What Happens Now (2 page)

Kendall, Dani, and I fell silent, all watching him swim a trail of white froth through the dark water. When he got to the rope, I expected him to dip underneath it into the forbidden
zone. But he turned for the raft tied to the corner of the rope and hoisted himself up the ladder.

“I’ve got to get some intel on Sunscreen Guy,” said Kendall after a few moments.

“I’ve just been calling him The Boy.”

“See? We can’t go on like this. I’ll talk to Mabel.”

Mabel had been running the lake’s snack shack since the 1980s. Mabel absorbed details about people like osmosis.

As Kendall headed off on her mission, I went waist-deep into the water to meet Danielle. She wrapped her arms and legs around me, buoyant and effortlessly huggable. Her cold wet against my warm dry. That moment of shock, until we became the same temperature.

“Will you throw me out like garbage?” she whispered in my ear.

I lifted Danielle away from my body. “You’re no good anymore!” It was part of the game. “I’m chucking you out with the trash!”

Then I tossed her as far as I could into the water. She shrieked with joy.

“Again!” she said when she came back up for air. “This time, let’s pretend you’re putting me in the recycling bin. It’s blue and it’s prettier. Now, go!” So I went. Again, and again, and again. Dani was the best distraction ever.

Ten minutes later, Kendall swam out to meet us, and even with her mirrored sunglasses I could tell she had a mischievous glint in her eye.

“Camden,” Kendall said simply, paddling a circle around me.

“What?”

“It’s weird, but that’s his name. Camden.”

“All you got was a name?”

“He goes to Dashwood.”

“Oh.”

Dashwood was a private alternative school on the edge of town, halfway up a mountain, surrounded by forest. Nobody I knew had even seen the place. Most people called it “Crunchwood” because there were few teachers and no classes. Students did what they wanted, when they wanted to do it. The rumor was they didn’t even need to wear shoes if they weren’t in the mood.

Kendall lowered her sunglasses so she could give me a look. “We think he’s cute, right?”

I grimaced. “
Cute
’s not the right word.” I hated that word and anyway, it didn’t belong on the same plane of existence as this boy.
Camden
.

“International Sex God?” Kendall offered with arched eyebrows, pulling out an old phrase from our private best-friend language.

“Perhaps,” I said, giving in to the smile.

“I won’t tell Lukas,” added Kendall.

“Lukas is just a friend.”

“Who you made out with.”

“That was before.” I didn’t need to elaborate.
Before
meant, before January. Before my night at home alone with a Lady Bic
razor and a bag of frozen peas.

Kendall looked pained, then covered it up and said, “So? He still likes you. He’s not scared away.”

“He will be, eventually.”

She kicked me under the water. I splashed her back.

“Why are you always so hard on yourself?” asked Kendall, but I knew she didn’t really want an answer. “I thought we agreed, that’s something that would make you happy. To
have
someone. You’re close. I wish I were that close.”

“I don’t need ‘someone.’ I have my whole family. And lucky for them, they have me.”

My mom was working hard to finish nursing school. My stepdad, Richard, was gone most days, running his art supply store. There were meals to prepare and a self-regenerating to-do list stuck to the fridge with alphabet magnets. Also, the small matter of a real live child who needed to be, you know, fed and clothed and supervised. I filled the gaps. Sometimes it felt like there were more gaps than whatever it was that went between the gaps.

Let’s keep her busy
, I’d heard my mother tell Richard once. She didn’t want me to have time to retreat into myself, apparently a place full of dark corners and hazardous material.

Kendall was my friend and wanted to help, too. What was
happy
anyway? A dumb-sounding word, if you really broke it down.
Happy
was something you didn’t think too much about because if you did, you knew you weren’t.

I turned to look out at the raft where Camden sat by himself,
staring off into the sky. I was always confronting the sky with questions, but that didn’t seem to be the case with him. It was more like he and the sky were collaborators. Like maybe he had the whole edgeless thing on his side.

