by E. R. Frank
“I was thinking I should send Cameron’s parents a letter or something,” I say, listening to the whooshing and watching the bubbles in that plastic box. “That’s what you think I should do, right?” I wait, and I hear the screaming, stopped, and try to shake it out of my mind. “My father is being slightly less of an asshole.” I walk nearer to her bed. I touch her cast, by the ankle. It’s hard and cold. “I’m going to write something on this,” I tell her. I look around for a pen. There’s one attached to a clipboard hanging from a peg on the door. I slip it off and think about what to write. I think and think and think, and I’m still thinking when the Gersons walk back in.
“I can’t think of anything to write,” I tell them when they see me at the edge of the bed with the ballpoint in my hand.
“How could you?” Mrs. Gerson says as if it’s an argument and she’s taking my side. She hands me a cup of coffee. I don’t really drink coffee, but I like the heat in my palms. “For God’s sake.”
My mom and I get lunch out after the hospital, and she keeps touching my hand or my arm or some part of me, which is still so different from our usual, and we don’t say a whole lot, which is the same as our usual, and she drives really, really slowly on the way home.
We don’t get back until about three. Jack is in the family room, watching TV. Not watching a movie on DVD. Watching an actual television show. I walk in, my chest hot and pounding, and then I notice Rob is here.
“Hi,” I say.
Rob nods. He’s not a big talker.
“Thanks for coming over, Robert,” my mother says, stopping in the family-room doorway. She stares at Jack, slides her palm along my arm, and then walks away.
“Why are you guys watching TV?” I ask. I can see the TV fine with my left eye. The throbbing is still pretty bad, though. It passes through my head like a steady wave.
Rob shrugs.
“You hate TV” I tell Jack. He picks up the remote and aims it at the screen. The TV goes black. Now my brother looks at me. I want to say things, but it’s hard with Rob here. He’s staring at my eye. He points to it and tilts his head.
“It’s called a shield,” I say.
“Why are your teeth chattering?” Rob asks next. His voice is really deep. I always forget how deep it is.
“They’re not chattering,” I lie, and then I clamp my jaw tight to stop them from doing it.
Jack’s still looking at me. I guess I’m going to have to ignore Rob.
“Jack,” I go. “I…”
He just looks.
“I didn’t have time. I mean … I didn’t even see her when …” Rob’s face is turning red. Jack’s face stays exactly the same. Why doesn’t Rob just leave?
“Jack,” I try again. But the words won’t come. Jack looks back at the still TV “I’m glad you’re okay,” he says. His voice is as blank as the screen.
• • •
Cameron was good for us. I didn’t get it then, but even from the first time I really met her, she helped Jack and me. It was just some school-day afternoon, right after they started going out. It wasn’t any big deal.
“Oh my God,” I yelled, throwing my hands over my ears. The kitchen looked like a war zone. “What happened?” Pots and pans and flour and chocolate splotches and bunched-up dishrags and eggshell slime all over the place. Plus the smell of something burned, and what looked like soil sprinkled all over the kitchen floor, and some horrendous, unbelievably earsplitting music.
“Hi!” Cameron called to me. She was on her knees trying to sweep up the soil with the edges of her hands. “I’m Cameron!” As if I didn’t know. “You must be Anna!”
Jack clomped in from the family-room side of the kitchen, hauling the vacuum cleaner. He was moving his mouth along with what I guessed were supposed to be lyrics. He stopped clomping and lip-synching the second he saw me. Then he was saying something, but I couldn’t hear a word.
“What?”
He tried it again.
“What!”
Jack dropped the vacuum cleaner and hit the stop button on the CD player. I lowered my hands from my ears, and Cameron stood up.
“What happened?” I asked again in a normal voice.
“We’re making a chocolate cake,” Cameron said. Then she laughed. Not giggled. Laughed. One of those big, joyful, from-your-gut kinds of laughs. It was totally contagious. Well, it would have been with anybody other than Jack and me. He stood there looking bummed. I stood there feeling awkward. Cameron stopped laughing.
