Cameron and the Girls

by Edward Averett

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Table of Contents

  Copyright

  Dedication

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-one

  Twenty-two

  Twenty-three

  Epilogue

  Afterword

  About the Author

  Clarion Books

  215 Park Avenue South

  New York, New York 10003

  Copyright © 2013 by Edward Averett

  All rights reserved. For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 215 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10003.

  Clarion Books is an imprint of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.

  www.hmhbooks.com

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:

  Averett, Edward, 1951– Cameron and the girls / Edward Averett. p. cm. Summary: A boy suffering from schizophreniform disorder falls into a love triangle with a girl in his junior high class—and a girl in his head.

  ISBN 978-0-547-61215-7 (hardcover)

  [1. Schizophrenia—Fiction. 2. Mental illness—Fiction. 3. Love—Fiction.] I. Title.

  PZ7.A9345Cam 2013

  [Fic]—dc23 2012015765

  eISBN 978-0-544-08444-5

  v1.0413

  For Penny. Miss you.

  One

  I’ve just walked the half mile down our driveway, and now I’m standing by the mailbox at our bus stop talking to myself. Which wouldn’t be a bad thing, except that my sister, Beth, is standing with me.

  “Stop doing that,” she says.

  “Stop doing what?”

  “You know,” she says. But I can tell she’s mad about something else. “I hope Dad has a car wreck today,” she adds. “He thinks he can actually ground me.”

  “Bad, huh?” I say.

  “They’re both going to be sorry one of these days,” she says. Beth takes after our dad, who is a former semipro football player. She plays basketball and volleyball and towers over both me and our mom.

  “Yeah,” I say. “Sorry.”

  She smiles and adjusts her backpack. The sun is out now and the canvas starts smoking. “It’s okay, Cam,” she says. “I’m not going to do anything that’ll get you in trouble.”

  “I know,” I say. But there must be some kind of signal I give off because now Beth is suspicious. In the distance, we both hear the bus as its brakes squeal two stops away.

  Beth tilts up my chin with her cold fingers and studies me like a bug in biology. “Are you doing what I think you’re doing?” she says.

  “Just one day,” I say.

  “Are you sure?”

  “Well, maybe two.”

  “You forgot two days in a row?”

  I shrug. The thing they all hate. “I didn’t exactly forget.”

  Another squeal and the bus is one stop away.

  “You okay?”

  “Yeah. Why wouldn’t I be?”

  “Because if you’re not taking your pills . . .” She fumbles for the words. “Don’t you remember what happens?”

  “It’s an experiment,” I say.

  “Sure,” she says. “I think Mom and Dad are a little tired of your experiments.”

  “It is,” I insist. “It can be different this time. The doctor says it could just go away.”

  For a few seconds I can’t tell if she’s serious, but then she grins at me and rolls her eyes.

  “Could be four or five or six days,” I say.

  Now Beth is stuck between laughter and worry. She just shakes her head as the bus comes around the corner. She jerks up her backpack. The bus squeaks to a stop and the doors bustle open. Before she boards, Beth turns and says, “Just don’t make a fool out of the fam, okay?”

  Two

  We live on fifteen acres seven miles from town, and it’s a long bus ride. There are a lot of kids to pick up in Lexington, Washington, but once we’re through, the road curves alongside the river. I sit alone in my favorite window seat, staring out at the murky water. Up ahead, a railroad bridge crosses the river. As the road passes under it, I read a white sign with big red letters way up high:

  DANGER! LOG TRAIN OVERHEAD!

  It feels crowded, even though no one wants to sit in the seat with me. I hear Beth. Now that she’s sixteen, she sits way in the back and talks to her friends. And then I hear another voice, and it makes me feel better. It’s what I’ve been waiting for.

  Here is what this voice is telling me:

  It’s eight thirty Pacific Standard Time. What learning will we do today? Let’s bring that good brain of yours to full attention. Intelligence is as intelligence does.

  “Yes, sir,” I say. And the kid sitting ahead of me turns and frowns.

  I call the voice The Professor. His tone is so educated and knowledgeable. He talks to me with a kind of respect and appreciation for my gifts, not like to a kindergartner who can’t understand basic English. The way my parents sometimes talk to me. Only Beth and The Professor treat me with respect. But now Beth has a boyfriend and a cell phone, so there’s not much talking to her anymore.

  There is a downside, as Dr. Simons would call it. In order to hear The Professor’s voice, I have to stop taking my medication. I wasn’t exactly lying to Beth. Today makes five days without it. There’s good and there’s bad with stopping. If it’s mostly just hearing The Professor, then it’s okay. But there can be other complications. Sometimes I’m not sure that what I actually hear and see is real. And then there can be problems, and, as Dr. Simons has told me, “Problems are like a match, and you shouldn’t play with fire.”

  I’ve been in the hospital twice, both times since I was eleven years old.