How would that even feel? I couldn’t imagine. But, oh, to find out.

Soon, summer began in earnest, so hot and green and wet, it was hard to remember what any other season felt like. I saw Camden at the lake a couple of times a week, but it was always from afar and we never spoke. He usually came alone, which totally fascinated me—who had the nerve to come to the lake alone?—but sometimes he did come with friends: a rickety-tall boy and a petite girl with long, straight, jet-black hair. They’d disappear down a trail into the woods for a while before coming back out to strip down to their bathing suits and do yelping cannonballs off the dock.

I knew the lifeguards liked to drink or smoke stuff in those woods after the beach closed at night. Were Camden and his friends bold enough to do it during the day? And if I myself didn’t smoke anything and had even washed cars as a fund-raiser for Students Against Drunk Driving, why did the thought of Camden doing these things make my kneecaps feel unattached from my legs?

“We’re hardwired for the naughty ones,” sighed Kendall once, as we spotted Camden and his compadres come out of the woods. “It really sucks.”

Here’s one thing I learned watching Camden during those weeks: a person’s body can move and not ever touch you, but still have a physical impact on yours. He leaned against the diving board railing as he waited his turn, and it was like
I
was that railing. The motion of his hand as he ran it through his wet hair while talking—long fingers scattering beads of water—or the angles of his elbows as he stretched out on the sand: these things could make the hair on my arms stand up.

I never liked the word
attraction
. It’s way too much about magnets, and not enough about why someone’s mere presence can make you feel pleasure and pain at the same time.

Crush
didn’t work either. I wasn’t twelve.

What should I have called it? I just called it Camden.

Sometimes, I’d catch him looking my way. A trick of the light, of course. Or the wishiest wishful thinking. Because there was no way I could possibly be worth that.

“Go talk to him,” said Kendall the time we caught Camden glancing at us while he stood in line for the snack shack. “
Seize the moment.
”

“I will,” I said. “I will.”

“I mean,
this
moment. Not some theoretical future moment.”

“I have to keep an eye on Dani.”

“I have two. I’ll keep them both on her.”

“Plus, I already have an ice cream. It would be so obvious that I was going over for him.”

“So?”

“Then he would know.”

“Argh,” snarled Kendall. “You’re making me crazy with this. What are you so afraid of?”

I looked at Camden again. He was at the window now, joking with Mabel. She was actually laughing. I hadn’t even known that she
could
laugh, and that it sounded like a chipmunk on helium.

What was I afraid of? Anything that might tip me off balance and make me fall back into that place I knew was still there, waiting beneath all my newly glossed-over, smoothed-out surfaces. But I couldn’t explain it to her, because I couldn’t even explain it to myself.

As the summer went on, Kendall gathered more details from one of her three older brothers, who seemed to know everyone with one or two degrees of separation. His mom was named Maeve Armstrong and was a medium-famous artist. They lived in a converted church that was either lavender or turquoise—the reports varied on that. He’d been homeschooled until last fall. The most delicious rumor was that his father was Ed Penniman, the lead singer for the legendary punk band the Stigmaddicts.

All this was unconfirmed, of course. But I knew two things about Camden Armstrong for sure:

1) His eyes were the exact same forest green as the diving board.

2) I ached for him in places I never knew could ache, like earlobes and collarbones.

At night, I’d lie awake and picture what Camden’s life was like. I’d think of him in his turquoise church, painting like his mother. Reading books I’d never heard of. Playing guitar or piano, whichever worked best for the songs he wrote. Because surely he wrote songs, surely it wasn’t possible for a boy to look like that and
not
write songs.

I knew a third definite thing about Camden, eventually. I wouldn’t have believed it if I hadn’t seen it myself.

One day, Camden came to the lake wearing a black baseball cap with a white
X
on it.

It was a specific white
X
. Deeply specific, at least for me, and maybe for him, too: the logo for the short-lived TV reboot of
Silver Arrow
from a few years back.

He knew about my show.

He knew.

About. My. Show.

