It should be noted that Camden Cole was officially the worst storyteller in the history of storytelling because, while it took him a solid five minutes for him to tell me all that, his version of nonsense events only left me with more questions than answers.
“You bought a hundred worms from Old Man Lewis?”
He nodded. “Oh, and a Coke. But I drank that before I met you. I’d have brought you one if I knew you were here. Next time though.” He pointed a finger at me and clucked the side of his mouth.
I blinked at him too many times to count. This kid was not working with a full box of rocks. “Um…why?”
He shrugged. “I don’t know. I guess to be nice. Why? You want a Sprite instead?”
Even annoyed, I was in no position to turn down a free soda. “No, Coke is great. But why would you buy worms just to sell them back to Mr. Leonard?”
He had the audacity to look at me like I was the idiot. “Uh, because the bait shop sells ’em for ten cents apiece and Mr. Leonard is paying twenty.”
My head snapped back so fast it was a wonder it didn’t fly off my neck.
He swirled his finger in front of my shocked face and smirked. “Oh yeah. You’re following me now.”
And I was. Because good Lord, that was brilliant. Turned out, I was the one who wasn’t working with a full box of rocks. Freaking Camden Cole was a genius, and I didn’t know why but it seriously annoyed me.
I stood up and glared down at him with my hands planted on my hips. “You can’t buy worms from the bait shop. Mr. Leonard will lose his mind if he finds out he’s fishing with cursed Lewis bait.”
“How’s he going to find out? You said you weren’t a tattletale.”
“I’m not! But…” I trailed off, knowing that what he was doing was wrong but not quite able to formulate a response through my absolute jealousy that I hadn’t thought of it first.
“But nothing,” he said, rising to his full height. He glanced over his shoulder up at Mr. Leonard’s house, and then lowered his voice. “Look, he’s not going to find out. Nobody knows me in Clovert, so I told the guy at the bait shop my name was Cam and I just moved to town. I made up a whole story about fishing with my brothers and told them we needed a lot of worms. It wasn’t a total lie.” He paused and looked up at the sky, deep in contemplation. “Okay, not true. It was mostly a lie. A little white one. I don’t have any siblings. But I did some asking around at church and Mr. Leonard has a lot of brothers and five sons, who each have at least one more son, who each have, like, four kids who all like to fish, which equals…” He lifted his hand to start counting off on his fingers only to give up when he reached ten. “A lot of people, okay? And none of them are allowed to use the bait shop anymore. So over coffee this morning—”
“You had coffee with Mr. Leonard?” I asked rudely, which I was learning was the only tone I had when it came to Camden Cole.
He scoffed. “No. He had coffee and I helped myself to the hard candies from his wife’s crystal bowl.” He paused. “By the way, I still have a few of those left in my backpack if you want one. But warning, only the nasty butterscotch are left.”
Drats. Butterscotch was my favorite, but I feared, if he got distracted with getting me candy from his bag during this story, I’d never find out what the heck he was talking about.
“Thanks. I’m good.”
He shrugged. “So anyway, I asked Mr. Leonard his limit. He said around five hundred a week because whatever his family didn’t use he was going to set up shop down by his driveway and sell them to Lewis’s customers, even if he had to take a loss.”
Wow. Otis Leonard was a savage.
Camden continued. “I’ll buy ’em for ten bucks. Sell ’em to him for twenty, and I’ll show up here every day, pretend I’m collecting ’em, and get to avoid my grandpa for eight hours. Win. Win.”
Okay, so maybe he wasn’t the worst storyteller after all. That covered the majority of my questions, but not the majority of my jealousy.
“He’s never going to believe you find a hundred worms every day.”
“I know, which is why it’s good that he hired you too. The two of us could easily get fifty worms in a day. All I ask is that you give me half back so I can buy more worms.”
I once again clamped my mouth shut. Math was not my strong suit, but I was no dummy, either. If he was buying ten dollars a day in worms, that would have left ten dollars in profit. And he was going to split that with me? A girl he didn’t know, who yelled at him a lot. Guaranteeing me five dollars a day? Twenty-five dollars a week?