  Sometimes, the powers that be don’t exactly know what they’re dealing with, so they hedge their bets and don’t make a definite diagnosis. “Rule out schizophreniform disorder” means it could be that disorder, but we don’t have enough information to say for sure.

  Even though that kind of disorder is not supposed to be very bad, it was very scary. For quite a while, I was feeling like somebody had taken over the controls in my brain. I told my mom that I wasn’t feeling well, but in those days she paid more attention to physical problems, and she just put her hand on my forehead and told me I didn’t have a fever.

  I got weird. I liked staying in my room more. I hung by my knees from one of our apple trees for hours on end. It began to take a lot of effort just to say what my day was like when we were having dinner.

  Then, one day, my brain split in two. As if the Titanic were leaving the dock in Liverpool and I was holding hands with my girlfriend and we didn’t want to let go, and when we didn’t, each hand broke off and the two hands went spinning down into the water. Obviously, I’ve never been to Liverpool and have never had a girlfriend, even though I would like one, so something was very wrong. I also heard voices, especially one that I didn’t want to hear. He told me what to do and it wasn’t always nice. I had to watch myself closely at that point.

  I made such a bad scene once, I was put in the psych ward at the hospital. They shot me up with medications and made me take pills every day after that, and a year later I was doing pretty well, so they did a trial of no medicatio
ns and everything was just fine. My parents thought it was the end of the story, but . . .

  Something went wrong a few months ago.

  “Diagnosis deferred” on your discharge papers generally means they can’t figure out why it is happening again. They tell everyone that this new diagnosis is a step forward, that perhaps it will turn out that you have a lesser, more manageable illness.

  My dad doesn’t like things he doesn’t understand. He said, “How can a kid the age of Cam be schizophrenic? He hasn’t lived long enough to go crazy from life.”

  “It happens,” said the doctor, shrugging. “And we’re still quite hopeful that it isn’t your classic schizophrenia.”

  “But what is it exactly?” asked my dad.

  “Something different. Not quite so . . . ominous. If it’s what we think it is, it can stay for a while, but never longer than six months. And fingers crossed, everybody, it can even disappear, never to return. There’s no real predicting with this disease. Sometimes you just have to wait and see what happens.”

  “But Cameron is so young,” my dad said, putting up the good-parent fight. “Isn’t it more likely he’s on drugs or something?”

  The doc went on to explain that what I have is thought to have a genetic component. That set both my parents off as they searched their minds for the crazy ones in their families. One night I overheard them.

  “Your aunt Agnes is a suspect,” said my dad. “Remember how she used to hoard pennies in her shoes in the closet? Or your cousin Tootie. You remember all those jars of pee?”

  But whenever I studied my mom she just looked plain scared as she chewed on her knuckles. Her face was always streaked red and her eyes leaked tears. As if she was only letting my dad go on and on about her family, to calm him down, to give him something to do. But it was also as if she knew the reason I had this disease. My mom thinks it’s her fault, that it’s something she’s done. And I think that’s what makes her stalk me the way she does.

  After a while, I see the school up ahead and start adjusting my backpack. As I do, I hear a voice I’ve never heard before.

  Hello, Cam.

  But there’s no one next to me. I tap the kid in front on the shoulder. “Did you just say something?” I ask.

  He shrugs my arm off his jacket. “Nutball,” he says.

  The bus stops and spits a lot of us out at my junior high school. Beth stays on until the high school, so when it starts to leave, I wave at her through the window. She smiles and gives me a cool wave.

  Because I’m a two-time loser, I am now in the EDP, the Emotionally Disturbed Program, and we have our own special wing of the school that was added on when more and more kids started having emotional problems. The special wing keeps us from having to enter the school through the main doors, which can lead to trouble. One time, the little rabbit girl was grabbed and ended up hidden in a locker for most of the morning.

  As I walk around to the side of the school, I wonder about the voice I heard on the bus. Sometimes it happens that way; a new voice doesn’t stay too long, or it just turns out to be a real person talking to someone else. It’s hard to know for sure. But this new voice. It was sweet. And soft. It was kind of a wow.

  I bang on the narrow door at the back of the school. In a minute, Mrs. Owens, my teacher, pushes it open.

  “Well, hello there, Cameron,” she says.

  I breeze past her and smell the perfume drifting from her loose clothes. Mrs. Owens has been on a diet for most of the school year and now her clothes just hang off her.

  “You look skinny today,” I tell her, and she pats me on the back as she pulls the door closed.

  “You little sweet talker,” she says. I know I’m one of her favorites because a lot of kids in our class are troublemakers. Most of them can’t sit still. It seems like Mrs. Owens spends most of her time sorting out everybody’s symptoms instead of teaching. One time, I found her in the supply closet, sitting on a bucket and crying.

  Today, I find my seat next to Griffin. Griffin likes to puff out his cheeks and then squirt air past his gums so as to make rude noises. The trouble with Griffin is that he is too smart. He learned so much so fast that his brain couldn’t keep up. Now information falls out of it as fast as Griffin can take it in.

