The End of the World (9 page)

I give a little laugh before I can stop it. Help. The concept is as sad as it is hilarious. No one helps. No one ever helps me. I tell him as much.

“If I thought it would work, I would say something.” I shrug at his frown because there’s nothing else to say. Life is what it is, and mine isn’t going to get better any time soon. “When my parent’s died, no one wanted me. For four years after that I lived in a home for discarded kids because still no one wanted me. Now, I have a place to live, and I’m not going back. I’d rather be treated badly here than to go back there.”

His mouth hangs slack. “Shaye, you can’t—”

“Swear you won’t say anything, or I won’t trust you anymore. It only happened that one time.” I give my own hard glare right back at him. When he blinks, I figure the explosion isn’t quite over.

“I don’t like it. Not at all.” Cameron tunnels a hand through his hair and looks into the empty air before turning his focus toward me. “If I see him so much as lay a hand on you…”

“He won’t. Just trust me. That’s all I’m asking.”

I turn and walk away, thankful to put distance between me and his scrutinizing gaze. For possibly the first time since I moved in, I’m glad to be heading back to the house. Back to peanut butter sandwiches and oscillating fans and crying babies.

Maybe Cameron follows me. Maybe he doesn’t.

I don’t turn around to notice.

Cameron

I
’ve been at
this school exactly twenty-eight days, four hours, and seventeen minutes if you don’t count weekends, and if you add up all those seconds and minutes and hours and multiply them by three—that’s approximately the number of insults I’ve heard about Shaye since my first day here. I’m not sure if she’s being targeted for something she’s actually done or for just an awful misconception made up by some very hateful classmates, but she’s being bullied worse than everyone else combined.

I hate this place and most of the people in it.

I turn around and shoot a glare in the direction of the latest offender—a redheaded Molly Ringwald knock-off named Abby who sits behind me in advanced algebra and might be considered pretty if she didn’t have such a vile tongue—hoping to scare her. When she just laughs at me, I decide words are in order.

“Are you always so hateful or is it just a part-time hobby?”

“Shut up, Cameron. No one asked for your opinion.” Smiling at the girl sitting next to her, Abby picks up a swirly pink pencil and chews on the eraser, then pulls it out of her mouth. A long string of saliva is attached to both ends, making my stomach curl. Even her mannerisms are gross. “Everyone knows Shaye’s a slut, even if she’s your sister,” she says, doing a little quote thing with her fingers. A big part of me wants to chop them off at the knuckles, especially when I see the beginnings of yet another evil smile. “Who knows, maybe you have first-hand knowledge. After all, you do live together. Maybe that’s why you’re always so defensive of her.”

Everyone deals with anger differently. I deal with it the same way I deal with everything else—hurt, abandonment, fear; I count. One, two, five, eleven. This time it isn’t all that effective. “I’m defensive of her because nothing you or anyone else ever says is true. Shaye’s a nice girl, not the piece of crap you and all your groupies make her out to be.”

She slams the pencil on her desk, earning a look from the teacher. We’re supposed to be working in partners on a mock exam, not arguing over the positives and negatives of a classmate I happen to like.

“Are you telling me you think she hasn’t slept with all those people, including your own father? Or that she didn’t break a Smart Board
and
a desk in English class because she threw a giant temper-tantrum? I
saw
that, Cameron—everyone saw it. And it happened way before you showed up. She’s been suspended twice and has had to leave for medical reasons more than once. Everyone here knows what those medical reasons are, whether you believe it or not.”

My vision grows red. I don’t like her implication, and she’s right—I don’t believe it. Maybe I shouldn’t open my mouth…maybe I should stay quiet…but she threw down the gauntlet and there’s no way I’m going to kick it aside.

“If we’re talking rumors, why don’t we talk about the one I heard yesterday? That the reason your boyfriend broke up with you was because you finally gave him what he wanted and it wasn’t worth much.”

I’m acting like an eight-year-old girl and I regret the words the second I see her face blanch and drain of color. But like everything people say, words often wound and can’t be taken back. You can apologize, but you can’t undo the damage. I want to kill myself for stooping to her level, but at least now we both see eye to eye. The view isn’t pretty down here.

“I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said that,” I say.

It’s too late. Other people heard me, a few laughed, the damage was done, and I’m the same jerk as she is.

“Leave me alone, Cameron. And from now on, work by yourself.”

With a long look at her that I hope conveys both disgust and remorse at the same time, I turn around.

For the rest of the class period, I do work alone.

And when I finish the assignment and Abby only manages to tackle one more problem, part of me feels terrible. For my words. For her lack of help from me. For both.

But another part of me doesn’t feel bad; that part of me just wants to know which things Abby said are true.

And hopes that every single one of those things is a lie.

*

Shaye

“This is becoming
quite the problem, Miss McCormick,” the counselor says, taking a sip of coffee and setting the mug down on the desk in front of her. There’s a deep water ring on the golden wood that cuts through the finish, as though that mug never moves from that spot; a permanent home for an inanimate object. Some things are just lucky, I guess. She leans back in her chair and studies me. It’s what they always do—counselors, teachers, parents—but up to this point no one has been able to figure me out. They’ve come close, but never all the way. And they never will. I know the consequences of truth-telling.

“At what point are your office visits going to stop?” she asks, making a tent with her fingers. I want to remind her that I didn’t come here voluntarily. I want to remind her that these visits are never my idea. Instead, I do what I always do. I state the obvious.

“She threw a ball at my head. Why am I the one who’s in trouble?”

The lady swirls a finger around the tip of her mug. The lipstick mark smears a little, a stain of gelling blood on her fingertip. Appropriate, considering she gets off on killing the spirits of teenage girls.