One hundred dollars a month?
All without having to touch one single worm?
“Why would you do that?” I asked suspiciously. “You didn’t even have to tell me, ya know? You could have just turned in your fifty worms every day and made five dollars. I’d have been clueless.”
The frustration faded from his boyish face. “And let the other five dollars go to waste?”
“Sure. Why not? You don’t know me.”
He turned his gaze to the ground, his nearly constant smile slipping away with the uncomfortable shuffle of his feet. “I might know you better than you think, Nora.”
A wave of unease skated down my back. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
He shook his head and looked back up. “I know you don’t like hunting worms. I saw you gagging as I walked up yesterday. I know you’re the kind of person who returns ten bucks even when they need the money. And while I don’t know if you would have included me in your plans if you’d thought of it first, I believe maybe once we became friends you would have.”
I wouldn’t have. I would have been scared that he would have told on me and that I would have gotten in trouble and lost my job no matter how much I hated it.
I looked down at my muddy sneakers, doing anything to escape the guilt churning in my gut. Outside of Ramsey and Thea, I didn’t get a lot of sweet in my life. And coming from a friendly boy with pretty blue eyes, who had absolutely no reason to give it to me after the way I’d treated him, the weight of that guilt became suffocating.
“But above and beyond that,” he said, “I thought it might be nice to have someone out here with me every day. Like a partner in crime or something. This could be our little secret, but if you’re not interested—”
My head popped up. “I’m interested.”
“Yeah?” The way he smiled slow and shy, like I’d given him a gift, only made my guilt multiply.
“Yeah. It’d be a win-win for me too if I got to spend the day away from my house. My dad screams a lot. I might have gotten it from him.”
His eyes flashed wide, and for a blink, I swear his face paled. He quickly covered it with a grin. “Soooo, what are we gonna do today?”
“I don’t know. What do you want to do?”
“Slapjack?” he suggested, holding his hands out in front of him, palms up.
“Oh please. Don’t make me embarrass you.”
He laughed, loud and rich. “Okay then. I brought some books and stuff to draw with. I almost brought my radio, but the batteries are dead.”
“What kind of batteries?”
“C. But I need, like, eight of them and those things cost a fortune.”
“I’ll bring some tomorrow. I’ve got a whole case. They randomly gave them to my dad at his last job.” Truthfully, Dad had stolen them from his job stocking at the grocery. The drunk dumbass thought they were double As he could use for his remote control. Not surprisingly, he was fired the next day.
I’d always been a crappy liar, so my cheeks heated, no doubt turning my face a lovely shade of neon pink. I didn’t have many friends because it was easier to avoid getting close to people than looking them in the eye and lying about my life. However, at five dollars a day, it looked like Camden and I were stuck together—lies and all.
“No!” He spun around so fast he tripped, stumbling over his own feet.
I barely jumped out of his way in time to keep from getting plowe
d over. “Jesus, Cam!”
He righted himself and stared at me with wild eyes. “You don’t have to ask your dad. It’s no big deal. I'll buy some next week.”
Okay, seriously, Camden was weird.
I rolled my eyes. “My dad doesn’t care. They’ve been sitting in our garage for, like, a year. Do you have any idea how useless C batteries are? They don’t work for anything. Except apparently your radio.”
“Okay,” he said, but it wasn’t a question or a statement. It was more like two syllables he’d left hanging in the air to fill the space between us.
“Ohh-kay,” I replied, glancing around for any possible escape from the awkwardness. “Anyway. We could go for a swim. We’re already soaked and there’s a deep part down by the tree stump that—”
And that was all I got out before The Flash himself ran past me in a blur, calling over his shoulder, “Last one in is a rotten egg!”
Never one to turn down a challenge, I took off after him.
He beat me to the water, but he didn’t brag or gloat. Which was probably the only reason I didn’t dunk him the first chance I got.