“Since when do you bake?” I asked Jack.
“Since today,” he told me. “Weren’t you going to the mall with Ellen?”
“We went,” I told him.
“That’s going to be much better,” Cameron said about the vacuum cleaner.
“Did you drop a plant?” I asked them.
“We dropped the cake,” Jack said.
“That’s sweet,” Cameron said. “Your brother is so sweet. I dropped the cake.”
“Was it burned?” I asked. “It smells like something got burned.”
“The first one burned,” Cameron said. Then she started laughing again. “We kind of forgot about it, if you know what I mean.”
Jack turned red. I think I did too.
“So. Good-bye,” he said to me. He flicked the CD player back on. I clamped my hands over my ears again, and right away Cameron leaned over and turned it off.
“What’s that about?” she asked Jack.
“What?”
“Can’t your sister hang out with us?”
Jack and I both looked at her like she had four eyes and antennae.
“Now?” Jack asked.
“Um. Yeah,” Cameron said. I didn’t know what to do. On the one hand, I really wanted to hang out with Cameron. On the other hand, that meant hanging out with Jack.
“We don’t really hang out,” I said finally “Not since we were little kids.” She curled a strand of shiny blond hair behind her left ear and then kept her fingers on her earlobe.
“Seriously?” she asked. It was embarrassing. All of a sudden I felt like there was something really wrong with us. Maybe Jack felt that way too, because he started humming. Just like my father does when he’s tense. I guess Cameron heard a tune somewhere in there.
“Bid List?” Cameron asked him.
“Yeah,” he said, smiling. It was this smile I sort of knew but sort of didn’t. It reminded me of when he was a lot younger. “You know Bid List too?”
“I’m telling you,” Cameron said. She was finished fiddling with her ear. “You better get into UCLA. Everybody in California likes the music you like.”
“Nobody here has ever heard of it,” I told her.
“That’s what Jack says.”
“Yeah, well. He’s right.” He looked at me, and I looked at him. Cameron looked at both of us and went to work on her earlobe again. Her left one.
“You’re probably not as different from each other as you think you are,” she told us.
“We’re pretty different,” Jack said. What was that supposed to mean?
“I’m not sweet,” I told Cameron. “According to Jack, I’m small.”
“Sometimes,” he added.
She turned her back on us to start washing a cake pan at the sink.
“You guys even look alike,” she said. “Except for the hair.” We don’t look anything alike. He’s all dark skin and eyes and everything, and I’m orange and pale and blue.
“She’s crazy,” I told Jack.
“Hey,” he said. But he was joking. “Don’t call my girlfriend crazy.”
She splashed water at him from the sink. Some of it splattered me. “Your girlfriend?” she said. “I have a name, you know.”
“Yeah,” I said to Jack. “She’s got a name.”
“You’ve got to vacuum, for that,” Cameron told him. “I’ll clear off the counters and start a new cake.” She laughed again. “Third time’s a charm. Anna, you wash.”
So I swapped places with Came
ron, and she let Jack put the music back on, only not so loud, and we all sort of did our thing in silence. When Cameron poured fresh batter into the pan I’d just cleaned, she said, “So, what’s the deal?” She dipped a pink, pretty finger into the pan and then reached over to feed Jack, who had just stepped on the vacuum to turn it off. Oh my God. I looked out the window. I was not about to watch my brother lick cake batter off his girlfriend’s finger. Off Cameron Polk’s finger. “Do you guys hate each other or something?” she asked.
I waited awhile and then risked a glance at them. It seemed safe again. Jack was sitting on one of the counter stools, and Cameron was using the back of a spatula to spread batter evenly in the pan.
“Of course we don’t hate each other,” I said.
“You don’t?” Jack asked.
“Do you?” I asked him back.
“Are you two kidding me?” Cameron said.
“No,” we both said at the same time.
“It’s Ellen. Leave a message. If this is Anna, try back in five minutes.”