“Miss McCormick, you’re a junior. These antics need to stop. Is this the way you want to end your high school career, by getting expelled?” She sighs and shakes her head. “Believe me, that wouldn’t be in your favor, especially considering all the other—”

“What? Strikes against me?” My voice comes out a little louder than I intend, but I don’t care. I sniff, command myself not to cry. It’s been years since I’ve broken down in public, and I sure won’t do it in front of this woman. She hates me. I won’t give her yet another reason to feel triumphant.

“Well now that you mention it, yes. You have no parents, a questionable home life, and more accusations steeped against you at this school than any other student.”

“If you’ve looked through my records, you would know I have no choice in my home life. Some of us aren’t as lucky as most of the kids in this school,” I say. She looks a little chagrined, a nice change from her usual smug, so I keep going. “And as for the accusations, none of them are true.”

She pauses, an eyebrow slowly rising as she studies me. “So you’re telling me that you didn’t damage Mr. Kelly’s board or punch Abby Rice in the eye during P.E. just now?”

I come forward in my seat. “She threw a ball at my head!”

“You were playing basketball. Abby says it was an accident.”

I fall back in my seat. It wasn’t an accident; I saw the way Abby looked in the coach’s direction to make sure she wouldn’t get caught just before she took aim and pummeled me. I heard everyone laugh when I hit the floor. I saw jaws drop in shock when I finally retaliated. With any luck, that chick won’t be able to see anything on her left side for a week.

But no one here ever believes me. It’s pointless to expect anything different now.

“It wasn’t an accident,” I say, “but that’s beside the point. You’re going to take her word for it because you always do even though she’s the main reason I keep coming in here.”

She shrugs. “Well, there’s also the boyfriend.”

I stiffen at her heartless reminder but say nothing because there’s nothing left to say. Nothing I want to revisit. Nothing about that topic I want to discuss. Those bags were packed and shoved deep inside my memory months ago. But I don’t tell her that. I won’t let her think she’s affected me even though it’s getting harder and harder to do. My tension rises. I cross one leg over the other and swing it back and forth.

Two months. Two months and I’m out of here for the summer. If I can get away with it, I’ll take my GED by August and skip next year altogether.

I pick at a fingernail and don’t look up. “What’s my punishment, Mrs. Combs?”

Twenty minutes later I walk out of her office with chipped polish on four fingers, a stack of detention slips that will keep me hanging with fellow troublemakers for the next two weeks, and a verbal command to apologize to Abby.

The detention I can live with, I’ve done it before.

As to the apology…Abby can suck it. And then she can live without it.

Cameron

O
ther than me
never seeing Shaye at school, nothing much happens over the next four weeks. Five if you count the week I spend in counseling—my social worker sitting across from my therapist, a fingerprint-smudged glass table between them—as they lob questions and theories about my well-being back and forth like two sand-covered kids playing a pick-up game of beach volleyball on a California shoreline. I manage to dodge their questions, I succeed in shrugging off their theories. Funny how a well-placed smile or an occasional off-color joke deflects concern away from me, even when the questions become pointed and filled with innuendo.

Are you happy, Cameron? Has anyone hurt you, Cameron? There’s an older girl at the house…at any time has that been a problem, Cameron?
I dodge that question entirely, at one point even delving into elaborate detail about my sleeping situation, going as far as to produce a fake yawn to express my fake exhaustion because of all the fake sleep I haven’t been getting.

Sure, I’m tired. And sure, Alan never sleeps, preferring to spend nighttime hours playing with his feet and babbling about juice and his tummy and wake up wake up wake up
Camben
—his odd baby way of saying my name. But I do manage to get a little rest. More rest than Shaye, of that I am certain.

But I made her a promise, and I plan to keep it. I’ll never forget the matter-of-fact way she said
No one wants me
. She believes it. It hurts my heart how much she believes it, like a person believes the sky is blue and there are twenty-six letters in the alphabet and the sun will come up tomorrow. It is what it is, just like she said.

I can’t risk being removed from Shaye, not after hearing those words. She’s broken in the same way I am broken, only where my pieces are large and might be sloppily put back together with a lot of glue, hers are shattered. Still I understand her in a way no one else can. She understands me in a way no one else can. I haven’t known that bond since my mother died, and I won’t lose it now. I just need to do a better job of taking care of her. I won’t risk losing her trust.

Besides, I hate counseling. There’s only so many times a kid can be reminded that he’s lost everything. There’s only so many pitying looks a guy my age can take, especially a late bloomer like myself. I mean, finally my voice is changing and my complexion is faltering and hair is growing on my chest.

And men don’t like to be pitied.

I for one have been in limbo long enough to know that my substitute parents aren’t coming back. Ever. My construction-worker foster father isn’t taking me to Lowe’s for lumber any time soon. Todd and Shelly aren’t asking me to be a big brother to their baby girl who will make her appearance sometime in the couple of weeks…whose name I’ll probably never know.

My name is Cameron Tate. I’m a foster kid who will gradually grow into a foster man and will remain that way forever and always, or least for the next few years until I’m too old to be considered in need of parents, anyway. No amount of counseling will fix that.

But there is one thing I intend to fix, and I’m going to fix it here and now.

Today is Shaye’s seventeenth birthday.

And her mood has completely and utterly sucked for most of it.

“What’s wrong now?” I ask, my ears beginning to bleed from the third…make that fourth bad word she’s dropped today. All under her breath and each time she’s surprised I hear it, but come on—her words of choice are offensive even to someone with my super-low standards.