“Okay,” she said. “We’ll talk later.”
Connor had filled Jake in on why we were there, and Jake asked me if I wanted to stop somewhere to get something to eat.
“We can stop if you’re hungry.” I was still waiting for him to say something about me inviting myself to ride home with him.
“I’d rather wait until we get back.” He put the keys in the ignition but didn’t turn on the car. His smile was warm when he looked at me. “Where are we going, Cam?”
I, too, had been thinking of our childhood game. It started one morning when I got up before everyone else. I grabbed a box of cereal and went into the garage. Mom always parked her car in the garage. Even now, we always parked over to the side of the driveway so she could pull into the garage. Back then, hers was the only car after she and my dad got divorced. I got in and pretended to drive as I munched on dry cereal. Jake found me there and got in the passenger seat. Connor would always fight with me about who got to “drive.”
Jake grabbed a handful of cereal. “Where are we going, Cam?”
I decided on Texas, because that sounded like a lot of fun to me. We really got into it as we made up all kinds of adventures about what we were doing in Texas. Somehow, there were cowboys and Indians even though we were in a modern car.
“I want to drive,” Connor demanded when he finally got up and found us.
I left them to go get dressed and play with my friends. It became our special thing, however. In those days, Jake only slept over on the weekend, and we had a babysitter on the nights Mom worked. Those weekend mornings became my special time with Jake.
We traveled all over the country, and I started looking things up so that I could add more places to our adventures. One time we went to Myrtle Beach, and I spoke about it from memory. It was my most treasured family vacation, because it was before Dad’s drinking got out of control. I started off excitedly taking Jake to the beach with me and sharing all the things I remembered doing there. Then I started to get sad and stopped talking. I hated crying, and I squeezed my eyes shut angrily.
“Let’s go to Japan,” Jake said.
I gave him a watery smile. “We can’t drive across the ocean.”
“We can. There’s a secret tunnel at the bottom, and you can drive anywhere in the world.”
This fired up my imagination. “Yeah, let’s go. I want to go to Japan.”
“I was there once with my grandpa,” he said.
My tears were forgotten as I stared at him. “You went to Japan? Did you drive through the tunnel?” I thought he had made up the tunnel, but I wasn’t sure.
“No, we went on a plane. But we’ll take the tunnel there now.”
I was jealous, because I had never flown on a plane. Once we started traveling the world, our imaginations came up with unlimited journeys. We even decided to time travel at one point. The game continued well past when we should have been too old to play it. Sometimes we just sat in Mom’s car and talked. I would tell him about something hilarious that had happened to one of my friends, and Jake would tell me funny stories about his brothers and sisters. The game ended when we were twelve, shortly before I overheard him telling Connor that I was pretty.
It was hot, and our air conditioner wasn’t able to cool the house down enough for me to be comfortable in my pajamas, so I put on the thin nightgown Mom had bought for me but I had never worn. It kept me cool, because there wasn’t much material to it. It was short and only thin straps covered my shoulders. Jake was drinking a glass of milk when I walked into the kitchen, and he started coughing.
I whacked him on the back, even though he couldn’t really choke on liquid. “Went down the wrong pipe, huh?”
“I’m okay.” He turned away from me, even though he was still talking to me. “Want me to make you breakfast?” By this time, I was aware of his skill in the kitchen.
“No thanks. I’m going for a ride.” I walked past him and opened the cabinet to get a glass. I could feel the nightgown ride up as I reached for a glass. When I turned around, Jake was staring at me. “What?” I asked
.
“Nothing. Want some juice?” His voice was in the process of changing. Maybe that was why it sounded funny.
“Yeah.” I set my glass on the counter while he took a carton of orange juice out of the fridge. “Thanks,” I said after he filled my glass. I took a big gulp of it before setting it down on the counter. Mom would kill me if I spilled it in her new car, so I left it there for later. I licked the juice off my lips and swiped a hand over my mouth.
Jake was silent as he followed me out to the car. I slipped on my flip-flops before stepping out into the garage. Jake stepped into his tennis shoes. We took our usual places in the car. “Where are you gonna go when you get your own car?” I asked.
“Where do you want to go, Cam?”
“I meant for real, Jake. Where do you want to go when you get a car?” After all the places we had pretended to go, I was curious where he would pick to go in real life.
“Wherever you want to go, Cam. As long as I can really drive there.” He smiled, probably remembering the imaginary tunnel at the bottom of the ocean.
“You’ll take me with you?” I was pleased that he was including me in his future plans.
“I’ll always take you with me, Cam.” His blue eyes looked kind of intense then.
“Can we go without Connor?” I asked to lighten the mood.
“Connor who?” Jake joked.
“I know,” I said, seized with sudden inspiration. “We’ll be bank robbers.”
He was looking at me like I had lost my mind. “That’s what you want to do when I get my car?”
“No, silly, now. Okay, the cops are after us. We need a hostage. You be the hostage.”
“How can I be the bank robber and the hostage?” Jake asked.
“We’ll pretend that bank robber you is driving. I want to be the one holding the gun.” I climbed over into his lap and held my hand up to his head like a gun.
