Story of a Girl (14 page)
And if I ever met the girl on the waves, this is what
she
would tell
me:
Sometimes rescue comes to you.
It just shows up, and you do nothing.
Maybe you deserve it, maybe you don’t.
But be ready, when it comes,
to decide if you will take the outstretched hand
and let it pull you ashore.
Somehow I talked Darren into giving me a ride on the first day of school. I needed someone with me at least on the drive over because there was a good chance I’d be on my own once I got there, maybe for the whole school year.
Part of me was ready for that.
Part of me wanted to barf.
We rolled by the same old Pacifica houses we’d passed every day for years: some with cars on lawns and mildewed paint jobs, some with carefully landscaped front yards and cheerful garden gnomes. I remembered what Michael had said about why he stayed here. Not me, I thought. I’m getting out. Someday.
Darren pulled up to Terra Nova. I looked sideways, for a second, toward my and Lee’s old meeting spot on the lawn. I didn’t see her. Everything in me sank. “Keep going,” I said. “Don’t stop.”
Darren didn’t move. “Deanna.”
“Screw it. I’m cutting.”
“You’re not cutting the first day of school,” he said. “I have to get to work.”
“Then drop me on the corner or something, I don’t care.”
“She’s there.”
“No, she isn’t.”
“Yes,” Darren said, “she is.” He pointed and I looked again. Lee stood under the tree in the shade, setting her backpack down on the lawn. She looked up and saw us. I closed my eyes for about three seconds so that I wouldn’t have to see her walk away. When I opened them, she was still there. And now Jason stood beside her.
“That’s her, right?” Darren asked.
I nodded, unable to speak.
“Hey,” he said.
I turned to him.
He was a man, strong and responsible and full of whatever it is that makes a person want to do the right things in life. Then he was just my brother again, and lifted his hands off the wheel like he wanted to touch me or something, only to let them fall back, saying, “You were right. We can be different from him.”
I grabbed my backpack and got out, looking back at him to show that after everything, I could still smile. He pulled away and I stood still for a minute.
Lee gave a little half wave and I started across the lawn, the longest walk of my life.
“Hey,” I said when I finally got to them.
“Hi.” Lee didn’t exactly smile, but she didn’t look like she hated me, either.
Jason mostly looked uncomfortable, hands in his pockets like usual. He caught my eye and said, “Ready for junior year?”
I let my breath out for the first time since getting out of the car and shook my head no.
Lee picked up her backpack. “Okay then,” she said. “Let’s go.”
Mom: For teaching me to love books and stories by reading to us every night, and doing the accents.
Comrades: In my terminally flaky but obscenely talented writing group in SLC for being my best teachers, and at the Glen Workshop for reminding me I’m not alone. Special thanks to Ray Garton and Louis Greenstein for pushing me out of the nest.
The Kevin Avery section: For being there from the first word, Saturday mornings at the library, and the many years of friendship.
When things got desperate: The Utah Arts Council for prize and grant money, FPC for flexible work hours, and Lew Hancock.
The pros: My editor, Jennifer Hunt, for her warmth and wisdom, and everyone at Little, Brown who made this all so easy. Michael Bourret, for being my dream agent and understanding Deanna (and me) from the beginning.
But not least: My husband, Gordon Hultberg, for never doubting, never failing to encourage, and always being on my side.
Sara Zarr was raised in San Francisco, California, and now lives with her husband in Salt Lake City, Utah. She is the author of
The Lucy Variations
,
How to Save a Life
,
What We Lost
,
Sweethearts
, and the National Book Award finalist
Story of a Girl
. Her website is
www.sarazarr.com
.
The Lucy Variations
How to Save a Life
What We Lost
Sweethearts
Coming December 2013:
Two acclaimed authors join forces for a novel about growing up, leaving home, and getting that one fateful e-mail that assigns your college roommate.
Don’t miss
Roomies
by Sara Zarr and Tara Altebrando!
Keep reading for sneak peeks from
Sweethearts
and her upcoming novel
The Lucy Variations.
