It’s the golden hour now. The sun looks like melted sugar. Irises grow more layers. Purple mountain majesties.
When I get to the base of the cliff, I lean my bike against an aspen. My legs burn as I take the first few steps up the steep, dry path. Powdery red dirt covers my heavy boots.
By the time I reach the top, sun is coming down in rays so thick you could grab them by the fistful. They filter through naked branches, scattering shadows across the plateaus.
Cameron sits on the edge, feet dangling into the abyss. He does not look any particular way. His back is stiff, unnaturally so, and he stares into the unknown space below, the hood of his winter jacket folded over his forehead. It drowns him.
I imagine, just for a second, how it would feel to be with him.
Cameron would do it differently. It would still hurt. But he wouldn’t say, Hey, you should probably go; my parents will be back soon. He’d be shaky. Nervous. And afterwards, he’d wrap his arms around you and kiss your forehead and you would lie there until you weren’t out of breath anymore. Cameron knows how to watch. Because of this, I imagine he’s much different than Jason from Ohio, or Jimmy Kessler, or even Zap. Cameron would look at you like a painting he doesn’t want to understand: He would study each brushstroke. He would see something embarrassed, something raw and cracked and fragile, and he would trace these things with artist’s hands.
Cameron will never watch me this way. I don’t want that. But it’s funny, to suddenly be able to picture this, knowing someone so minimally. It’s tangible.
“Hey,” I say.
Cameron is barely visible behind the curtain of his hood. One hand is clenched inside a pocket.
I ease down next to him, swinging my feet in time with his. My boots hit the underside of the cliff, and a few pebbles chase one another over the edge.
“Hey,” he answers.
“I saw you that night,” I say. “Before and after. I saw you come back without her.”
“Please go,” he says.
“You followed her to the park. You staggered back. You looked drunk. You threw up in the bushes in front of the Hansens’ house. Remember?”
He’s crying now. Tears fall fast, but he doesn’t move otherwise, not a muscle.
“Want to know something?” I say.
“Sure.”
“I wanted her dead.”
“That’s a pretty terrible thing to say.”
“I know. So I didn’t tell anyone what I saw.”
“You don’t owe me anything,” Cameron says.
“Not you,” I say. “Her. I came here for her. Anyway, we’re not all that different, you and me. Wanna know something else?”
“Sure.”
“You can only see fifty-nine percent of the moon from the earth’s surface. No matter where you go, in the entire world, you’ll only ever see the same face. That fifty-nine percent.”
“Why are you telling me this?”
“I’m just saying. We know this fact, but it doesn’t stop us from staring.”
The night I got home from that grisly scene at Zap’s house—I don’t want to—I stood in front of my own bathroom mirror. Studied myself, in my ripped-up concert T-shirt, with jeans that cut too tight across my bulging hips and skin that puffed out like the head of a cupcake. It was a searing hatred. A whole and incapacitating contempt for the very cells that made me up, for the way those cells replicated without my permission, how bones grew without my knowledge and skin acquiesced, folding over them in this intolerable manner.
I took a safety pin from Ma’s sewing kit in the linen closet. I lifted my shirt and poked my ribs 815 times, not hard enough to draw blood but enough to leave a connect-the-dots across each flabby rib, a poem in braille I would never learn how to read.
This can’t be it, I thought. This can’t be love.
This rotten love was stuck to my skin, humid, dewy. That night in the bathroom, I could not fathom the possibility of peeling it off, allowing new, pink skin to breathe. So for years I wore it like a cloak, this decaying love. An excuse.
Now, on the cliff, I find there are no excuses to be made.
Cameron pulls a small object from his pocket.
The thing looks out of place in Cameron’s palm. It’s a tiny girl made of porcelain, lying on her side against his reddened lifelines. A ballerina. I would recognize the figurine anywhere. It has the most unrealistic face and this awful smile—the kind of smile you know is a cover for something else.
“Where did you get that?” I ask. “Did you take it from the Thorntons’ house?”
“What?”