And so three times. Three times, I started walking over to where he sat by himself on the Navajo blanket. Practicing the line in my head. Laughably simple, really, but then again, all the best beginnings are.
Nice hat. Are you a
Silver Arrow
fan?

The fourth time was going to be the charm, I swear.

Then Danielle was suddenly at my side, tugging on the hem of my rashguard. “Ari, I got a splinter.”

“Again?”

“It’s not my fault, it’s the freaking dock’s fault.”

“Don’t say ‘freaking.’” I took her hand and led her to the lifeguard station, where they probably kept a pair of tweezers
with her name on it. And yes, I’ll admit I didn’t mind the extra time to get my nerve up even higher.

But when we got back, Camden was packing his stuff to leave.

I bit down hard on the tip of my thumb as I watched him walk away.

This is what I remember from the next time I saw Camden. It was late August by then.

Camden and his friends on the dock, waiting in line for the diving board.

The girl—I now knew her name was Eliza, I’d heard the boys yell it enough times—reaching out and taking Camden’s hand.

Camden letting her.

Then, Camden leaning in to kiss Eliza.

Eliza letting him.

Their faces breaking apart but their hands staying connected, until it was his turn to dive.

Me not watching that dive. Me not seeing Eliza laugh at whatever he did.

Me, walking up the beach and toward the parking lot and away, away, away from the lake, already closing the book on summer. So mad at myself for being afraid.

And as I drove home, it occurred to me that my thinking about safety could be all wrong. Maybe safety lay in actually pursuing the things you desired. Maybe the real danger was
not pursuing them and never knowing what would have happened if you did.

Maybe regret was the thing that really knocks you off balance into whatever’s waiting below.

September, then Halloween. November and Christmas.

The dreams would come randomly, when I hadn’t even been thinking about him (I swear). Sometimes once a week and sometimes more. Often, they came at the end of a Black Diamond ski slope day, the kind of day where you have to be an expert at life to get to the bottom without breaking a bone.

It was always something simple and pathetically G-rated. We’d be walking. We’d be holding hands. We’d be driving in a car with the windows down. When I woke up, I’d try to go back to sleep and pick it right back up.
More
, I begged the powers of, well, whatever’s in charge of this stuff.
Please, please, more.

“Destructive,” was Kendall’s comment when I got up the courage to tell her about the dreams. We were back at her house early from the lamest-ever New Year’s party, turning on the TV to see the ball drop.

“I have no control over them,” I protested.

“Maybe not,” she said. “But there are other things you can control. It’s not like he moved away or was only visiting town from another country.”

“He goes to
Dashwood
. That may as well be another continent.”

“Why don’t we figure out where he spends time outside of school, and then, you know, go to that place. A radical idea, I know.”

“Then I would still need the guts to talk to him.”

“Ari,” she continued, her patience wearing thin; I could see it. “You either have to find a way to connect with this guy or move on. It’s not healthy for you. And it’s not healthy for me to watch it be not healthy for you.”

I nodded. I knew she was right.

But then a week later, I saw him.

It was the frozen dead of January. On my to-do list that day was a trip to the bookstore to pick out a gift for one of Dani’s friends. I rounded a corner toward the kids’ section and there was Camden. My mental images of him were so deeply seated in summer that I almost didn’t recognize him in his parka, his hair longer as if he’d grown winter fur.

“Check this one out,” he said to his friends, the boy and the girl, the
kissing
girl Eliza, as he held open the pages of a graphic novel.

They checked out what he wanted to show them and then they all laughed, hard. Loud. I fought the urge to go peek over their shoulders. Maybe Eliza sensed that, because she started to turn around.

Which is when I fled like I was running for my life. A detour through the cookbooks, through the door empty-handed, the sound of Camden’s laughter jingling after me into the cold.

That night was the best and worst dream yet. We were at
the lake, on the raft. He touched my leg.

Just as in a nightmare when you always come out of it right before someone stabs you or the train hits you or the plane crashes, I startled into reality right before we kissed.