“You can dance,” said a girl with long blonde hair that hung in dirty, wavy strands to her waist. She wore a cream-colored maxidress that was embedded with dirt at the hem and soaked with seawater to her knees. Around one ankle she wore a macramé anklet, something Cam would normally not tolerate. This girl, though, seemed to embody “flower child” from the inside out, willowy and graceful, as if her parents were actually flowers.
Cam said nothing but joined the girl dancing near the fire.
“What’s your name?” Cam asked.
“What?”
“Como se llamas?”
“Oh. Sunny!” she said, and she smiled dreamily, as if the sound of her own name filled her with bliss. She went back to dancing with her eyes closed.
Cam should have guessed from the little sun tattoo on her other, un-macraméd ankle. “Sunny” was perfect. And could also be a Land’s End color.
Cam stepped inside the music and let it close around her like a bubble. Inside the music there was no cancer. No awkwardness. No pain. No abandonment. No Flamingo List. Inside the music, even inside these primitive rhythms, Cam felt free.
Sunny seemed to approve of Cam’s dancing, every once in a while opening her eyes to check Cam out and then nodding her a little “Right on.”
After a short while, she was surprised to feel the familiar burning sensation of her disease. She hadn’t felt it since they’d arrived in Maine. It was hard to describe, but it was as if each of her cells began to individually smolder with sickness. She didn’t know if the toxicity she felt was from the cancer or from the chemicals and radiation used to treat it, but there were times when she just felt poisoned, green, acidic. So different from this pure, organic girl spinning beside her.
She tapped Sunny on the shoulder and asked, “Is there any water?” Then she tilted an imaginary cup to her mouth in case Sunny couldn’t hear her.
“Over here,” said Sunny, and she led Cam to a cooler on the other side of the fire. The water cooler, a big orange jug, like the one athletes used to dump Gatorade onto their coaches, sat behind a wall of rocks. Cam looked around the cooler for cups, but she didn’t see any.
“Oh. Like this,” said Sunny, and she squatted down and opened her mouth beneath the spigot like a baby bird. “Reduce, reuse, recycle,” she said. “No use wasting cups.” She wiped her mouth with the back of her wrist.
Cam filled her mouth as well and swallowed what tasted like water from a mountain stream tinged with a little bit of sugar. In one gulp she began to feel purified, that burning, toxic feeling slowly washing away.
“Good, isn’t it?” Sunny asked. “It’s holy water. We steal it from the baptismal font at the Catholic church. It just tastes better.”
“Won’t God be upset that you stole his water?” asked Cam.
“I don’t presume to know what God thinks,” said Sunny. “I like to think she’d want us to have it.”
The holy water reminded Cam of the makeshift christening Lily had performed for her on the dock that night. She wished she wasn’t reminded of how she threw away her only remaining friendship because she had to be right about Ryan. If Cam finally learned one lesson before she died, it would be that being kind was sometimes more important than being right. All Cam had had to say that night was “I’m happy for you.” Four simple words.
“Whoa. Samoa. What are you thinking about? Your whole aura just changed from gold to black.”
“Nothing,” said Cam. “My name is Campbell, by the way. And how did you know—”
“My little sister hangs with yours, so she told me where you were from. It’s rad. I’ve never met an island girl before.”
“Aloha.” Cam smirked.
“Right on,” Sunny said. “Well, Campbell, you should think good things, and good things will come your way. ”
She followed Sunny back to the dancing. Royal and Asher must have finished their zip line duties because they were climbing over the rocks to finally join the party. Cam nudged Sunny with her elbow and pointed her head toward Asher.
“What’s his story?” she asked.
“Asher?” Sunny grinned. “Asher doesn’t have a story. Ashicus has a mythology. And he’s totally taken.” She giggled as Royal grabbed her hand. Cam watched as he gently pulled her toward the edge of the water, where they walked along the shore talking.