October 18, 1998, 3:30 p.m.
A DRIPPING FAUCET.
Crumbs and a pink stain on the counter.
Half of a skin-black banana that smells as old as it looks.
If I look at these things and at nothing else, concentrate on them and stay still, and don’t make any noise, this will be over soon and I can go home without Cameron’s dad ever knowing I’m here.
He is yelling.
About how Cameron is always late coming home from school. About the lizard cage needing to be cleaned and how he knew he should never have let Cameron have a pet because this is what happens — children forget and stop caring and expect their parents to take care of everything and, well, how would Cameron like it if he came home from school one day and the whole family had moved and not told him because they were tired of taking care of him, the way Cameron was tired of taking care of the lizard?
I think we’ll do that,
he says.
Maybe tomorrow. Maybe in a week or a month. You won’t know until you come home from school and find the empty house. How would you like that?
I’m not supposed to be at Cameron’s house or anyone’s house. Not without my mother’s specific permission. But Cameron made me something for my birthday. He told me at school that it was too big to bring so he’d left it at home. I haven’t seen it yet. Maybe he baked me a cake. The idea of cake makes me think about my lunch box and the two chocolate chip cookies I saved, and the Milky Way bar I stole from the 7-Eleven on my way to school this morning by slipping it up my coat sleeve while the cashier reached to get cigarettes for someone. I could share it with Cameron; maybe even put a candle in it. If he didn’t bake a cake.
Leaves fall in front of the window over the kitchen sink. In a few weeks it will be Halloween. Thinking about what my costume could be helps me put Cameron’s father’s voice out of my head. The costume can’t cost money because we don’t have any. It can’t be hard to make because there’s only my mom and she has work and nursing school and doesn’t get to spend very much time at home. It can’t be anything from Harry Potter because Jordana Bennett and Charity Hays backed me against the wall in the girls’ room and told me they decided that certain people could be Harry Potter characters and if anyone else, for instance me, showed up in a Harry Potter costume they would make them walk naked across the school yard at recess.
You know what I think? I think this lizard wants to go free. If you’re not going to take care of it, it’ll have a better chance out in the wild. Or if you’re going to neglect it and let it die, why not just put it out of its misery now? Why wait?
I try not to imagine what Cameron’s dad is doing but pictures come into my head anyway, like the lizard being dangled by the tail or squeezed in two big hands.
A fly lands on the banana, stopping and starting in short bursts, and I make my mind go somewhere else again, to the kids I sometimes watch playing red light/green light at school. I’ve never played it myself, and they don’t invite me no matter how long I stand just a few feet away wishing hard that one of them will. My mom says that if I want friends I have to smile and be friendly, even though we both know things would be a lot easier if we were Mormon like practically everyone else at my school. Anyway, who should I smile at if no one will look at me? Cameron looks at me. He’s the only one who thinks I’m worth knowing.
Maybe I should get my coat and my lunch box off the living room couch and slip out before Cameron’s dad notices me. Cam can give me the present later. I move as silently and slowly as I can, staring down at the pink sneakers we got from the secondhand store before school started. That’s where we got my lunch box, too, which Jordana says is for babies. When I asked Mom if I could bring my lunch in a paper bag like everyone else, she said it was wasteful and more expensive in the long run.
The front door is just ten steps in front of me now. I pick up my coat and lunch box carefully, carefully, but the zipper of my coat brushes against the lunch box and makes a noise that to me is the loudest ever. No one comes, though, and I make it to the door. The knob is cool and I’m already thinking about my cookies and my Milky Way and how they’ll keep me company on the walk home, when I hear the voice of Cameron’s father behind me.
Where do you think you’re going?
CHAPTER 1
SOME MEMORIES ARE SLIPPERY.
There are things I want to remember about Cameron Quick that I can’t entirely, like the pajamas he wore when he used to sleep over, and his favorite cereal, or how it felt to hold his hand as we walked home from school in third grade. I want to remember exactly how we became friends in the first place, a definite starting line that I can visit again and again. He’s a story I want to know from page one.
