell of chatter among the six of us made us all appear to be, you know,
people
in the world who
led lives.
Every fantasy I’d ever had about being grown-up and independent and real—it looked a lot like this. But this was happening now, and it didn’t even feel like cheating.
Camden took my empty bowl and filled it to the top. I didn’t ever want to leave.
After dinner, we ate mini Hershey bars out of the bag and talked until it was time for Kendall and me to get home by curfew. Camden and James walked us to the car.
James opened the passenger door for Kendall and she paused for a second before climbing in. He leaned into the open window and said, “Thanks for coming. I’ll send you those links tomorrow,” before turning to walk back to the house.
I hovered by the driver’s side. Camden took my hand and I realized it was the first time all night he’d really touched me.
“Can I kiss you good night?” he asked confidently. So sure I’d say yes.
I simply nodded. Once again, those familiar lips, which now tasted like garlic and wine. With Kendall in the car, the others probably watching from the house, it didn’t feel like we should kiss for longer than a few moments. Each millisecond of it was precious.
I got in the car and turned to Kendall, expecting her to give me some kind of look, but she was staring out the window at the moon.
Neither of us said a word on the way home.
In my half sleep, I thought about the “Ferris Wheel” episode of
Silver Arrow
. It was my favorite of the whole third season, where the
Arrow One
explores a portal that sends them to 1950s Earth. It lands in a cornfield outside a fair somewhere in the Midwest. The ship creates a temporal anomaly where people get on the Ferris wheel, and by the time they get off, they are much younger. Satina and Azor have to figure out how to fix it before word gets out among the locals.
I loved this episode because of what it said about aging and lost youth, and because it was one of the few where Satina and Azor have a lot of screen time without Atticus Marr around.
Eliza thought I could pull off Satina. Camden did, too. If I didn’t believe them, what did it say about me?
I grabbed my phone and pulled up Camden’s name in my contacts. Letter by letter, I deleted the “Armstrong,” and with each backward stroke it was like I was claiming a little more of him.
Then I called.
“Ari?” he said, sounding very much awake. I wondered if I was just “Ari” on his phone.
“I’m saying yes to the cosplay,” I announced. “Tell Eliza before I chicken out.”
The plan fell
into place pretty quickly.
We picked three scenes from the “Ferris Wheel” episode to cosplay at the county fair. Accuracy was everything. My job was to look at Eliza’s sketches for all the characters—Satina, Atticus, Azor, and Bram—and make sure they were as spot-on as possible. Over the next two days, Eliza texted me constantly with photos of items or fabric she’d found, asking for my thumbs-up. Every time she shared a new element of Satina’s costume, I couldn’t help but feel like I was being rebuilt piece by piece.
At the end of the second day, Camden called me while Danielle and I were doing the dinner dishes.
“Hang on,” I said as soon as I picked up. I went into my room and locked the door before Dani could follow me in. “Okay. I’m alone.”
“I can say hi now?”
“Yes.”
“Hi,” he whispered, and in the fleeting solitude of my room I crawled inside his voice.
“Hi,” I practically sighed back.
“What did people buy at the store today?”
“Origami paper. Blank canvases. Fancy pens.” I paused. “Did you get any calls at the hotline?”
“A few. I was on the phone with one kid for an hour.”
“And you helped him?” I knew Camden wasn’t allowed to talk about the details.
“I think so. God, I hope so. He promised he’d come to the teen support group this weekend, so we’ll see.”
“He’ll come,” I assured him. “You seem like the kind of person whose advice is worth taking.”
He laughed a bit, surprised. “I do?”
“Yeah. I mean, your friends all look up to you. That’s obvious.”
“It
is
?”
Was it? I flushed with panic that maybe I’d gotten it wrong. Why was I telling this boy about his life, instead of shutting up and listening to that voice talk about . . . well, anything it wanted to.
But then Camden added, “Maybe you’re right. Maybe they
do.” He cracked up again.
“What’s so funny?” I asked.
“I’m remembering this thing that happened last winter.”
“Tell me.”
“Well, Eliza, Max, and James decided they were going to put on a production of
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
at Dashwood. Eliza was doing the costumes, of course. Max and James thought they could direct it together, but that was a total disaster. Max wanted to make the play shorter by rewriting some of Shakespeare’s lines, and James was like, completely outraged by that.”
“Um, as he should be,” I said.
“I know. But then James kept changing his mind about where one particular tree on the set was supposed to go, which drove Max crazy. I’d never seen him that annoyed. Seriously, I thought the whole show was going to implode. I had to step in and tell them how to fix it.”
“And they listened to you?”
“I was Oberon. Who’s going to mess with a badass Fairie King?”
I laughed, sensing myself falling toward two things at the same time: Camden, of course, and also this group of people who were so important to him becoming part of my life, too.
I’d started telling Camden about a big Mock Trial team fight we had during our biggest competition when Richard rapped on the door and told me that Dani was ready for me to kiss her good night.
“I have to sign off now,” I said.
“Want to go swimming tomorrow?”
“I’m with Danielle all afternoon.”
“Here’s a shocking concept: you can swim with both of us at the same time. I think I can coexist with your sister and not rip a hole in the space-time continuum.”
“She’ll blab to my parents.”
“Let her blab.”
“Easy for you to say.”
“You, too, Ari.”
We were quiet, listening to each other breathe.
Finally I said, “Okay.”
I hung up and left my room, and everything looked different. The hallway a slightly deeper color beige, the light fixture refracting tiny diamond shapes I’d never noticed on the ceiling. It was as if every conversation with Camden was taking me another few inches farther from the person I’d been.
I was in the water with Dani when Camden appeared on the beach. The faraway Camden from last summer: the hair and the shoulders, the heartbreaking tilt of his head.