Asher had picked up a drum from one of the drummers who had rotated out and was playing it with a huge smile on his face. Cam continued to dance. She didn’t mind dancing by herself as long as she kept her eyes closed. She danced, shifting her bare feet around in the sand, and tried to forget about Asher. Maybe Lily was right. Maybe Cam should experience some things. It was too late to find true love, but it wasn’t too late for sex.
And just as Cam thought the word sex, a boy she couldn’t see slid his arm around her waist and his tongue into her ear.
The boy, Alec, with a c and not an x, was not named after a T-shirt color.
Cam tried to be cool. She lifted her arms and placed them gently around his neck while he looped his around her waist. She looked up into his eyes, which were brown, heavy-lidded, and half shut—very French, like his name; then she tilted her head downward and leaned it against his chest. He was tall. And thin. And taut. Like a tennis player. He probably was a tennis player. Even on the beach, he wore his blisteringly white shoes. She let him kiss her gently on the forehead before he led her away over the rocks to a place where someone had beached their small catamaran. His palms were a little sweaty. More in anticipation, Cam thought, than in fear. Cam’s hands were icy with dread.
“Ahh,” he said in a French accent, gutturally swallowing the final sounds of all of his words. “A bed.” It turned out he really was French.
They sat on the black trampoline “bed” of the sailboat, which was laced up the center like a big corset. He promptly rolled on top of her.
“Wait,” Cam said, pushing him off of her. “Shouldn’t we get to know each other?”
He pointed to himself and said, “Alec.”
Cam said, “Cam,” and then he rolled on top of her again, kissing her neck and working his hand up her shirt.
Cam got so nervous, she could not stop talking.
“Are those drumsticks in your pocket or are you just happy to see me?” she asked. “Does no mean no in France or does no sometimes mean oui? Because in Maine I think no pretty much means no. Although it is a little backward up here, so they may not know that no means no. . . .”
“Are you saying no?” asked Alec.
“No,” said Cam.
“Shhh,” said Alec as he traced her lips with his index finger and then kissed her squarely on the mouth. His tongue was a little too probing at first, and his teeth, because they jutted out a bit, kept clicking into hers and biting her a little. His fingers slid under the waistband of her jeans and tried to wedge themselves beneath the elastic of her underwear.
“Yes!” Cam said, trying to sit up.
“This feels good, yes?” asked Alec.
“No. I mean yes, I am saying no.”
He looked into her eyes with confidence, as if he could decipher her thoughts better than she could and would be the final arbiter of the situation. “No. You are not saying no,” he said, and he kissed her more softly this time, looping his tongue around hers. He had an amazing tongue, which compensated for the bad teeth. He kissed her ear, her neck, the soft skin on the inside of her elbow, the center of her palm. Cam relaxed enough for it to feel good, and then it did not feel good, and then it was over.
He was slumped on top of her when they both heard a girl’s voice call, “Alec!” from the other side of the rocks. He pulled his pants up quickly as Cam rolled herself off of the catamaran and hid behind one of its pontoons.
“I’m sorry,” he whispered. “I must go.” And Cam watched from underneath the boat as his white sneakers sloughed through the sand in the direction of the girl’s voice.
It was impossible to make a graceful exit when you were trapped on an i
sland. Cam tried to sneak off and use the funicular by herself, but Asher followed her.
“Cam,” she heard him call.
Cam ignored him and climbed into the rusty old cart. She slammed the door with a clang and pulled on the rope. It screeched loudly, and she only moved about one foot across the wire. She pulled and pulled, fueled by her embarrassment. A couple of people had gathered out of curiosity and watched her moving herself solo across the wire. Eventually she tired herself out, and she fought back tears. She sat slumped in the cart as the wind swung it back and forth with loud creaks.
“Cam!” screamed Asher. “Campbell, look down.”
“Aren’t you supposed to tell me not to look down?”
“No. Look down.”
