“Don’t you ever get sick of yourself?” he sneers. “Sick of being Miss Perfect all the time? Perfect grades? ‘Oh, I got the only A in the class on the French exam.’ Perfect flute solos? Perfect pirouettes in your perfect ballets?”
I blink back tears.
“I’m not Miss Perfect.”
I’m not anywhere near perfect. The New Yorker didn’t think my poems were perfect. Ms. Archer didn’t think my review was perfect. The two agents didn’t think my novel was perfect. The essay contest judges didn’t think my essay was perfect.
Right this minute I don’t even want to be perfect. I just want to have my big brother back again.
I try again over the lump in my throat. “Hunter, why are you so mean to me all the time?”
What I want to say is, I still love you, Hunter. Why don’t you still love me?
“Give it up, Autumn,” Hunter says. “Just get up, walk away, and don’t come back.”
How could I have thought, one second ago, that I loved him, this brother who is looking at me with icy eyes and sneering mouth? What did I ever do to him that he treats me like his worst enemy, mocking me and my poems, and refusing to let me into his life anymore in even the teensiest, most minimally friendly way? I’m not the reason he got grounded.
“I hate you, Hunter.” My voice is trembling. “I’m glad you can’t play at our dance, and I hope you fail out of school, and Mom and Dad kick you out, and you end up hungry and homeless with no one to bring you any tray of food again, ever.”
I follow Hunter’s nasty instructions and get up off the floor, ready to walk out on him and never return. But before I do, I say the one thing that never in a million years would I have dreamed I could say.
“I wish you were dead.”
24
I’m not really in the mood for going to the dance now, but Kylee and I go anyway.
The dance has a theme: Beach Party. The wearing of tropical-inspired outfits has been encouraged, but Kylee and I are both just wearing short black dresses (but not the kind of short black dresses that would make our dads send us back upstairs to change). When Kylee and I show our IDs and get our hands stamped at the gym door, I can see that only half a dozen boys are wearing Hawaiian shirts and the rest are in ordinary T-shirts and jeans. The only evidence I can see of the dance theme in the girls’ attire is that a few girls have flowers in their hair. One of them (the one with the longest, thickest, most flower-worthy hair) is Olivia, of course. The rumor that Ryan Metcalf asked her to the dance turns out to be true.
To further the beach theme, surfboards are propped up against the gym walls next to travel agency posters advertising vacations in Aruba and Tahiti. Beach towels are spread out over part of the floor, with a few seashells scattered here and there.
Even as I take in the decorations and the outfits, the things I really care about are (1) whether Cameron is there and (2) whether Paradox is playing without their drummer.
The answer to the first question is: I don’t see him. But that doesn’t mean anything. It’s fairly dark in the gym, and there are a lot of seventh and eighth graders crowded around the still completely empty dance floor.
The answer to the second question is: Some band is playing right now and it’s definitely Paradox. I would recognize David Miller’s throaty voice anywhere. I don’t hear a drum.
It’s hard to be heard over the sound of the music, but Kylee follows me when I lead the way to the corner of the gym near where the band has set up.
I see David, lead guitar and vocals; Timber, backup guitar and vocals; Moonbeam on bass; and an empty spot where Hunter’s drums should be. Paradox must not have found a sub on such short notice. Or—the thought occurs to me—maybe Hunter didn’t tell them he was grounded? Maybe, up until the last possible minute, he thought Dad might relent and let him play? I think Mom thought that might happen, too.
Despite all those hateful things I told Hunter two hours ago, I suddenly feel so terrible for my brother I can hardly stand it. It’s too awful for him to finally have a real paid gig at a real dance—with at least a hundred people there—and not be able to sit on his drummer’s throne, in his glory. If he didn’t tell the rest of the band, if he just didn’t show, maybe they’ll kick him out, and he won’t even be a band member anymore. After weeks of nonstop rejection, I know better than anyone how it feels when a dream dies. I couldn’t wish that on anyone, not even on Hunter.
