by Rowe, Brian
Wesley re-arranged himself in his chair. “You don’t still have feelings for her, do you?”
“Of course not. I haven’t thought about her in forever. That girl was a total bitch. She had no sympathy for me. At all.”
Wesley nodded. “Yeah, I guess when you were going through all that you saw who your true friends were, didn’t you?”
“Yeah… you know, Wes… about that…”
“What?”
“I never properly thanked you… you know… for what you did for me.”
He took a sip of his latte and eyed me with anticipation for what I was to say next. “What did I do?”
“You know. That video you made for me. The photo montage. You didn’t exploit my disease. You easily could’ve…”
He shook his head and put his hand out to stop me. “Cam, if there’s anything four months at USC has taught me, it’s that to get ahead in life, you have to be merciless with others, including your friends. Last spring I was devastated by what happened to you. I really was. And I wasn’t about to turn in a video for my film class, or to you, that showed the horrors of your final days. That would’ve been too traumatic… at the time.”
“Yes, thank you,” I said. “I just think it showed a lot about your character—”
“But, you know… some time has passed now…”
I didn’t know where he was going with this. “What do you mean?”
“Well, I waited until I got to L.A… when I could really clear my head, you know?”
I shook my head. No, I don’t know.
“And then I looked at my footage again. You know, there was some great stuff in there.”
“Footage from what? When I was getting older?”
“Yeah, and enough time had passed that I was able to bring a fresh eye to the material, and to the kind of film I initially intended to make—”
I scooted my chair back. I couldn’t believe my ears. “What are you saying, Wes?”
He bit down on his tongue. “Cam, don’t freak out. I haven’t done anything yet. But I just wanted to see… you know… if I could get your permission to make the movie I originally intended to make… the story of those hellish two-and-a-half months.”
“What? I thought we were past this.”
“Plus, now there’s an ending.”
“What ending?” I was upset, to say the least. I didn’t realize how loud I was being until I eyed at least five customers behind Wesley staring at the two of us with obvious frustration.
He smiled. “You and Liesel floated up in the air at graduation for nearly thirty seconds. The two of you said it was a special effect, some kind of optical illusion with invisible wires…”
I stood up from my chair. At this moment I felt two things—one, that Los Angeles had completely robbed Wesley of any humanity he had left, and two, that I didn’t want to ever see him again. “I’m outta here.”
“Cam… hold on a sec…”
I stormed out of the coffee shop, and he followed close behind.
“Cam, don’t get mad.”
“Mad? Why would I be mad? My best friend has turned into an egomaniacal piece of shit. And you’ve only been in L.A. for four months! I shudder to think what you’ll be like four years from now…”
“I just want to know what happened, Cam. Something happened that night, didn’t it? At graduation?”
I unlocked my car door and jumped inside. I turned on the ignition and looked out the window.
Wesley stopped, calmly put on his sunglasses, and lightly tapped on the windshield. My face was red with anger but I decided to roll the window down. “What?”
“I’m sorry. I got carried away.”
“Yes, you did.” I tapped my fingers against the steering wheel. Unexpectedly I started to tear up. “Please… Wes. Please destroy that footage. I don’t want to ever see it. All I’ve been trying to do these last few months is forget what happened. If you bring it all back… I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to recover…”
Wesley removed his sunglasses. I could see in his eyes that the mind-numbing time in L.A. slowly turning him into a total douchebag finally started to erase itself from his face. “You’re right… you’re totally right.”
“Promise me you won’t do it.”
“I promise. I’m… I’m sorry. Forget I mentioned it.”
“OK.”
“OK.”
“Put it in the fire,” I said, “and just let it burn.”
---
The alcohol was flowing through the house, and not even my parents seemed to mind. The one nice thing about having younger parents, ones still in their early forties, is that they weren’t much sticklers about my consuming alcohol, especially around the holidays. And when they did strike up a fuss, I had to always remind them that I’d technically already turned twenty-one, and that it had been legal for me to drink for months now.
Liesel appeared before me in the downstairs family room area, as I exited the bathroom. Kimber stood up behind her. “Did you go number one or number two?”
“Number three,” I said, kissing Liesel on the cheek and peering down to see that they had been playing the board game Clue. “Was it Professor Plum or Miss Scarlett?”
“It was both,” Kimber said. “They’re in love.”
“That’s not how the game works,” a cracking voice said from the couch in the back of the room. Kimber’s new on-and-off boyfriend Tommy, who looked a bit like Wesley but with blond hair, tiptoed up to her before he started tickling her. I still couldn’t get over the bizarreness of seeing my little sister trade kisses with a member of the opposite sex.
“It is midnight yet?” I asked, pulling Liesel close to me. “I really, really want this year to be over.”
“Thirty more minutes.”
“You’re not gonna turn me into a mouse when the clock strikes twelve, are you?”
Tommy and especially Kimber gave me confused glances.
“I’ll try not to,” she said with an awkward smile before turning around. “What do you say, Kimber? Another round?”
“Nah, I’m bored. Come on, Tommy. Let’s go hang out in my room.”