“Cam,” he said desperately, “get off.” His voice cracked as he spoke.
“Shut up,” I said, getting into my role. “Don’t give us any trouble, and we might let you live.”
Jake was looking at me in a way I had never seen before. I didn’t know what that expression was, but it kind of mesmerized me for a minute. This close up, I noticed that he was starting to sweat, even though he was only wearing his boxer shorts. My discomfort snapped me out of my trance. “You have a rock in your shorts,” I stated.
I didn’t know why he would be embarrassed by that. Rocks came in handy for pranks and for defending yourself against bullies. Plus, they were just fun to throw at things. Jake, however, looked so embarrassed that he was turning red. “I have to go to the bathroom.” He sounded almost like he was in pain.
“I climbed off him and back into the driver’s seat. “Okay, I’ll hold off the cops until you get back.”
He never came back though. After a while, I got bored and went into the house. Jake was sitting at the kitchen table with Connor. “It was too hot,” he said in answer to my questioning look.
I shrugged and drank the rest of my juice.
“I didn’t know it was Halloween,” Connor said. “Nice costume, Cam, but you still don’t look like a girl.” He laughed at his own lame joke.
I looked curiously at Jake, who was flushing in embarrassment again. “Wanna play video games, Connor?”
“Yeah, it’s too hot to go outside.” Connor finished eating his cereal, and they went down into the basement.
I was a little hurt that Jake hadn’t asked me to play too. He always had before, even though I usually opted not to hang out with Connor. I took out a bowl and poured myself some milk and cereal. Oh well, I didn’t want to play with them anyway.
It turned out that Jake didn’t want to hang out in Mom’s car with me anymore either. He would busy himself in the kitchen making breakfast for us. We still talked, but we had to speak in hushed voices in
the house. Our time in the car had been more private and fun, but I guessed that he had become bored with our silly games.
“Oh,” I said now, realizing what had happened back then.
“What?” Jake asked.
“I was just thinking about the last time we hung out in Mom’s car. Do you remember that?”
“I’ll never forget it. That was the highlight of my preteen life,” he said with a smile.
“I really thought it was a rock,” I said, laughing at my cluelessness.
“The best part is that it took you this long to figure out that it wasn’t,” Jake laughed. “Only you, Cam. Only you.” He turned on the ignition and started driving toward the cemetery exit.
“You know,” I said. “We never took that trip you promised me we would after you got your car.”
He glanced at me. “Do you still want to go with me, Cam?”
“Do you still want to take me?” I felt like I was asking about more than just a road trip.
“That depends, Cam. Where do you want to go?” It seemed that he, too, was also talking about more than a road trip.
Chapter 13
“How about Texas?” I asked with false enthusiasm. “That was the first place we went in Mom’s car.”
Jake was silent for a moment as he watched the road. “I remember.”
I wondered if he was just saying that. “You do?”
“Yes, Cam. I remember all of it, all our special times together. Connor wasn’t the only reason I spent so much time at your house.” He pulled up to a stoplight and glanced at me.
So, we were really going to get into this. We had to drive two hours to get home, and there was no way to avoid an uncomfortable conversation about us. “I remember those times too, Jake. I always thought of you as Connor’s friend, but I’ve realized that you were my friend too. Why don’t you come over anymore?”
“Do you miss me?” His blue eyes were on me again and then refocused on the road.
I had already admitted it to myself, and now I told him the truth. “Yes, Jake, I do. I miss you so much that I even went to one of your games just so I could see you.”
“I saw you there,” he said. “It didn’t put me in a good mood.”
I was hurt by his statement. “I didn’t know my presence was that intolerable to you. I’m surprised you agreed to drive me home if that’s how you feel.”
“You know that I would do anything for you, Cam.”
He spoke the truth. I remembered when he was in my class in elementary school. The PTA sponsored an ice cream party for us, and every kid got a little cup of ice cream. I loved ice cream and wished that we could have gotten more. Jake gave me his, even though he liked ice cream too.
There were many instances like this throughout my childhood, the most significant being the one when he took the blame for me breaking the window. Just last year I had been upset about not having enough money to go to a professional skateboarding competition that I wanted to watch.
The next day I found money on my desk. It was exactly how much I had been short for the ticket. I knew that it was from Jake, but he claimed not to know anything about it. After I saved up enough money to pay him back, he refused to take it and still wouldn’t admit that he had been the one to leave it for me.
“I’m still trying to get over you,” he said. “I just need some distance for that. Do you understand?”
I didn’t understand, because being apart from him was just making me miss him more. “Can’t we
still be friends?”
“I don’t know,” Jake said, making my heart sink. “I don’t know if I can go back to being just friends after kissing you.”
I tried to make light of it. “Kyle kissed me, and he’s still my friend.”
Jake didn’t crack a smile. “That’s not the same.”
“Because you love me?” My heart was hammering in my chest as I dared to call him out on this. I had my head turned to look out my window, and I didn’t look at him as the silence stretched between us.
“Yes, Cam,” he confirmed. “Because I love you.”