It’s totally good to hear her voice, even though it’s not live. I’m lying in my bed with my legs drawn up and one ankle resting across the other knee. It’s late, and all my shades are down, and the only light in the room is the quiet blue from my cell phone. Before I would have my glow-in-the-dark key chain hanging off my big toe, and I’d be gazing at the earth. But that was before. It’s lost now.
“Hi, Ellen. It’s Tuesday. Everybody’s totally psyched. They took that breathing tube out, which is a good thing. In a couple more days, after they’re sure your lung isn’t collapsed anymore, they’ll take out the chest tube. I haven’t been back to school yet. I’m bored out of my mind. Plus, I look like a cyborg with this shield thing I have to wear over my eye. Jack is freaked out. My father is being sort of nice and sort of not. After we went upstairs at Wayne’s, I got really drunk and then you got really drunk and we were playing pool and then we were late, and I drove us home, and they say she swerved to avoid a tree branch, and it happened really fast, and I think you passed out right away. Your parents don’t seem mad about the drinking. I told them not to be. You know it was Cameron, right? If they haven’t told you, or if you think you dreamed it or something, it was Cameron in the other car. She died, Ellen. Just so you know. Call me as soon as you get this.”
7
“YOUR BROTHER WAS REALLY GOOD,” LISA GOES AFTER SHE HUGS me, carefully, at my locker. The smell of shoes and hand lotion and the sound of locker doors slamming make me feel a little more normal than I’ve felt in a while. Maybe I’m not even shaking all that much.
“Thanks,” I say. Even though I was still just getting to know her as of the night of the party, I’m really glad to see her now.
Dr. Pluto checks me every day with the tonometer—the machine with the beautiful blue light. Last Friday he said everything looked good enough that I could go back to school. I have to wear the shield, though, and I have his note ordering teachers to let me leave classes early so I can walk in quiet halls and not get my eye whacked again by some joker tossing around his backpack or a Frisbee or whatever. I decide I’ll use the note just sometimes. When I’m in a boring class. Like history, for example.
Jack started back last Thursday. Friday there was an assembly in honor of Cameron. Her funeral will be in California, where she used to live and where her parents have already returned. People are saying they couldn’t stand to stay where she was killed. Killed.
Jack spoke at the assembly Friday. I only know that because my mother told me. Jack isn’t not speaking to me exactly. But when he does, it’s only for polite reasons. “Excuse me,” he said yesterday as we brushed by each other going in and out of the first-floor bathroom. “Excuse me”? We’d never said “Excuse me” to each other in our entire lives.
“That memorial link to Rosebud Is a Sled is an amazing idea,” Lisa tells me. Link? I don’t know what she’s talking about. I do know that Rosebud Is a Sled is Jack’s movie review Web site. He designed it last year, and once I heard him tell Rob he’d gotten more than three thousand hits. I guess that means people actually use it. “Can he really get it ready that fast?” Lisa’s asking me. “He said by next week.”
“Yeah.” I’m wondering how long I can get away with one-word responses before Lisa figures out that I don’t know what the hell she’s talking about.
“I’m not sure if I should post anything,” Lisa’s going. “I was thinking about it, except I didn’t really know her. Then again, maybe I should just do a sentence or something so they get the five dollars.” Five dollars? “Is Jack going to pick the charity the money goes to, or are Cameron’s parents going to do that?”
“I don’t know,” I say. How could he have done that already? How could he have thought of it and started it? “I think they’re still figuring it out.” How could the brother I saw less than a week ago on our front lawn-turned-psych ward have already spoken to the entire school and planned an entire link? An entire memorial Web site? I need to write a letter. I need to write Cameron’s family a letter. Screaming, stopped. My eyes throb. Both of them.
“Are they letting people visit Ellen?” Lisa’s asking me. Jason yanks at his lock across the hall, making sure it’s locked, and then heads our way.
“Just family. She can talk now, but she’s on serious drugs.” Her parents said I could see her the day before yesterday, but when I got to the hospital, the doctor was there and he vetoed me for some reason.