“That ballerina. It belonged to the baby Lucinda and I used to watch. Ollie Thornton.”
When I go to touch it, to examine the figurine, he lifts the hand that isn’t holding the ballerina. It rests, palm up, on a rock wedged between our two bodies.
His pointer finger is laced lazily through the trigger of a small black handgun.
I’ve never seen a gun before. It occurs to me that we are children.
Cameron
The ballerina figurine belonged to Ollie Thornton.
As February fifteenth came pouring over Cameron—the last time he would ever live his Collection of Statue Nights—he wished he could stop the wave of memory, the lost chunk of time he’d spent the last three days reluctantly trying to retrieve.
As he remembered February fifteenth, Cameron allowed himself to think only of Hum. Lucinda would be sitting on the edge of the bed. The sheets would be white and crisp. She would tuck her hair behind her ear with one of those thin, gorgeous hands. Cameron’s favorite hands in the world. Outside, the birds would whistle their welcome.
Finally, he imagined Lucinda would say. She would smile. A ghost. Sublime. You’re home.
The day she died, Lucinda left her diary on top of the drinking fountain in the art hallway.
The purple suede book sat on the cool, vibrating metal. When Cameron found it, he felt both ecstatic and horribly average. Ecstatic because it was the key to her, and average because he knew he would not open it. The diary belonged to Lucinda and only her; he would not take that away.
Most everyone had left school, except a few teachers who graded quizzes in empty classrooms. A group of girls rounded the corner and faded out of sight—they laughed like girls, shrill voices echoing off linoleum and trophy cases.
Two nights earlier, Lucinda had seen him in the yard and raised one slender hand in solidarity. For over a year, Cameron had watched, a presence that didn’t partake in her existence. Steadfast observer, devoted spectator. But the diary would change this—she’d left it on purpose. Cameron was sure. She was raising her hand to him. This time, she was beckoning him in.
He slipped the diary into his backpack and walked home like usual.
“Well, don’t you look happy,” Mom said that night, smiling at Cameron, curious but wary. She’d cooked dinner from a sealed bag, one of those pasta packets you emptied into boiling water. “Any particular reason?”
Cameron couldn’t tell her how it felt to be loved back.
It felt like a seed in a pot.
It felt like the right shade of yellow.
The last stroke of paint on an exquisite masterpiece.
By nine fifteen that night, Lucinda had curled in the fetal position on her bed, spine facing Cameron. He clenched the diary tight in his hand. He hadn’t opened it, of course. He wouldn’t betray her.
Lucinda’s family watched television in the living room—Lex was sprawled on the floor with a bowl of ice cream. The house was dim.
He had practiced what he would say when her mother answered the door. Is Lucinda home? I have something of hers. Lucinda would pad barefoot down the stairs and she would lean on the doorframe. They would be two people facing one another in shaky, unpredictable conversation.
Cameron hated the thought. He wanted to leave her like this, perfect on top of the blankets, with a sheet of glass between them. Cameron clutched the diary to his stomach, think
ing that he loved Lucinda most when she was just far away enough to exist tenderly, unaware of her audience. He loved Lucinda most on these quiet Statue Nights.
Tonight was different. Lucinda unspooled her limbs. Stepped gingerly from her bed. She put on her winter coat (yellow, like a down comforter), and walked to the window.
She cranked the window open, peering out at Cameron with green almond eyes. Pulled out the screen and slid one leg through. She breathed heavily—from fifty feet away, it could have been crying or panting. She climbed from the bedroom window onto the roof of the porch. Wrung her hands. Gathered her nerves. Jumped.
Lucinda landed on the frozen ground with a delicate thud, feet away from Cameron. Up close, she looked different. Much older than fifteen. She walked much older than fifteen, with a showgirl swing in her hips.
He could have reached out. He could have touched her. He could have said, Come be with me.
But Lucinda glided across the lawn and through the back gate, inching it carefully shut behind her. Cameron counted, as slowly as he could, blowing on his hands for warmth. Sixty-three. Sixty-four. She was not turning around; she was not coming back to him.