Kylee and I find Brianna by the refreshment table with a couple of other girls we know. It already looks as if this dance may repeat the sixth-grade dance, with Kylee and me huddled by the refreshment table all night, despite my promises to her that it would be different this time.
The food looks great, though. Some of the middle school supermoms went all out on killer snacks. There’s a huge fruit display spilling from hollowed-out pineapples, punch with kiwi slices floating on top, a mountain of cheese cubes surrounded by a sea of crackers (the cheese made tropical by a few little paper umbrellas stuck here and there for effect), and a coconut-frosted cake.
“Nobody’s dancing,” I mouth to Brianna.
“It’s too early,” Brianna mouths back.
Maybe this means there is still time for Cameron to appear. But a quarter of an hour later, I still don’t see him. I’ve eaten two pieces of cake, downed three paper cups of punch, and added a paper umbrella to my hair. No one has asked either Kylee or me to dance, though Brianna is now chatting with a boy from our multicultural history class named Todd, and Jack from science class, who has glasses as big as Isabelle’s, is looking her way. Except for the lack of a popcorn-throwing, punch-tossing melee, this definitely feels like the sixth-grade dance all over again.
Mr. Cupertino, my science teacher, who is also the student council adviser, comes over to the microphone set up near the band. He’s decked out in a loud-patterned red, orange, and blue Hawaiian shirt, khaki shorts, and flip-flops, with a flower lei hung around his neck. I’ve noticed that middle school teachers take school spirit stuff more seriously than the students do. He gives a signal to the band to stop playing.
“Good evening, Southern Peaks seventh and eighth graders!” he booms into the mike. “Who’s ready for a beach party?”
The question suggests he realizes that the beach party proper has yet to begin.
The crowd gives a good-natured whoop in reply, mainly to humor him. Mr. Cupertino is a good teacher, fair and encouraging, and he did make a special effort to dress up as a beach-party host. I forgot to say that he also covered his nose with that thick white sunblock paste lifeguards wear. The applause of the dance attendees, I think, is chiefly for Mr. Cupertino’s nose.
“The band is going to take a short break to rearrange a few things. Before they do, let’s give a big hand for Paradox!”
The applause is louder this time. A lot of kids think it’s cool to have a real band instead of a DJ. It makes it seem more like a real dance. Of course, at a real dance you’d expect more people to be dancing. And you’d expect a real band to have a drummer.
“And, beach partiers,” Mr. Cupertino continues, “when the band returns, let’s show them how fast we can fill up a dance floor, shall we?” He must be reading my mind. “To get the beach ball rolling, I’m going to announce boys-ask-girls dances and girls-ask-boys ones, at least for the next few numbers. So go grab some cake and punch”—he’s clearly not talking to me and Kylee, who so far have done nothing tonight but grab cake and punch—“and get ready to warm up those dancing feet!”
With the band on break, we can actually talk.
“Do you see Cameron anywhere?” I ask Kylee.
“No,” she says. “Do you see Henry Dubin?”
“No,” I say.
Cameron is too cool to come. Henry isn’t cool enough. Kylee and I are smack-dab in the middle zone of coolness, which right now is an awkward place to be.
“What’s happening with the band?” Kylee asks.
I whirl around toward Paradox to see what she’s
talking about, when who should I see coming through the gym door that leads out to the parking lot but Cameron.
He’s carrying a large drum in a drum case.
Behind him, carrying two smaller drums, is Hunter.
25
I feel so relieved that Dad relented—Hunter’s really only missed about a half hour of the dance so far, the half hour when nobody was even dancing yet—that I almost follow Cameron and Hunter back outside to help drag in the rest of the drums. Maybe there would be some romantic moment when I’d go to pick up an especially heavy one and Cameron would say, Let me do it. Maybe one drum would be too heavy for either one of us to carry alone, so the two of us would hoist it together, and our fingers might touch accidentally on purpose.