It was weird to see the Gersons in the hospital but not to see Ellen. What made it weirder was the way the waiting room was decorated. It was strung with orange and black streamers and cardboard cutouts of black cats and broom-riding witches and a white ghost with big, friendly dimples. Halloween. I’d forgotten it was almost Halloween. I must have looked right at home with my robot eye.
“Hey,” Jason goes, and he hugs me too. He has strong arms, and he holds on for more than a second. It feels good. “How are you?”
“Alive,” I start to say, but, mortified, I stop myself and mumble some nonword instead.
“Does your eye hurt?” Jason asks, looking at my shield.
“No.” I’m deciding right here and now that I won’t complain again, ever, about anything that hurts me. That just seems like the right thing to do. If Cameron can’t complain, why should I get to?
Everybody’s quiet, and I don’t like it. So I think of something to say. “Did you understand the math homework?” I ask Jason. He has precal fourth, and I have it fifth, but it’s the same teacher. At our school if you miss a day, it’s murder. I don’t know how Ellen’s going to catch up. I don’t know how I am either. It’s hard to read with just one eye.
“Not remotely,” Jason says.
“Seth has been really worried,” Lisa tells me.
Katy and Slater slide through the crowd of kids and walk over. Katy hugs me as if we’ve never stopped being friends. Is everybody going to hug me today?
“It’s really good to see you,” she goes. We nod in the halls this year, but we haven’t really spoken at all.
“Thanks,” I say. Her fingernails are polished black to match her lipstick, and she has a ring through her eyebrow. I’m nervous Lisa and Jason will think she and Slater are losers, which might make them think I’m a loser.
“That thing on your eye is excellent,” Katy tells me.
“Tell Ellen we say hi,” Slater adds. He’s completely bald except for an orange tuft at the top center.
“Okay.” I sort of just want them to go away, they’re so weird. “I definitely will.” They leave.
Lisa looks at me.
“Ellen and I were friends with them for a long time,” I explain. “Whatever.” And then I feel bad because I think Ellen will be happy they stopped me the way they did, and I’m not happy about it and I know that’s sort of mean, but I can’t help it.
“You know where that guy is going to be ten years from now?” Jason says. He means Slater.
“Who cares,”
Lisa goes.
“In a manly office, in a manly business suit, with a manly haircut, and a thing for men.”
“Slater?” I go. “You think he’s gay?”
“I do,” Jason says. I guess he should know, since he’s gay himself. According to Ellen, anyway.
“Do you think he’s cute?” It didn’t occur to me that anybody would actually look at Slater these days.
“Ech,” Lisa goes.
“He could be cute,” Jason says. He eyes Lisa. You can tell from his look that he doesn’t like how she’s being bitchy. “You just have to see underneath.”
I wonder for a second why I’m not worried what people think of Jason being gay, but maybe not everybody knows, and anyway, you can’t tell that Jason’s different just by looking at him, the way you can tell a mile away that Katy and Slater are complete outsiders. Besides, Jason doesn’t go around being the gay guy. He just goes around being Jason.
“So, why is Seth worried?” I ask Lisa, noticing that my shakes are back somehow.
“He gave out the alcohol,” Jason says. Lisa nods.
I cross my arms to try and hide the trembling. “But I wasn’t drunk.”
“Well, that’s good,” Jason goes. And he’s right. If I hadn’t been sober, all of this would be worse. A lot worse.
“Even if I was drunk, it wouldn’t be Seth’s fault.”
“I know,” Jason says, arching his left eyebrow. “But still. I’m glad nobody has to deal with that.” I’m glad too.
“He’s coming now,” Lisa says. “Stop talking about him.”
The hall’s emptied out a little. I think I heard the bell ring a second ago, but I wasn’t really paying attention.
“Hi,” Seth says. He looks right at Lisa. “I totally heard you.”
“It wasn’t your fault,” I tell him, while Lisa turns red. Seth looks sort of surprised. He glances at Jason.
“She wasn’t drunk,” Jason explains.
“Plus, they’re saying there was a cinder block in the middle of the road,” Lisa adds, recovering. “Right, Anna? Cameron was swerving to avoid it.”