The Probability of Miracles (22 page)

“Huh?”

“I don't want you thinking this was some bad episode. You simply had a panic attack. Your numbers are all fine. The doctor can prescribe some medication. A little Ativan. Something to take the edge off. And you'll be good as new.”

“Did your pizza win?” Cam asked groggily, taking in the sterile doctor's office around them.

“I didn't have time to enter it, but we can eat it when we get home.”

Perry was sitting on a chair by the window, busy with the keypad of her phone. Next to the chair was a paper bag overflowing with the random stuff from her half of the scavenger-hunt list. A clothespin, a sun visor, a plastic baseball bat . . .

“I did it again, didn't I, Perry?”

“What?” she asked, her thumbs still wildly texting.

“Ruined something you were looking forward to.”

“That's okay.”

“No. It's not. Can we at least go home and eat the pizza?”

“Sure. There's plenty of it. I had so many tomatoes. You can invite some friends,” Alicia said.

“Ha!” said Perry without looking up from her phone. “Like she has any of those.”

As if on cue, Asher, Sunny, Royal, and Autumn sans Alec walked into the doctor's office.

“We just wanted to see how you were doing,” Asher said.

“Well, that
is
a miracle,” said Perry. She took out her notebook and said out loud as she wrote, “Number forty: Campbell . . . has . . . friends.”

“Thanks a lot, Perry,” Campbell said.

Perry just gave her a little wink.

“Let's get out of here,” Alicia announced. “Pizza, anyone?”

“Perry, you should write this down in your notebook.”

The pizza was magical. The dough had a chewy, bendy, bouncy quality, and the cheese pulled away from your mouth in thin strings. Which was perfect. Biting into pizza should be a silent operation. Noiseless. There was nothing worse than a crunchy pizza with cheese that slid off in one piece.

And the sauce. The sauce was an inspiration. Not too sweet or salty or tangy, but a blend of those flavors that perfectly glued the cheese to the bubbling dough underneath. Alicia walked around serving endless trays of it to their guests.

Everyone they knew was there. Her mom's hula friends, Perry's tweeny friends, Cam's catalog kids, who had thankfully shaken their patriotic alter egos and returned to their pretending-to-be-effortless style. Even Elaine was there with Smitty, the cook from the lobster pound. It was a wonderful, spontaneous gathering, the kind that used to happen to Cam's family before everything changed.

They sat around a long table that Asher had set up in the front yard overlooking the bay. They waited for the orcas to make their ritual leaps out of the ocean, and then they waited again for darkness to fall and for the fireworks to begin. Someone was launching them from behind the lighthouse, and they had the perfect vantage point from the lawn of Avalon by the Sea.

Cam watched as Perry and her friends honed their flirting skills on Asher. He was the perfect hot-but-innocuous person to practice on, and he was extremely patient with them, lighting their sparklers again and again, as they pretended to be too frightened to do it themselves.

Cam hadn't gotten the gene that allowed you to flirt. She was convinced it was genetic. You either had the capacity for coyness, or you simply could not pretend to be stupid. Which was what guys really wanted. They wanted you to prove to them how much smarter they really were, and Cam's ego was too big for that. Which, if you thought about it, was just stupid. If Cam were smart, she would pretend to be stupid, so that she would end up less alone.

She was glad Perry could do it. It made her worry less about her.

Asher had hooked up the outdoor speakers, and her mom put on the sound track from “The Spirit of Aloha.” Cam was dying to dance but was suddenly terrified to do it in front of Asher. Maybe she did have some coyness in her.

“Come on!” said her mom. “Campbell, this is your number.”

“Oh, God.” Cam finally hoisted her pizza-stuffed self off the bench. “Just for a minute,” she said. But when she lost herself in the music, one minute became a half an hour, and she'd forgotten all about who might be watching. She did the entire volcano goddess hula, which describes the origins of the dance. Pele the volcano goddess needed to escape her sister, the sea. The sea kept dousing her flames, so Pele traveled to the top of the highest hill and found a home where she could truly express herself. Then she danced in celebration.

When Cam was through, she sat down to take a rest. She watched Perry as she very animatedly told her unicorn theory to a bunch of people who'd gathered around her, eating their s'mores.

Cam had heard Perry tell this unicorn story a million times. Her theory started with the idea that there are too many references to dragons for them to have been a complete myth. The idea of dragons could not possibly be entirely fictitious. Someone must have seen some kind of flying lizard who breathed fire.

“There needed to be an origin,” she said now. Her audience was rapt. “And the original dragon was probably—like the Loch Ness Monster, who, by the way, is also not a myth—a dinosaur. At some point a very, very long time ago, dinosaurs must have walked the earth with humans. Not a lot of them, mind you, but a few stragglers who had woken up after the Ice Age like iguanas can sometimes do after a long cold winter when you think they are dead. Cold-blooded things can wake up when they get warm. So a few of these dinosaurs—or pterosaurs, actually, because they could fly—must have woken up and existed, and man must have seen one, or there would never have been stories about dragons.