My brain doesn’t seem to work that way. Most specific things about Cameron are fuzzy — the day we met, how we got so close, exact words we said to each other. There are only moments, snapshots, pieces of the puzzle. Once in a while I feel them right in my hand, real as the present, but usually it’s more like I’m grasping for vapor. I understand that you can never have the whole picture; inevitably, there’s stuff you don’t know, can’t know. But when it comes to Cameron I always want more than I have, would like to be able to take hold of at least one or two more pieces, if only because I’m convinced there are parts of myself hidden inside them.
Other memories stick, no matter how much you wish they wouldn’t. They’re like a song you hate but can’t ever get completely out of your head, and this song becomes the background noise of your entire life, snippets of lyrics and lines of music floating up and then receding, a crazy kind of tide that never stops.
The memory of my ninth birthday is that way. Sometimes it’s in pieces. Sometimes it’s an endless loop, from start to finish. But it’s always there.
I do have more memories of Cameron, things I know for sure, good and bad. Like:
The time we both got pulled out of class during the lice check and the whole rest of the year other kids called us the Cootie Twins.
The way he always got in trouble with our second-grade teacher, Mr. Duke, for not paying attention, for not sitting still, for having chronically untied shoes.
How us being together all the time made us a bigger target, the whole of our exile being greater than the sum of our outcast parts. How we didn’t care because we had each other.
The three days Cameron didn’t speak — to me or anyone else — after he missed a Tuesday of school and came back with his wrist in a cast. He still walked home with me, still sat next to me on the outside bench at lunch, a cheese sandwich in his good hand and between us the free cartons of milk we both got because of being low income. But he didn’t say a word the rest of the week. I’d ask him questions and he’d shake his head no, or nod yes, or just look at me with big eyes. When we saw each other again on Monday, he acted like everything was normal.
I remember that Cameron made me feel special, protected and watched over, loved. If Matt Bradshaw came around at recess to call me fat and smelly, Cameron would fight him, usually ending up in the principal’s office. When Jordana imitated my lisp or called me Fattifer, he stole her lunch and threw it away. One snowy day that my mom didn’t get the laundry out of the apartment dryer in time I ended up walking to school in sneakers and no socks. Cameron took off his and gave them to me to wear. They were still warm from his feet.
And there was the ring.
Right before the summer between second and third grade I was in the back of my mom’s brown Geo Prism, which was parked in front of the ugly building where we rented a one-bedroom apartment. Mom had gone inside to trade her Village Inn uniform for her nursing school scrubs before taking me to the babysitter. I remember that I had a library book about possums and I liked the way they walked on mossy logs and peered out from holes in trees and how their paws looked like little human hands. I tried saying it without a lisp.
Possum,
I whispered, putting my tongue behind my teeth the way I’d learned in speech therapy.
Mossy possum paws.
I’d be ready next time Jordana pointed to Sam Simpson and said, “Who’s that, Fattifer? I can’t remember his name.” She made me nervous, and it came out
Tham Thimthon
no matter how much I’d practice at home.
I didn’t want to think about Jordana, so I opened my lunch box where I knew there was a plastic bag half full of crackers that I’d taken from a first-grader’s lunch when she wasn’t looking. Stealing food was a bad habit, more of a compulsion really, and not only did I want a snack but also I needed to destroy the evidence, a process I enjoyed: holding the crackers in my mouth and feeling the hard, salty crunchiness dissolve into a slightly sweet mush. When I reached in my lunch box to get them, I found a small white cardboard box that I knew for a fact had not been there at lunch.
I slipped the lid off the box and lifted up a small square of cotton to see a ring with a silvery band and sparkly blue stone. Underneath the ring was a piece of paper that had been folded, folded, folded, and folded again to fit the box. I opened it. It was a drawing of a house with a fence around it, and a tree. Pencil-line rays from a round sun beamed down on two stick figures holding hands. Beneath the picture in a messy second-grade scrawl, it read:
