Soulprint (26 page)

Cameron unlocks the trailer door for us, though I'm sure we could've gotten inside in countless other ways. And the first thing I'm met with is the scent of cigarettes and sweat. Casey flicks a light switch, and a fluorescent rectangle on the ceiling buzzes to life. The carpeting is covered in muddy orange footprints. There's a desk with chairs on either side and a small table near a smaller refrigerator. I opt to stay outside. I wonder what my first foster home was like—if it was full of scents and dirt and the remainders of real people—or if it was more like my island. I can't remember. But I've seen the envelopes, the letters, that led to my removal from that place. I've read about the lives that June had ruined; I've felt their need for revenge. It wasn't safe for me out there, within reach. If they left me there and something happened, they'd be at fault. I see it now, the fine line of my imprisonment. That perhaps we are all victims of circumstance. Products of both chaos and fate.

There's a monitor on the desk, and Casey walks straight for it, seemingly unaffected by the odor.

“If you're going to stand out there,” Casey says, “at least keep an eye out for anyone coming.”

I turn around, my back to the room now lit by the unnatural white glow, and I stare out at the twilight. We're not in the mountains anymore, but possibly we're at the edge of them—the roads rose and dipped on our drive, the trees became denser the farther we got from the highway. Cameron and Casey talk behind me, but not to me, and I imagine myself disappearing—walking straight into the distance, nobody to stop me; or standing right here, fading to nothing. They'd look up, and I'd be gone.

I could do it, if I wanted. I've earned their trust, and I could run. It's becoming more and more clear that I will never shake her skin—that I will always be seen as June Calahan living inside the shell of Alina Chase to everyone else.

But not right here. Right here, when I look over my shoulder and Cameron catches my eye and smiles, when Casey barks a command in my direction—
listen for cars
—it's only to me.

The world is big, and we are small.

But maybe this is enough.

I'm lost in a daydream—me in a yard somewhere, standing like this, and laughter from the cabin behind me, and a deep voice calling my name—it's so real I can feel it taking shape inside me, and I know how dangerous this is, I know. How hope can spread, how it multiplies when you linger in it. How
it works its way into your life, before you remember that it's not real. How insidious hope can become if you let it.

I'm deep within this dream, so I must not hear Cameron the first time. Because his hand is suddenly on my shoulder and his voice is in my ear. “Alina,” he says, and the vision is gone, replaced by the sound of Casey's fingers typing on the keyboard, the floor that creaks below us, the smell of the cigarettes and sweat. “Check out the home sites with me?”

He doesn't grab my hand, but his passing body has the same effect, pulling me along.

We walk toward the half-built homes. One, with a door and green paper covering the roof and walls. One, just a foundation and the start of a wooden frame. The other two completely framed, but without windows, without drywall. I can see through the beams of the houses in sections—a hallway from this perspective, but step to the left and the wood lines up, and I can see into another room. Cameron steps through the doorway of the closest one onto the solid, wooden floor.

The whole place smells like sawdust, with the scent of something faintly burning.

“Do you smell that? Like a fire?” I ask.

“Left behind from a saw on wood, probably. The heat from the friction almost makes it burn,” he says.

The scent sets my heart on edge. Like the candles on my birthday cake—like something changing, a passage of time. It's been only five days, but it feels like a lifetime we've spent running.

Cameron heads down the hall, but I check out the rooms
off to the sides. Perfect squares, empty and exposed. The walls will go here and be painted, and the wood floor will be hidden. I can picture a couch here, against the wall, maybe blue. And a black-and-white picture hanging on the wall behind it. And me, sitting there with a book, legs crossed at the ankle … light footsteps down the hall, the sound of my mother humming before she comes into view …

I've got to stop this. This dreaming of possibilities that can never be.

I open my eyes, and the room is bare, the night visible through the slats of wood. And the footsteps are Cameron's hiking boots. “Hey,” he says, “I was worried you got lost.” He leans against the wooden beam at the entrance to this room, and there's nowhere to go but closer to him. Casey asked me to keep away, and it's the least I can do for her, but there's nowhere else to go. There's no other choice, and he's walking closer.

“This will work,” he says, looking around the space, and I'm trying to see what he sees. What version of this house he's talking about.

“Work for what?” I ask.

“For tonight.” He smiles, and he stands maybe three feet from me, keeping his voice low. “I know it's not completely protected or anything, but it's a shelter, and there's a computer nearby. Oh, and there's a ton of food in the minifridge back at the trailer, in case you missed it.”

“I did,” I say. “I missed it.” Stuck in my daydream instead of reality.

“Yeah, I thought so. Where were you back there?” He taps the side of my head.

I shake the thought away. “Just imagining things. Got lost for a minute.”

“Good things?” he asks.

I remember the voice I heard behind me, the deep voice from inside, and I fear he can see it all on my face. “Things that won't happen.”

He tilts his head to the side. “I hope you're wrong,” he says, but it's the word he uses, that he knows how unrealistic that is, too, but the room starts to shift on me, and I can see both at once. The empty room, the full one. Me at the center.

“Whoever lives here better realize how lucky they are,” I say.

He shakes his head. “A house doesn't make people lucky.”

“But the people in it,” I say, “the people you live with.”

He cringes and then gestures to me. “Some people never know their parents and wish they did.” His lower jaw shifts. “But some people do know their parents and wish they didn't. No house in the world would've changed that,” he says.

I wish, for a moment, that the world was simple and predictable. That a family meant safety and unconditional love, and all the things I read about in children's books.

This is my fear, too—the one I keep buried. That maybe the reason my mother does not speak out, does not fight, is because I no longer matter to her. That I am but a distant memory that resurfaces when she hears a crying baby, or reads an article in the paper, or realizes it's my birthday. That when she said I
could visit her in my dreams, in that song, that was her way of saying:
nowhere else
. That maybe she is scared of me, too.

“Do I scare you?” I ask.

“No. You surprise me, Alina,” he says, pulling me toward him effortlessly.

And that's the change I was sensing in the air, not the scent of something burning, but this. One moment I'm sinking, and then I'm floating. Like being in the ocean with him.

But I put my hands on his chest and push back. “I promised Casey,” I say. And then, when he frowns, “She's your sister.” That must count for something.

“She
is
my sister,” he says, but he's not backing away. “Not my dad, not my mom, and not in charge of me.” And then he adds, “Or you.”

He is the spell. He's the spell, not me, and I need to break it. “It's not the time,” I say, repeating Casey's words, because they make sense, they have logic and a purpose.

He looks around the empty house, and I know he's seeing a thing none of us will ever have. Not anymore. He leans his forehead against mine. “I'm scared,” he whispers, “that this is the
only
time.”

I hear Casey in the distance, the door to the trailer, and I know she's coming.

Cameron presses his lips quickly to my forehead.

I feel him slipping away, feel time doing the same.

“I hope it's not,” I say.

Imagination is not the same as a memory, and hope is not the same as reality, but still, I am filled with hope for everyone
in that moment. For my mother and father, for Cameron and Casey, for June's soul, and I guess for my own, too. I hope there's something more than what we were and what we've been. I hope that life surprises me.

So I change my mind and pull him toward me, and I'm the one to kiss him this time. I do it even though I hear Casey's feet just outside, and even though it's reckless and this isn't the time. I do it because I realize that life
did
surprise me, and it comes in the form of the guy in a ridiculous-looking basketball uniform in a half-built house. And it comes in the form of the girl walking down the hall, too. And it comes in the form of me, standing on my toes to reach him, and this moment I can steal, even here, even now.

I've pulled back from Cameron, but the moment must still be obvious on both our faces because Casey dumps a bag of food on the floor in the entrance to the room, drops her bag beside it, and says, “Wow, I'm so glad I just spent the last twenty minutes finding food for everyone and getting directions and checking the news. So glad to know you were doing something useful.”