I still didn’t have the courage to look at him, so I continued to stare out the window until he pulled onto the highway. I knew that he was waiting for me to respond to that, but I felt frozen in a strange kind of limbo. Eventually I began to talk about everything that had been going on in my life while we had been apart. I told him about Kyle, about Jason asking me out, and even about everything that Mom had said to me about relationships.
“Cam,” Jake said as I wound down my nervous chatter. “I’m sorry.”
My gaze finally met his straight on before he returned his attention to the road. “About what?”
“About what you caught me doing in your room. I don’t even know why I did that. Especially after what happened the first time. I couldn’t believe that she still wanted to after that. You asked me how many times I used your bed. It was twice. You were at a soccer game the first time.” He had barely taken a breath as he confessed all that.
I took a moment to grasp everything he had said. “What happened the first time?”
“Maybe we shouldn’t get into that.” He sounded even more uneasy about it now.
“You can’t say something like that and leave me hanging,” I protested. “It’ll drive me crazy wondering about it.”
“Just remember that I’m driving. We could get into an accident if you punch me.”
“You punch somebody one time, and people think you make a habit out of it,” I grumbled.
“I called out your name.”
He glanced at me and saw my blank look. “During sex, Cam. I called out your name while I was with her.”
I tried to control the emotional whirlwind that was suddenly spinning through my heart and mind.
“I was thinking about you when Dylan kissed me.”
“You were?” It was the first bright smile I had seen on his face in a long time.
“Yeah, it was better with you.” Since I was completely overwhelmed by all these revelations, I desperately changed the subject. “How’s your family?”
Just like old times, he told me fun stories about the loving chaos that was his family. It made me want to meet them and spend some time at his house for a change. That was unlikely to ever happen now, I thought sadly. He didn’t want to be my friend anymore, and he would probably go back to avoiding me after we got home. After a while, we ran out of neutral things to talk about, and Jake turned on the radio. We were both lost in our own thoughts until he pulled off the highway.
“Do you want me to take you somewhere to eat?”
Things were just too awkward between us now for me to have any appetite to eat dinner with him. “No thanks. I’m not hungry.”
We were quiet again until he pulled into my driveway. Then we kind of just stared at each other.
“Where are we going, Cam?”
This time I didn’t pretend to misunderstand his meaning. “I don’t know, Jake. Will you give me some time to think about it?”
“Okay, but I can’t be here while you decide. You come to me when you’re ready. Just don’t leave me hanging, Cam. Let me know one way or the other, whatever your final decision is.”
“I will,” I promised.
It was the same promise I had made to Jason, but this time I knew that my heart was involved in the outcome.
Chapter 14
Nobody could help me decide what to do about Jake. I talked to Mom first after she came home from the funeral. She listened to me explain that he had asked me out, and I wasn’t sure what to do. “But you said that you like him,” she said.
“I do, but I liked being just friends with him.” I twisted her bedspread in my hands as I sat on her bed.
“And Jake wants more than that.” Mom was sitting beside me. We were in her room with the door closed.
I didn’t want Connor to hear this conversation, even though he knew more about the situation than Mom did. She didn’t need to know about wh
at happened in my room. “He says that he can’t go back to being just friends.” I looked down at my hands. “We kissed a few times.”
“If you like him enough to kiss him more than once, then you must like him enough to go out with him. What’s holding you back, Cam?”
“I’m afraid.” This wasn’t an easy thing for me to admit. When it came to physical fear, my instinct was to overcome it. “Things start off great in relationships, but then they end.”
“That’s not true,” Mom insisted. “They don’t always end.”
“They do!” I cried. “You and Daddy used to be happy, but where is he now?”
“Oh, Cam.” Mom hugged me.
I hugged her tight as I pulled myself back together. When our embrace ended, I was able to speak more calmly. “Don’t you wish that it had never happened? That you could go back and make a different choice?”
Mom looked at me intently. “I could never wish that, Cam. Like you said, we were happy. Those memories are still with me, and I have you and Connor. I wouldn’t trade that for anything.”
I thought then that Mom might not be as physically strong as some people, but she had an inner strength that I admired. “But your life would have been easier in so many ways.”
“Easier doesn’t necessarily mean better,” she said. “You know that saying about it being better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all? I’m one of those people who believes it. I can’t tell you what to do, and I can’t promise you that your relationship with Jake will last. There’s no way to know that. I think in your heart, though, you already know what you want.”
What was in my heart? I wasn’t a person who spent a lot of time contemplating my feelings. Now I had to consider what Jake meant to me. It had been nice to spend time with him again, even if the atmosphere between us hadn’t exactly been comfortable. I had missed him, and I had realized how much of my childhood I had actually shared with him. Just like the incident with the window, a lot of it was things we had never spoken of afterwards.
I remembered the first time Daddy had failed to pick us up for our weekend visit with him. We were ten years old, and we had been waiting for him for hours. Since it was summer and we had no school, he was supposed to pick us up right after lunch that Friday. Mom had tried to call him repeatedly but got no answer. She had to call off work, because our babysitter already had plans for that evening. Connor got sick of waiting and said that he wanted to call Jake to come over. Mom asked me if I wanted to invite a friend too, but I said that I was going to ride my bike and took off out the door.
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