I stopped the two lovebirds in their tracks, holding my right arm out like it was a gated fence. “No way in hell. You guys are staying where I can see you.”
But Kimber catapulted herself through my arm before I could stop her. “You’re one to talk, Cam. You just turned eighteen and you’re already getting married!”
I didn’t say anything back as Kimber pulled Tommy into her bedroom down the hall and slammed the door behind her.
I smiled at Liesel. “They’ll be fine.”
She nodded. “Sure they will.”
We made our way upstairs, where my parents were watching the countdown on one of the local news stations, drunk from a couple of bottles of white wine.
My mom shifted in her seat, petting our cockapoo Cinder on her lap, and smiled at the two of us. “You guys ready? It’s almost midnight.”
“More than you’ll ever know, Mom.”
My dad turned toward Liesel and me and furrowed his eyebrows, suggesting he was disgusted with the wine, the television program, or the two of us. “Hey you two.”
“Hey Dad.”
Liesel crossed her arms and took a few steps back. “I’m gonna use the bathroom,” she said and made her way down the hallway.
“I’ll just be here!” I shouted.
“Cameron, can I ask you a question?” my dad asked, pouring himself his umpteenth glass of wine. My mom stared at him with trepidation.
“What, Dad?”
“You know I love you, and you know I want you to be happy,” he said, drinking his wine more like he would a glass of water. “But come on… Cam… marriage?”
“Honey, let’s talk about this later,” my mom said, raising her voice, my dog jumping up on her lap like she could tell the mood around her was turning sour.
“I know you’ve been through a lot,” my dad continued. �
��I mean, we all have. But you’re barely eighteen. It’s a little premature, don’t you think?”
I just shook my head. I couldn’t believe my dad was talking to me this way minutes before New Year’s. Liesel and I had crashed a party an hour earlier at the house of a guy named Clark, but police broke it up before the clock struck eleven. Wesley alerted me to a party downtown, but Liesel and I decided to just trek back up to my place, a decision that I was at this moment regretting.
“Dad, it’s simple. I love her. And she loves me. And I’m not interested in wasting another ten years of my life trying to make myself believe there’s another girl out there for me. Remember. I’ve seen my entire life flash before my eyes. Life is short… fleeting. I don’t want to spend a single second of my time without Liesel.”
“You really love her, don’t you?” my mom asked.
“With all my heart. She saved my life, after all.”
My parents looked at me a little perplexed as I felt warm, inviting breath hit the back of my ear. “Cameron…” It was Liesel. She brought her hands to my arm.
“Yes?”
“You want to go outside?”
I turned around and tried to keep myself from kissing her right there in front of my parents. “I thought you’d never ask.”
She followed me out into the freezing cold—it was barely twenty degrees outside—but the air still somehow felt warmer than it had around the pessimistic parents, who still, after everything I’d been through last spring, would question something as important as my decision to get married. I didn’t care how young I was. I had made up my mind. This April, soon after Liesel’s nineteenth birthday, we were going to be named husband and wife. And there was nothing anybody could do to stop us.
The wind picked up and Liesel wrapped her arms around my waist. “Are you scared?”
I shook my head before kissing her on the cheek. “Never. I’m sorry to say, Ms. Maupin, that you’re gonna be stuck with me for a long time.”
“Soon it’ll be Mrs. Martin.”
I shrugged. “Sounds the same to me.”
We could hear a group of teenagers counting down in the distance. Ten, nine… I turned around and pulled Liesel close to me. Six, five… We stared into each others’ eyes and waited as the wind picked up even more. Two, one…
“Please don’t lift us up in the air,” I said.
“Believe it or not,” Liesel said, “this wind isn’t me.”
“Glad to hear it,” I whispered, before we started kissing, our arms wrapped around each other, the wind and the chill and the cheering fading around us.
After a minute, I looked down. Our feet were still planted on the gravel. “Yay for gravity,” I said.
“Shut up and kiss me,” Liesel said.
“Gladly.” I stared at her, our eyes just inches away. “Do you have any idea how great this coming year’s gonna be?”
“None whatsoever,” she said.
Our lips didn’t part ways for another twenty minutes.
---
January came and went, offering day after day of snow, as well as Kimber’s fourteenth birthday. We celebrated by going out to dinner, but then she met up with friends and her boyfriend Tommy for some bowling later that night. It was the first birthday Kimber celebrated not entirely with us. “She’s growing up,” my mom said. “She’s not our baby any longer,” my dad said. “She’s kissing boys now… doesn’t that gross you guys out?” I asked my parents, but they didn’t respond. They were still irked at me about the wedding, even though I guaranteed them that it wasn’t going to be a crowded, lavish affair.
My dad still seemed confused that he’d be the one paying for the wedding, as opposed to anyone on Liesel’s side. I’d been dating Liesel for eight months, and still, her family history was murky to me, no matter how much I tried to get Liesel to talk about her past. Her dad had died years ago, which I knew from the beginning, but it wasn’t until recently that I learned she had no idea where her mom lived, or if she was even alive. The only family she had in all of Reno was her uncle Dom, a man in his eighties with bad hearing and a heart condition; I had met him on only two occasions at Liesel’s dumpy apartment. No wonder the girl wants to marry me, I kept telling myself. I’m not the only one who wants to start a new life.