Then he came closer and became the new Camden. My Camden. The one whose stories I’d been learning, who I’d kissed twice so painfully briefly, I almost wished I hadn’t at all. Because it was torture, the
more more more
and the
when when when
and also the
if if if
.
This Camden walked onto the dock and smiled at me. I
smiled back, unafraid to offer up how happy I was to see him, that phone conversation still echoing between us. Then he suddenly dove into the lake, coming up a foot from Danielle.
“Squash!” he yelled as he broke through the surface.
Danielle laughed hysterically. “Why did you say that?”
“I don’t know, I felt like I should shout something when I came up. That’s the first thing that popped into my head.”
“You’re weird,” said Danielle.
“I try,” said Camden, and they beamed at each other. He’d already won her over. She’d been almost as easy as I was.
We swam together for a while, and I was glad to have Danielle there between us. Without Dani to distract me, I would have drowned in the
more when if.
Instead, my sister and I showed him the Garbage game and he threw her, higher and farther than I ever could. When we finally stumbled out of the water and I wrapped Danielle up like a burrito, Camden watched us, then asked, “Who does you?”
“What do you mean?”
“Who wraps
you
up like a burrito?”
I shrugged. “Nobody. I don’t really need to be a burrito.”
Camden flashed a devilish smile. “Don’t be silly. Of course you do.” He turned to Dani. “Am I right?”
Dani nodded energetically, eyes wide, eager to please him.
He picked up my towel and shook out the sand, then stretched it wide and flat across his long, beautiful arms. We locked eyes. I stepped into it and he wrapped me tight, one side of the towel and then the other. I felt his chest against
mine, the quickest sensation of a heartbeat thudding, a precious squeeze as he tucked one corner of the towel at the back of my neck. Then he stepped away.
“What do you think, Ari?” said Dani. “Isn’t it the best?”
“Yes,” I agreed, feeling my own pulse speed up as my eyes and Camden’s found each other again. “There is nothing better.”
“Does your mom know?” asked Kendall from behind her window at Scoop-N-Putt. It framed her perfectly, like she was a talking portrait.
I’d brought Dani straight here from the lake. I told Kendall about the swimming but not about the burritos.
“No,” I said, turning to check on Dani, who was talking to the rabbit on Hole 3, a cherry-dip cone already melting down the back of her hand.
It was 98 degrees and too hot even for ice cream, so we were the only customers. Kendall’s boss was taking a nap in his air-conditioned office upstairs.
Kendall took two sugar cones from the sugar cone tower. She took a bite out of one, handed the other to me. “Why not? She would be jazzed that you’re hanging out with other Arrowheads.”
“Do you think so?” I asked, and bit into my cone.
“Don’t you?”
“Haven’t decided,” I said, chewing. Which was the truth.
Part of me thought, yes,
jazzed
is the right word. Maybe
she’d embrace it as something that proved yes, we were connected in ways that can never be broken. Especially now, when her presence in our house was about to become even more shadow-like.
Another part of me thought: mine. All of this—Camden, Eliza, Max,
Silver Arrow
, and Satina Galt—belonged to me.
I couldn’t think of anything else that did.
“This is nervous eating,” said Kendall, crunching another bite. “I’m seeing James—Jamie—tonight.”
“What? You wait until now to tell me this? Where are you guys going?”
“Movies. Maybe the diner after.”
“That sounds like a date. Kendall, your first date!”
She shrugged, but I could tell she was trying to contain her excitement. “It sounds like a date. Looks like a date, smells like a date. But it might not, in fact, be a date.”
“But you like him.”
Kendall bit her lip and nodded. “A lot.”
“Then you’ll have fun, whatever it is.”
Kendall nodded again, as if I’d given her instructions. Maybe she’d needed them.
“Are you coming with us to the fair?” I asked.
“You’re definitely doing that?”
I gave her a look.
“It’s going to be weird, Ari,” said Kendall. “I mean,
really
weird. We’re going to see people from school there. They might laugh or give you a hard time.”
“I’ve thought about that.” I had. In my mind, all I had to do was grab Camden’s hand and then everything at the fair would be okay. “But the less I worry about what they’re going to think, the happier I am.”
Also, the more I’d learned about Camden’s friends, the more everyone else faded into the background. Lukas, Brady, the girls at the school newspaper. They were like movie extras who didn’t need names or even identities. They had no bearing on me.
“If I go with you, what will I do?” asked Kendall. “I don’t want to be some tagalong who’s just there for you, and for Jamie.” She paused, then seemed to brighten with a brainstorm. “Can I bring my camera?”
“Oh, good idea! You can be the second photographer. I’m sure Eliza would be okay with that.”
Kendall gave me the raised-eyebrows look. “You sure? Don’t we have to submit some kind of proposal to her first?” Her voice dripped with sarcasm.
“I know. She’s bossy. But a cool bossy, don’t you think? And she does have mad costuming skills.”
“If you say so,” said Kendall. “Okay, count me in.”
Richard never asked who I was talking to on the phone each night. He knew he should. He also knew he shouldn’t.
This little problem got solved one day at the store.
I was ringing up a woman and her kids buying coloring books. It had been a slow morning. They stepped away and
I looked down for a moment, then up again, and there was Camden. He planted his hands on the counter and leaned forward with a smile. Like he was glad to see me. Like that could be a thing. (When would I stop thinking this way?)
“Hey, Ari,” he said, his eyes twinkling.
“What are you doing here?” I asked, glancing at Richard, who was now coming down an aisle to see who’d said my name.
“Hi,” said Richard to Camden. “Are you the guy?”
“Oh, for Christ’s sake.” I picked up a paper bag and held it in front of my face.
“Yup, I’m him,” I heard Camden say. “Are you the awesome stepdad?”