He followed.
Cameron tracked her all the way down the block: a fairy under the occasional streetlamp. The glow of her cell phone light blue in her hands.
Lucinda wore her favorite skirt with a pair of sparkling black-and-silver tights. The skirt was purple—the one from school-picture day. Golden hair trailed down her back, a swaying sheet that danced with Cameron. He followed her until they reached the elementary-school playground.
Cameron stopped at the edge of the playground, but Lucinda kept walking: to the far back fence, near the Thorntons’ yard. She gazed up. She had stopped beneath the big oak tree where Cameron stood on Tuesdays, watching Lucinda rock baby Ollie to sleep.
Cameron lingered by the tennis courts, clasping the diary, as Lucinda reached up to the lowest branch of the tree.
Wind chimes.
The wind chimes Cameron had accidentally hit—they tinkled through the brisk night. This time, with purpose.
A back door slid open, then closed. A figure tiptoed out of the light. Cameron tried to sink deep into himself, to become a Statue. He’d never been so mortified. Those wind chimes.
Cameron would remember this moment as proof: Lucinda turned around, looked back at him in the shadows. Direct eye contact. That searing, alpine gaze. Bear witness, she seemed to say.
A grown man was hopping over the Thorntons’ fence, was meeting Lucinda under the wild oak, was taking her by the hips and drawing her close and brushing her hair out of her face with fat adult hands, he was kissing Lucinda on the mouth in the moonlight, and the wind chimes were singing their aluminum praise.
Mr. Thornton. He wore a wool coat, unzipped. Shiny shoes. A button-down shirt with no tie, the first few buttons undone to reveal a spouting of chest hair. Mr. Thornton was kissing Lucinda on the mouth, pressing his forehead against hers, and wrapping father hands around Lucinda’s shark-fin hips.
And with him: the limping little dog. Mr. Thornton clicked off its leash and the dog—happy to be outside and free—sniffed lethargically around the trunk of the wind-chime tree. Mr. Thornton zapped the extendable rope up into the leash like a tape measure, holding the big square of blue plastic by the handle. This was Mr. Thornton’s ten o’clock walk—Cameron had always gone home when Mr. Thornton brought the dog outside, afraid of sharing his nighttime space.
Cameron stayed behind the tree. The bark ran up and down the tree in patterns he could have molded with his hands—faces that glared, faces that judged, and some that watched, unsurprised, as Lucinda kissed Mr. Thornton back.
They whispered things Cameron could not hear. It occurred to him how you could watch people all their lives. You could watch them sing along to music, but you’d never hear what song. You could watch them drink cups of tea before bed, but you’d never know that bitterness on their tongue. You could watch them talk on the phone, but they could be in love with the person on the other end of the line. Sight was useful, and also beautiful—but it was not necessarily truth. The truth was a rock lodged deep in Cameron’s gut, and before he could turn around, before he could leave her diary on the ground next to the tennis courts for the cold to freeze over, Lucinda and Mr. Thornton started to yell.
Cameron only caught the loudest words.
“You wouldn’t,” Mr. Thornton was saying. “I know you wouldn’t.”
It happened in one instant, so trivial and seemingly unimportant that Cameron would not understand how, already, death had appeared.
Mr. Thornton was digging his man fingers hard into Lucinda’s shoulders. She was yanking herself away, Mr. Thornton was reaching for her, she was stumbling backwards, taking quick steps across the lawn. She turned around and ran toward the playground, and Mr. Thornton ran after her.
He caught up with Lucinda at the carousel. In one swift blow, his arm, heavy with that sorry little dog’s leash—a flash of sharp blue plastic tucked in his palm—cracked against the side of her head.
A small scream as she fell. Quickly silenced.
Cameron wanted to yell out. No: He wanted Lucinda to call for him. To acknowledge that she knew Cameron was there, that he was watching, had always watched. That Cameron loved her and he would help. But Lucinda only lay on her stomach on the carousel, the back of her skirt flipped up with the force of the fall.