Cam stood up slowly so as not to rock the little gondola. When she looked over the side, she noticed that there was no water left between the mainland and the “island” of the lighthouse. The little channel had dried up, leaving just a rocky beach.
“It’s low tide, Cam. You can walk across.”
Asher pushed a button, and the wire she was hanging from began moving by itself like a ski lift, back to the island. Cam got out and crossed the channel on foot. She didn’t even remember the walk home.
After a very long shower, Cam bundled up in her mother’s robe and sat back on her bed in the widow’s walk. She pulled out the Flamingo List and hovered a black Sharpie above it: Lose my virginity at a keg party. Check. The actual presence of a keg seemed irrelevant. Have my heart broken by an asshole. Check.
She could have died without experiencing that. But the first time was supposed to be terrible anyway, right? Too bad her first time was going to be her last.
She wished she could forget this night ever happened. That was what a healthy person would do. Healthy people are gifted with selective memory. Cam pathologically remembered everything. Details stuck inside her brain like spitballs to a chalkboard. Which was fine if you were taking the SATs, but horrible when you were trying to forget Alec’s teeth, or the catalog kids staring up at you from the beach as you swung there on the lighthouse lift.
It was horrible when you needed to forget how your dad looked on his deathbed, bald and shriveled to the size of a child, when his breath, finally, after weeks of holding on, grumbled to a noiseless stop. When you needed to forget that your organs might fail one by one or you might drown of pneumonia in your own bed. Maybe her heart would stop first.
FOURTEEN
“GET UP.GET UP, CAMPBELL.” HER MOM’S VOICE ESCALATED FROM AN angry whisper to a full-on yell as she threw the covers off of Cam. “We don’t do this in our family, do you hear me?!”
Cam was still in bed trying to sleep off last night’s debacle. Images bubbled up through her consciousness like some kind of bad memory stew: the vertiginous funicular . . . the incredulous stares from the catalog kids . . . Alec’s taut hamstrings . . . his fingers unbuttoning her jeans.
“What time is it?” Cam threw her arm over her face to shield her eyes from the bright sunlight streaming into the widow’s walk. If she looked out the windows without sitting up, it seemed as if she were floating in the middle of the bay. All she could see was blue. Different undulating shades of blue depending on their form and function. If she stayed here much longer, she was sure she could come up with more than a hundred words for blue, just like Eskimos had a hundred words for snow.
“You mean what day is it. You slept all the way through Saturday.”
“Whoa. Cool.”
“Campbell,” Alicia said, gritting her teeth, “you don’t have time to stay up here, reading The Bell Jar or whatever it is you do,” she said as she kicked some things around the room. “Other girls can wallow in their misery. You. You do not have the luxury to wallow.”
“Isn’t wallowing part of adolescence? I should experience the full range of adolescent behavior before I die. I thought this town was supposed to save me, anyway.”
“Campbell,” said her mom as she sat down on Cam’s mattress.
“What?”
“I’ve never known anyone who was saved who did not first save herself,” she said.
“Whoa. Did Jesus say that? That would be good on a mug. Or a needlepoint pillow. We can market that.”
“You are leaving this house today, do you hear me?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
Her mom threw a pillow at her before climbing back down the stairs.
Cam wished she could admit to her mom that she had left the house, and that she’d made a “wicked” fool of herself, as they said up here, but how do you admit to your mother that you just lost your virginity for the hell of it to a rude French exchange student on a beached catamaran?
It was better to just leave the house, Cam decided. Tweety was sluggish and looking a little peaked. She could take him to the vet. That was something she could do.
As she got dressed, she noticed the photograph she had stolen from Lily’s house balanced precariously on the corner windowsill. The sun shone behind it, and it seemed to glow with its own internal radiance. Cam looked at the wan faces, clonking bald heads, and white-toothed smiles. Strange, but because of Lily, St. Jude’s was one of the happiest times of her life.