Instead I just stay with Kylee and eat another piece of coconut cake. I know this makes it sound like I have food issues, when I really don’t. Except, apparently, at dances. Especially dances where my grounded brother has miraculously been ungrounded, and the boy I’m in love with has finally shown up. I try to catch Hunter’s eye, but he’s busy tinkering with the drums. For a moment I think maybe he sees me, but if he does, he looks away so fast I wonder if he somehow wants me not to know he’s there, as if I could possibly miss seeing him.
I make it a point not to look at the band anymore. In fact, I make it a point to leave the gym altogether and go to the restroom to comb my hair in the mirror very, very slowly. And remove three pieces of pineapple from the braces on my front teeth.
By the time I get back, the band is playing a fast, throbbing eighties song, with Hunter’s drums adding a pounding beat. This is really a dance now. I can see Kylee dancing, not with Henry Dubin, but with Tyler from journalism, who said my review of the band was hilarious.
I approve.
I don’t see Cameron among the dancers, for which I’m glad. I don’t want him dancing with anyone but me. But then I worry I don’t see him anywhere. Please, please, please don’t make it that he came to help the band set up and left already!
I return to my post by the coconut cake, where I do not have a fourth slice, because that would cross the line from understandable stress eating to flat-out-disgusting piggery, plus I do not want any other food morsels stuck in my braces. I take a paper cup half full of punch and pretend to sip from it, to have something to do with my hands.
As I take another fake sip, Cameron appears beside me. I didn’t see him approaching. His ability to materialize out of nowhere only adds to his mystique and awesomeness.
I wait for him to speak first.
“Hey,” he says.
“Hey,” I say in reply.
We both stand watching the dancers. Now I’m glad the music is so loud. It’s pleasant to have a ready-made excuse not to try to talk.
Too soon, the song ends. Most of the dancers leap apart, as if terrified by the possibility that they might be stuck together twice in a row. Not Kylee and Tyler, though. He says something to her, and Kylee laughs. Cameron is still standing next to me, gazing out at the dance floor with a vacant kind of stare. Maybe he’s writing a haiku in his head. Maybe he’s thinking of another rock formation he wants to create.
Mr. Cupertino comes to the mike again.
“Gentlemen, you’ve had your turn. Ladies, go to it!”
If only Mr. Cupertino had announced the girls’ choice first, while I was in the bathroom! It would have been perfect to have a boys’ choice happen now, with Cameron standing two feet away from me.
Should I ask him to dance?
I could.
No, I couldn’t.
The band starts to play, and it’s a slow dance. At first I don’t recognize the song—after all, I only did hear it once before in my life—but then Cameron’s brother begins to sing the first lines: “‘I tell myself that I don’t care … But I do. I tell myself that it’s just me. But it’s you.’”
Cameron’s song. My song. Our song.
My fantasy is coming true in every single detail. Except for one. Oh, Mr. Cupertino, why couldn’t you have had this be the boys’ choice? Why? Why? Why?
Then—OMG—yes, yes, yes, YES—Cameron looks over at me and jerks his head toward the dance floor. The head jerk has to mean that he’s asking me to dance. I must have some kind of psychic power I never realized, to will into being whatever I want most in the world.
Cameron doesn’t even care that this is a girls’ choice. Of course he doesn’t care. He’s Cameron. He doesn’t follow rules, especially trivial rules about who should be doing the inviting for the next dance.
Miraculously, I have the presence of mind to reach behind me and drop my empty punch cup in the overflowing trash can.
Cameron leads the way to the dance floor.
I tell myself that it’s just me. But it’s you …
I wait for him to put his arms around me. Not the boy’s-left-hand-around-the-girl’s-waist and the girl’s-right-hand-on-the-boy’s-left-shoulder thing we learned in a doomed ballroom dancing unit in elementary school P.E. At real dances—and this dance is feeling realer by the minute—the boy puts both of his hands around her waist, holding her close to him, and she puts both of her arms around his shoulders. That’s what all the couples around us are doing, swaying in time to the music.
Instead, in the middle of the dance floor, Cameron starts to do a totally bizarre set of motions that look sort of like tai chi, or some new kind of Asian martial art never before seen in the West.