We spent the rest of the afternoon splashing around and getting to know each other. I made good on my promise and didn’t at yell him anymore. It wasn’t too hard though, because once I gave him a chance, Freaking Camden Cole was actually super nice.
We talked about Alberton. He agreed it stunk, but we argued on whether it was more of a dead animal stench or dirty socks. He made the trek up to his bag not once, but twice to get me a butterscotch. I hadn’t asked him either time. And I filled him in on the people in Clovert. Mainly, who to talk to and who to avoid.
He listened patiently and never took his eyes off me, which was a tad uncomfortable at times, but for the most part, we got along like cheese and apple pie—an odd combination, but somehow, it worked.
When the bright afternoon sun started its descent, Camden sprinted from the water just as quickly as he’d entered it. His grandparents were strict about dinner time, so he needed to get home ASAP to get his chores done first.
I’d spent a lot of time alone in my life, avoiding my dad, hiding from people who might be able to see through my façade. However, that day, as I watched Camden running through the tall grass, carrying his bucket and his backpack while water streamed from his cutoffs, I could honestly say I was really looking forward to having some company for a change.
Without any place to be, I took my time making my way back to our dirt beach. I walked straight to my bucket, and as a young girl who had been wronged by people she loved too many times, a part of me expected to find it empty. He could have easily taken them when I hadn’t been looking and cashed them all in himself. In my experience, when things sounded too good to be true, they usually were.
But not with Camden.
Never with Camden.
Not only was my bucket filled with worms, but there was the ten-dollar bill, wrapped around the handle. Written in black marker across the top of the bill, it read: This is yours. Fair and square.
“Hey,” he said, lurching to his feet when I arrived at the creek.
I shrugged off my tattered backpack and dropped it at my feet. “You’re here early.”
“Yeah. I wasn’t sure what time you came in the mornings, so I left straight after breakfast. I would have been here earlier, but the bait shop doesn’t open until seven.”
“Seven? Jeez, do your grandparents always make you get up that early?”
He shook his head. “They didn’t make me get up. I just thought if you were here, I wanted to be here too.”
My whole body locked up tight. It could be said that I wasn’t the best at understanding or processing feelings, at least not the good ones. Outside of Ramsey and Thea, I didn’t have a lot of experience with that kind of stuff. So I couldn’t be completely sure what happened inside my body in that second. But whatever it was, it made a lump form in my throat.
“I usually get here about nine,” I mumbled.
He nodded without saying anything else and I suddenly feared he knew about the lump in my throat too.
“Nice shorts,” I blurted.
He looked at the blue shorts covered in what I thought were supposed to be cartoon sharks, but the pattern on the fabric had been cut in all the wrong places, making it look like a shark massacre. “All right, all right. Don’t give me crap about these. My grandma made ’em and I was already in the doghouse after… Well…” He cut his gaze over my shoulder. “I didn’t tell them where I was going the other night. I’ve been picking up dog poop in the yard ever since, so no way was I risking more trouble by complaining about these.”
I ignored the urge to ask him where he’d gone and chewed on my bottom lip to stifle a laugh. “You have a dog?”
“Grandma does. It’s a mean little shit that bit me while I was sleeping once.”
“Maybe you were snoring?”
“Maybe it was bred from the devil himself.” He dove toward me, clinking his teeth like he was pretending to bite.
I jumped away laughing and not the kind of laugh I used when I needed to prove to Ramsey that I was okay or give adults a show so they didn’t ask too many questions.
This was real. And genuine. And so incredibly terrifying that I abruptly stopped and just stared at him.
“What?” he said, glancing over his shoulder. “What’s wrong?”
There was nothing wrong. In that second, at the creek, laughing with a kid who had shown up at the crack of dawn just to hang out with me, there was absolutely nothing wrong for the first time in quite possibly my entire life and it made the lump in my throat swell to the size of a watermelon.