Liesel had almost no one, as if she had deliberately tried throughout high school to make herself invisible. Her only friends were from her waitressing job. She had next-to-no family. I was her shining light, and all I wanted to do was make her happy. But underneath all the joys of the time we spent together, there was always this feeling that there was something big Liesel wasn’t telling me. I was the one person who knew her big secret, but she still hadn’t really opened up about her childhood, or where she came from. If I was going to marry her, I wanted to know everything. But given her lack of communication about these kinds of things, I found myself pushing all my questions to the back of my mind for a later date.
That date turned out to be on a real date, on Valentine’s Day, when Liesel and I escaped to a small cabin in Lake Almanor, California, where we could spend a glorious weekend by ourselves, she away from her grandfather and waitressing job, me away from the questioning parents, maturing younger sister, and my internship with Faye Snider Architects, which had sucked up a lot of my time since I started working there (unpaid) the first week of January.
I found Liesel that morning sipping coffee at the kitchen table, going over the seating arrangement, yet again, for our April wedding.
“Do you think your mom would want the seat closest to the aisle, or your dad?” she asked.
I made my way over to the kitchen island and grabbed one of the maple scones we had brought along for the trip. “I don’t think it matters, does it? I mean, my dad won’t be walking me down the aisle.”
“Yeah, I guess you’re right. I just don’t want to offend any of your family with this seating arrangement. I want everything to be just right. I want everything to be perfect.”
“I know you do, honey.”
It had been unexpected, to say the least, to see how much Liesel had involved herself in the wedding preparations. In December I questioned if she was interested in getting married. Now I watched as she had become a mini wedding planner, constantly obsessing over every detail, from the perfect Reno church, to the dress, to the cake, to the seating arrangements. I was more than grateful that she had two girlfriends from Uncle Tony’s to bother with the details; I took part in some decisions, but for the most part, all I had to do was remind myself the day and time I had to show up in a tuxedo to kiss the beautiful bride. Saturday, April twenty-ninth. Three weeks after Liesel’s birthday. One week after Easter. Two days before the honeymoon I hoped my parents would pay for.
I sat down at the table and started scarfing down the scone, while Liesel, who still looked beautiful sans make-up, and with the frizziest red hair I’d ever seen, continued outlining the seating arrangements. We had sent out invitations to about eighty-five people a week and half ago, with only six of those invitations going to Liesel’s acquaintances, and the rest going to my family and high school friends. Obviously we couldn’t have one side of the church empty, so we decided to arrange it so that people could sit on either side.
Liesel appeared to be in a good mood on this Saturday morning, smiling as she continued with her work, so I thought it’d be a good time to start asking some pertinent questions. I decided to begin with a goofy one. “You don’t have me sitting down, right?”
“Ha-ha.” She bit down on her lower lip and sketched in some names of my parents’ friends in the sixth row back. Then, surprisingly, she put the pen down and turned to me. “You know, your mom’s been really great through all this, Cam. I know your dad’s had kind of a hard time with it. But your mom’s finally coming around. She just took me to try on some dresses the other day, and we had a lot of fun.”
I leaned over and kissed her on the mouth. She didn’t seem appreciative, considering I was still eating my
scrumptious scone.
I decided to let it rip. Here we go. “Speaking of moms…” She stared at me, not knowing where I was headed. “You know, Leese, you’ve never really told me about your mom. I know you never met your dad, but what memories do you have of your—”
“She’s dead,” Liesel said, abruptly. “She’s gone. Can we talk about something else, please?”
“Really? But I thought—”
“She’s dead, Cam.”
I could see she was holding something back. “What was your mom like?”
She scooted back and crossed her arms. She started banging her head lightly against the wood door behind her. “You really want to know?”
I nodded, trying not to laugh in frustration. “You’re going to be my wife, Liesel. I want to know everything about you, including your family.”
“My mom was… uhh… what can I say? She was OK, I guess. She had red hair like me. She had a fiery temper.”
And now the big question. “Was she…”
Liesel shook her head slowly. “Was she what?”
“You know. Did she have powers?”
Liesel grinned subtly before returning back to her seating arrangement, which I figured she’d be agonizing over for another hour, at least. “If she had powers like me, I don’t think I’d be sitting here talking to you right now.”
“What do you mean?”
“Just… I don’t know… things would be different.”
“How so?”
“CAM.” She shook her head fiercely and motioned for me to leave her alone. “I don’t want to talk about this.”
“But I do. I want to know everything.”
“You don’t have to know everything.”
“Yes I do! For Christ’s sake, Leese, I feel like I know nothing about you!”
I regretted saying it before the end of the sentence erupted from my mouth. But there was no going back.
I saw her pen drop out of the corner of my eye, and I half expected her to throw it at my face, using only the forces of her mind. That would really shut me up, I thought.
Liesel didn’t show a lot of emotion. She just stood up from the table and turned to leave the room. But then she stopped and stood still, like she wanted me to approach her, wrap my arms around her, and tell her I didn’t mean what I said. But I didn’t budge.