  “So here we are again, big boy,” he says, studying a greasy clump of dark hair that tries to cover his eye.

  “Yeah,” I say. “Again.”

  When we get settled, Mrs. Owens takes the roll call. She comes to my name and looks up. “Cameron, I got a note from the librarian. You’ve a book overdue.”

  At that, Griffin shoots up his hand. “Cameron wants to know if we get any extra time in the library this week.”

  “I do not,” I say.

  “It depends,” says Mrs. Owens, checking over the roll sheet. “You need to be better focused for that to happen.”

  The other trouble with Griffin is that I can never tell him anything, not even about the library. “I can talk for myself,” I whisper.

  I try to glare at Griffin, but he just smiles big and says, “Right.”

  After she’s finished with the roll call, Mrs. Owens walks up to the chalkboard and picks up a piece of colored chalk. She trades it from one hand to the other as she says, “Today I have chosen a very, very interesting topic for us to discuss.”

  While I would like to listen to her soothing voice, another, more soothing one steals into my brain.

  Even if you know the instructor is not doing her best work, as her student you must act as if you’re learning everything she has to offer. This is essential for one’s future. Know what your goal is. Cream rises to the top.

  It could become a battle now. I have to pay attention to keep Mrs. Owens in focus at the front of the classroom while The Professor serves up some more interesting conversation in my mind. It’s a battle I’ve waged before. I’m determined to win it this time, but winning it can be tricky.

  Three

  Today, it’s harder for me to wake up. And when I do, it’s harder to tell the difference between waking and sleeping. But because I’ve stopped taking my pills, I have to be as normal as I can be, or somebody’s going to notice.

  I jump out of bed and run to the bathroom at the end of the hall. The door is shut and I can hear water running. I hop from one foot to the other, finally pound on the door.

  “In a minute,” Beth says.

  But Beth’s minutes last longer than anyone else’s, and so I have to sprint down the stairs to the bathroom next to my parents’ bedroom. Normally, after I go, I sneak back up the stairs and get ready. But this morning, as I reach to flush the toilet, something sweet and unexpected interrupts my routine.

  Hello, Cam.

  I freeze. There it is again. Clearer this time. It’s got a higher pitch than what I’m used to, and the words kind of take their time getting said. And hearing those words is like licking syrup.

  “What?” I say. But I get nothing in return. Instead, The Professor cranks up:

  In difficult situations, it serves one best to keep one’s voice down.

  And he’s right. “Cameron?” It’s my mom outside the bathroom door. I check the mirror: sleepy-looking hair, a little red in my eyes, pale face.

  “Good,” I say, and then open the door and step out. Mom stands in her turquoise robe and studies me.

  “It’s okay,” I say. “Really.”

  Before I can walk away, she grabs me by the arm and turns me toward her. She puts her microscope eyes on and makes me squirm.

  “Did you take them?” she finally says.

  I hate to lie, especially to her. I lick my lips and feel a chill wind on my bare legs. “Course I did,” I say. She lets me go.

  Beth and I have to jog to get to the bus on time. In my seat, I try to figure out the other voice. It sounded like a girl, which is unusual because I have never heard from a girl in my life. Maybe it’s just a boy with a high voice. No, definitely a girl. Maybe it’s someone trying to fool me. There are alwa
ys other kids out there trying to make a fool of me. It’s better not to tell anyone about this in case it’s true. But it was definitely a girl.

  I didn’t take my medication again. The previous record was eight straight days before anything happened. Now this is the sixth. I have to do my regular head check. There is a slight buzz in the back of my brain, but it’s not bad yet. I can still think over the top of it. I hold my hands out straight in front of me. No tremors, at least none that will attract attention. That’s good. I can handle this kind of normal me.

  But my mom can be the best detective. Stopping my meds is her worst nightmare because she thinks they’re the magic glue that will hold us all together. If she suspects anything at all, she’ll go snooping around, and if she finds anything suspicious, then I’m in for it. We’ll have that fight we always have where she asks me why I do things like that and I have to answer that I can’t help it. But she doesn’t accept that answer, and I will have to end up saying, “I hate my life.” Which is true most of the time.

  “You don’t hate your life,” my mom will struggle to say. “You just think you do.”

  “Well, what’s reality, then? Is it what I think or what other people think?”

  “Talk normally, Cameron,” she will say quietly. “Please.”

  But I don’t feel like fighting anymore. I don’t feel like explaining myself anymore. Is this too much to wish for?

  If I take the meds, my life is lonely and awkward and hopeless and other kids are mean to me. But if I don’t take them, I get The Professor and now this girl and who knows what other fun and interesting things. It’s my own life I have to live. Don’t I get to choose?

  At school, I pound and pound on the back door, but Mrs. Owens doesn’t come. All around me, kids are hurrying to get to class on time. I start to feel nervous. I run around toward the front, my backpack thumping against my butt.