It did not look like death at all. Mr. Thornton was kneeling in his suit, shaking her, begging, but she was limp. Gone. Minutes passed, and Mr. Thornton sprinted, panicked, back to the fence, where the dog sniffed calmly around the bushes, and then into his house. The faces in the tree grimaced at Cameron as the scene swirled around him—chaos, midnight, matted gold hair.
Cameron stood in the shadows with the diary, as Lucinda lay with her head turned grotesquely sideways. For the first time in his life, Cameron had what he wished for: he was invisible.
Miraculously, the snow. The sky’s kindest form of mourning. Cameron let the flakes land and rest on his hands, his neck. He begged them not to melt.
When he could no longer feel his skin, when the snow had given his entire body a coat of fur and his jacket was soaked through, when his mouth was filled with the snot that had run from his nose, Cameron dared to move again. To leave her. It was not Lucinda, lying with her eyes open on the carousel: just a girl in a bleeding blanket of white.
As he walked away, he heard the click, then slam of a door. The night janitor. Cameron’s only friend in the world. From his angle by the door, the night janitor would not see Lucinda until he crossed the parking lot in the morning, at the end of his shift. So Cameron took up his usual spot on the street—tonight, he was Tangled, so he did not nod. The janitor shrugged, as always. Raised his palms to the sky, like Yes, yes, I know it’s cruel.
Cameron left him to the discovery.
Now, on the cliff, with Jade staring terrified at the gun by his side, Cameron remembered flashes of the rest of that night: the floor of Dad’s closet with Lucinda’s diary tucked, damp and sacred, between his shirt and his belt. He remembered making terrible slashes with charcoal. Realism is made up of what you see, Mr. O always said, and Cameron had hated him for this.
So with his legs dangling over a brutal formation of rocks, Cameron remembered the side of Lucinda’s face, and he hated Mr. Thornton’s massive hands, foreign and unexpected all over her. He was sad, he was so sad, because Lucinda was not alive and she was not loving him. She was not loving anyone—but she especially was not loving Cameron. He didn’t know which devastated him more: that Lucinda was gone, or that she was gone and the reason had nothing to do with him.
Jade
Ma once told me I have a heart made of stone. I’ve never forgotten this. Often, I imagine my heart sitting heavy in my chest, a rock sunk to the bottom of a muddy lake.
Cameron lifts the small black handgun, and I have the brief, stupid thought that this will save me. You ca
n’t hurt someone made of minerals.
I have no idea what just happened. But I sense it, clear and electric: danger. I am in danger.
Cameron’s head is thrown back on his neck like the beginning of a laugh. He fiddles with the gun, hands in his lap, bitten nails traversing the barrel, the magazine, the trigger. The gun is small, less than five inches long, but it looks massive in Cameron’s hands. The air smells like iron. Urine.
The wind picks up, and my hair snaps across my shoulders. At the sudden motion, Cameron sits straight again. Laces his finger through the trigger.
What do you want? I try to ask myself, because I think it might be over. I want to see New York. I want to write something like lava, like gravity. There are things beyond the border of Broomsville, and I want to know how they taste. Somewhere, there is a person who will stand with me under the bathroom fluorescents, and when they say I want you, they will mean it. I want to be unafraid of death, but my heart is not made of stone, it’s made of the same thing as everyone else’s. I want to be unafraid of memory.
For the first time, my future is manifest, material—hovering just feet away from me, in the hands of a boy who barely understands he holds it. I could reach out and touch it.
“Mr. Thornton,” Cameron says. “I remember. It was Mr. Thornton.”
I first saw the ballerina on Eve Thornton’s dresser. It always looked out of place—the thing is too delicate to look natural anywhere in the Thorntons’ house, which is still packed in boxes from their move two years ago.
For a short period—maybe a month—they moved the figurine to the table next to Ollie’s crib. This was around the time Eve got really sick: she spent days locked in the bedroom with curtains drawn, leaving me or Lucinda with the baby.
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