He ignores her but grabs a can of soda and takes a bite out of a bagel that he's found in a brown paper bag. Casey is staring at me, obviously trying to catch my eye, but I keep my gaze focused on the food while I rifle through and decide what to eat. How can I explain to her that I don't have hope that there will be a right time, but that I want to? That I'm trying to create it out of absolutely nothing? That every choice is a betrayal to one side or the other?

I sit back against a wooden beam, next to Cameron, and I take a bite out of a slightly stale bagel.

A beam of light cuts through the night, and I drop the food, heart racing, ready to run. “Headlights,” Cameron says. We're hidden, but only partly. I press myself, stomach first, against the floor, and hear them doing the same. The car engine idles near the end of the road, the headlights still breaking up the dark.

“What are they doing?” Casey asks. But the beams shift as the wheels move over the gravel, driving away.

We wait in silence, flat against the floor, for a good ten minutes before rising. “Probably just someone checking out the home sites,” Cameron says. But he doesn't look at us when he says it. And neither of us responds.

We eat in silence, and then we rest against the wooden beams in silence. When at least another hour has passed since the car turned down this road, Cameron dusts his shorts off and says, “If anything happens while I'm gone, head down the road toward the highway, and I'll find you.”

“While you're
gone
?” Casey asks, and my food is stuck somewhere halfway down my esophagus.

“I need to get us a car,” he says.

“We'll all go. What would've happened at the school if you weren't back in time? If that car didn't leave? No. No way. We'll stay hidden while you get it,” Casey says.

“Seriously, it's a lot easier for one person to sneak around a neighborhood than three people.”

“And what if you get caught?” I ask. “What then? There's nobody to help you.”

“I won't get caught,” he says.

I'm on my feet now. “How can you say—”

“Have a little faith, Alina,” he says, but he smiles when he says it. “I'm good at what I do, remember?”

But he cannot possibly know all the different potential outcomes. What might happen between now and then. He cannot promise that he'll be okay. Oh, God, he has to be okay.

Casey has her arms folded across her chest, blocking the exit, which is ridiculous because he can just as easily slip between the wooden beams all around us. “Casey, I'll be okay. I'm coming back.”

She nods, like she's trying not to cry.

He turns to me, puts my face in his hands. “I'm coming back,” he says to me, too. And I feel it, those words, a promise down to my soul.

Casey gives me her best attempt at the cold shoulder, but it's obviously not something she does a lot, because she could use some more practice. She's cleaning up the wrappers and cans, and I'm helping her carry the leftover food back to the trailer when I say, “I do care about him.”

“Right,” she says.

“I do, Casey, and I'm not asking you to understand, but I want you to know that it's true. I won't turn on him, won't turn him in, nothing. If I'm taken, I won't tell them anything.” She keeps walking, pushing the door open with her hip. “For you, either,” I say.

“You expect me to trust you after you held me hostage? After I asked you to stay away from Cameron and you didn't?”

“I don't expect you to, just like I don't expect you to understand—”

She laughs, and it sounds cold and mean. “You're just a kid, Alina. A kid who doesn't think about anything but herself. A kid with absolutely no responsibility, who hasn't had to make tough decisions …”

She dumps everything into the trash container outside the trailer and folds her arms across her chest.

“I went!” I say. “That was a choice. You think that was so easy? To leave everything I've ever known?” The way I ache for the island, sometimes I think it's a sickness, but other times I think it's the most natural thing in the world. It belonged to me, I belonged to it—I knew my place there. I was treated kindly, if distantly. I was cared for, though not cared about. I had safety there. I could've stayed another year, rolled the dice to see what eighteen got me. I could've waited it out and crossed my fingers, but I didn't. I took the risk, with people I didn't know, with a plan I didn't understand. I took a leap.