The sweetest concern colored his face as he took a step toward me. “Nora, what’s going on? You okay?”
I backed away and desperately tried to compose myself, but my voice came out as a croak as I replied, “It’s just the shorts. They’re really ugly.”
He blew out a loud breath and then barked a laugh. “Jesus. You scared me. I thought you were having another heat stroke or something.”
Nope. Not a stroke, but something was happening inside my body and the jury was still out on whether it was a good something or a bad something.
He bent over and grabbed his bag. “Well, if you can forget about my shorts long enough to hang out, I snagged you some bug spray. I’m not sure if it works on beetles, but it should keep the rest of the ear monsters away.” He exaggerated a shiver and then shot me a smile.
Oh, God, he’d brought me bug spray.
The lump in my throat morphed into a ball of fire, stinging my eyes and my nose as I took the spray bottle from his hand. I’d never even thought to buy myself bug spray.
But Camden had.
“Thanks,” I whispered, not trusting my voice.
He rocked onto his toes and then back down to his heels. “No prob.”
I drew in a deep breath, holding it until my lungs ached, and tried to get myself together. This was ridiculous. It was just bug spray.
“You got the worms?” I asked.
“You know it. Hey, look what else I did.” Grabbing my forearm, he dragged me after him, talking a mile a minute as if he’d been saving each and every one of those syllables for me since seven a.m. “So, last night, I was thinking if we always turn in exactly a hundred worms, Mr. Leonard might get suspicious. So, each day, we need to take him a few less and sometimes a few extras. Mix it up. It will equal the same each week but not the same every day. But we gotta have somewhere to keep them on the days we give him less or we’ll be out the money.” He stopped beside an old oak tree and swung his arms out to the side. “Tada!”
Twisting my lips, I glanced around, trying to figure out what was so amazing about this particular tree. It wasn’t even one of the big ones, and if I was being honest, it was kind of crooked too. “It’s a tree. I don’t get it.”
“Oh, right.” He jumped into action. Bending over, he sank his fingers into the dirt and came up with the li
d of a plastic container about the size of a shoe box. “Worm storage.” Full of excitement, he bounced his gaze from me to the container he’d buried in the ground. “Pretty cool, huh? I talked to my dad on the phone last night and he said worms can live for weeks as long as you keep them somewhere dark and cool. So I tossed in some dirt, poked holes in the lid, and boom—Stewart and Cole Worm Farm is in business.”
I openly gaped at him.
Holy smokes, this kid had thought of everything. I probably would have just tossed out a few worms every day. No, wait, I wouldn’t even have thought about turning in the same number every day and would have gotten myself fired by the end of the week.
I’d been wrong. Camden Cole wasn’t a genius.
He was the genius who taught the other geniuses.
He was next-level genius, and at the moment, he was my business partner. And it had not escaped me how he’d put my last name first in our company.
But most of all, I was starting to feel like he might be my friend.
Cue the lump in my throat again.
And the something-good-or-something-bad pain in my chest.
And this time, add all the flutters in my stomach.
I had no idea how to react to any of those things. For as little experience as I had in the feelings department, I had infinitely less in the boy department. With Camden’s blue eyes and bright smile homed in on me, waiting for all the praise he rightly deserved, there was only one thing left to do.
I gave him a titty twister and took off like a Gold medalist, straight for the creek.
“Last one in!” I yelled, stripping my clothes off to reveal my purple tankini as I ran.
“Hey, that hurt, you cheater!” He laughed, hot on my heels, rubbing his pec.
As I was toeing my shoes off, he did a cannonball, beating me into the water once again.
But it was okay.
While he was underwater, I took a second to compartmentalize all the feelings screaming inside my mind. It was a trick I’d learned shortly after my mother left. Everything had a nice, neat drawer in my head, hidden out of my thoughts so I didn’t have to deal with any them until I was ready. Sometimes, late at night, I’d plunder through those drawers—considering and contemplating. But for the most part, I’d sealed them shut, never to be visited again.
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