“If you have to believe that there were dragons, then you have to believe in unicorns because people were telling stories about them around the same time.”

Cam wondered, between her and her sister, who was Pele and who was the sea. She didn't have to think too long about it. Her sister had an imaginative, erupting spirit, and Cam continued to douse it with her wet-rag cynicism.

“That was something else,” Asher said, straddling the bench next to Cam at the picnic table.

She started to say that yes, Perry would someday make a great unicornologist, when Asher interrupted, “The hula stuff. Pretty amazing. You're really good.”

Cam wanted to say something sarcastic, but just then the first rocket went off, announcing the start of Promise's Fourth of July fireworks spectacular, which, when you're used to Disney fireworks every night of your life, was pretty darn pathetic. Pathetic in a way that made Cam start to like it here.

Cam felt happier. Maybe it was the pizza in her stomach, but she felt content. She felt brave enough to text Lily for the first time since they'd arrived.

Today was a good day
, she wrote. She hoped it was positive enough to warrant a response.

“HELP ME GET HIM INTO THE U-HAUL.”

“You know he's a donkey, right?” Asher said. “And a spoiled donkey. He's not just going to do what I say.”

“Sure he will. Come on, James Madison,” said Cam as she clicked her tongue and pulled him with the lead.

James Madison pulled back. He shook his head, and then he actually sat down, which Cam did not expect.

“Isn't she going to realize he's a donkey and not a white horse? He doesn't exactly have a mythical, magical physique.”

“James Madison!” Cam gasped. “Are you going to take that? Stand up and show him your physique.”

James Madison just sat there and brayed. It almost sounded as if he were saying “U-Haul.”

“Right, James Madison, U-Haulll. Get into the U-Haulll,” Cam said in donkey language.

“Are there any air holes in that thing?” Asher asked as the donkey finally stood up and began taking tentative steps out of his corral and into the driveway.

“It's only five minutes to the house,” Cam said, pulling again at the lead.

“This just feels like a lie, that's all. And we're also stealing, which is not exactly comfortable for me.”

“You've never stolen anything?” Cam asked. “Everyone steals something. Even if it's an ice pop from the freezer when you're six.”

“Not that I know of.”

“God. That's cute. We're borrowing, Slasher. We will bring him back. That's the definition of borrowing. Taking something and then returning it,” Cam sighed, dropping the lead and taking a break from trying to pull the burro. She picked it up and pulled again. “Like a library book,” she continued. “Elaine's a librarian. She understands borrowing.”

“Borrowers have permission, number one, and you have never seen Elaine when she is angry,” Asher said. He picked up a thin stick and tapped James Madison on the bottom. The donkey took a few steps forward.

“She can't be worse than my mom,” Cam said as they approached the Vagina Train. There wasn't a place near here to return the U-Haul, so they had paid the rent on it and were going to return it when they got back to Florida. Returning the U-Haul on time was the kind of detail that just fell away when you were worried about dying.

James Madison only fell out once.

It was when they took the big curve in front of the lobster pound a little too quickly. They heard his hooves sliding around and then something like an elephant tap-dancing on a garbage can. Then it got quiet, and the drag on Cumulus got suddenly lighter. And when Cam checked the rear view, James Madison was standing motionless in the middle of the road.

“Don't panic,” she told Asher, and she herself popped one of those Ativans that the doctor had given her after her panic attack. They were tiny and dissolved into chalky silt beneath your tongue. She was allowed to take them whenever she felt jittery because what difference did it make at this point if she developed a tranquilizer addiction?

They backed the U-Haul up a bit so that it was directly in front of the donkey. Cam decided to ride him into the trailer. She mounted James Madison and bent down close to his ear, whispering to him to calmly get back into the U-Haul. The donkey straightened, as if listening, and walked forward into the belly of the truck. Cam knocked on the wall of the trailer to signal Asher to take off. She stayed with the donkey inside the tiny dark space until they got back to the house.

“I think you can take it from here, A. W.,” Asher said.

The only downside to the whole operation was that Asher now got to call her the “Ass Whisperer,” which she deserved, she guessed, after enlisting him in an afternoon of donkey-napping.

They had successfully transferred James Madison from the U-Haul, through the carriage house, and into the secret tunnels of the Underground Railroad. The donkey stood in one of the bunkers, tied to a cot as he feasted on some hay and a carrot. Cam attempted to attach a tinfoil-covered waffle cone to his forelock with some bobby pins. But the magical horn kept flopping to one side.