Am I supposed to imitate him? Is that what a dance partner should do?
I try bending my left arm and raising my right arm to copy Cameron’s pose, but no sooner do I accomplish that than he strikes a new one, with both hands clasped over his head like a genie coming in or out of a bottle.
There is no way I’m willing to do Uncorked Genie in front of half of the Southern Peaks middle school student body. People are definitely looking over at us. The couple next to us, wrapped around each other in the normal kid way, have cracked up laughing. Besides, maybe Cameron doesn’t even want me to copy him. Cameron himself never copies anyone, though right this moment I desperately wish he would. He might even be irritated if I turned this into an extremely awkward version of Cameron Says. Cameron says: Move your left hand in a long, floaty way in front of your eyes. Cameron says: Twirl around slowly with your eyes closed. If he’s even conscious of my existence at this moment, which seems increasingly doubtful, he probably expects me to come up with my own thing.
But my thing would have been slow-dancing with him the way every other couple except us is doing.
I have no choice but to think of something to do as the song continues to play. I try sort of swaying in place, shifting my weight from one foot to another and leaning first to one side, then to the other. I make myself attempt a couple of swirling motions with my arms, as if I’m waving a veil from side to side or doing a very slow version of the “Peace Like a River” and “Love Like an Ocean” motions from Vacation Bible School. Finally, after what feels like an hour but has probably only been three hideous minutes, the music ends.
I can’t bring myself to thank Cameron for the “dance.” But I have to say something about his song, the song that’s so beautiful, the song that sums up everything I think—I thought?—is so amazing about him as a writer and as a person.
“I love that song,” I say. And I did use to love it. “How long did it take you to write?”
And did you write it about me?
He stares at me, utterly mystified.
“Your song,” I say again. “I love your song.”
Comprehension dawns on his face. “That’s not my song,” he says. “Hunter wrote that one.”
Hunter wrote that?
“Oh,” I say.
Just when I think my Cameron fantasies can’t be any more thoroughly doused, I see Olivia slowly pulling apart from the arms of hunky Ryan. She’s looking right at us, and trying not to laugh. Well, maybe I’m being overly charitable to assume she’s trying not to laugh, because if that’s
what she’s trying to do, she’s failing. I can’t say that she’s mean to laugh, because I would have totally laughed if our positions had been reversed and she had been the one out there doing Vacation Bible School moves while Cameron was blissed out in his private Cameron world. I mean, who wouldn’t?
Now that his dance trance is over, Cameron apparently notices Olivia’s fit of giggles and the wide-eyed stares of half a dozen other couples who are still gazing at us. He gives a strange smile and the same slow wave he gave to Kylee and me when he saw us watching him make the rock sculpture, a wave that manages to convey total indifference to his audience, total disregard for the mirror. And yet—suddenly I see something I never saw before—it’s a wave that also says, See how cool I am that I don’t even care what you think?
So it’s not that Cameron really doesn’t care what other people think. He cares that other people think he doesn’t care what they think. Seeming not to care about what other people think can be the biggest act of all, in its own way. And totally un-fun for the person who happens to be cast as his partner.
Which tonight would be me.
I flee from the dance floor so fast that I collide with Kylee and Tyler, who are exiting the dance floor, too, hand in hand.
Kylee takes one look at me.
Here’s what a good friend she is.
“I have to go to the restroom,” she tells Tyler as Mr. Cupertino heads back to the microphone. She gives Tyler a big, regretful smile, lets go of his hand, and half pulls, half drags me into the hall.
“What happened?”
I can’t believe she doesn’t know. “You didn’t see?”
“No. The last I saw, you were heading off to dance with Cameron, and I was so excited and happy for you.”
At least if Kylee didn’t see, most likely Hunter didn’t see either. Only Olivia and twenty—or thirty or forty—other people saw. But that look on Olivia’s face, the look she gave me when she finally managed to stop laughing, is going to haunt me for the rest of my days: Olivia felt sorry for me. I felt sorry for myself.
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