Lily was the only person who got her. Her dad got her a little bit, but he was gone. Her mother used to try to get her, but then that got too exhausting, and she gave up. Perry was too young to get anyone. But Lily got her. They just had to look at each other in the right way, and they would explode into that paralyzing kind of open-mouthed laughter without sound. Without Lily, Cam was utterly alone.
Lily would know what to say about last night. Cam was dying to tell her that she had crossed two things off of the Flamingo List. But news from Cam’s list did not exactly contain the “positive” vibe that would heal the friendship. Cam cringed as Lily’s last words rang in her ears. I need to be surrounded by positive energy. I need you to leave me alone.
Wordlessly she packed the photo up in an envelope without a return address. She would mail it back to Lily today.
“Mom, I’m taking Tweety to the vet,” she yelled when she got to the bottom of the stairs. “Do they have a vet here, or do the animals miraculously heal themselves?”
“Don’t get smart. I think I saw something on Cedar Street,” her mom called from the dining room. She was trying to work the ancient sewing machine she’d found in the basement and didn’t even look up.
Cam unhooked Tweety’s cage from its stand in the living room and found her car keys in the pocket of her hoodie.
“Wait! Take me to the beeeea—” she heard Perry whining as she shut the big front door with the dragonfly knocker behind her.
Cam was irritated. Literally. It was hot, she could not find the vet’s office, and something was burning down there, which was probably normal after what down there had been through Friday night, but still a little disconcerting. After her third circle through town, she remembered Sunny and her theory of attracting what you think about. I will find the vet’s office, she thought, and on her next trip around the block, there it was. A red barn with a silo and a mail truck parked out front. A donkey was penned inside of a white corral, and an old white sign read, ELAINE WHITTIER, with five shingles swinging underneath it: DVM, HEAD LIBRARIAN, POSTMASTER, SHERIFF, ANTIQUES DEALER.
“What are you feeding him?” asked Elaine Whittier as she examined Tweety. She was about sixty and had that self-proclaimed-feminist-from-the-seventies look about her. Long gray hair, dangling feather earrings, and a royal blue caftan blouse covering her seemingly requisite middle-aged paunch. To get to the exam room, you had to walk through Elaine’s house, which was decorated with a lot of pine: pine woodwork, pine furniture covered with scratchy brown upholstery, pine floors, and pine plaques on the wall, shellacked with corny messages like HOME SWEET HOME.
“Um, I think there has been some extra papaya in his diet lately,” Cam said.
“He’s massively overweight.”
Cam liked this woman. She d
id not mince words.
“You hear that, Tweets? No more papaya for you.” Cam had to speak loudly over the cacophony of animal sounds. Elaine didn’t seem very discriminatory when it came to treating animals. Aside from the standard cats and dogs, the cages lining the periphery of the examination room were filled with hermit crabs, tarantulas, iguanas, ferrets, and—“Is that a muskrat?” Cam asked when she saw the slick black rodent with enormous bony feet.
“He’s one of God’s creatures.” Elaine lifted Tweety’s wing and felt around for his glands underneath it. “What brings you to Promise?”
“I’m sick,” said Cam. She was inspired by the vet’s demeanor to be direct, but it was strange to hear herself say those two tiny words. It was a relief, actually, to say it out loud to a stranger. She was sick.
“That’s too bad,” said Elaine. Cam liked that response. No questions. No denial. No “I’m sure you’ll get better soon.” Just: “That’s too bad.” It was. It was just too bad.
“So what do you do?” the doctor asked as she cupped Tweety gently in both hands and placed him back in his cage.
“Do?”
“Aside from be sick. What do you do?”
“I’m putting all my energy into that right now,” joked Cam.
Elaine smirked. She had the same parentheses dimple on the left side of her smile that Asher did. “A woman has to wear many hats. It’s in our nature. We’re natural multitaskers. Here. Can you hold Bart for a second?” She plopped the soft, heavy belly of a St. Bernard puppy into Cam’s hands. The warm folds of his extra skin draped around Cam’s fingers. She held him up so she could look into his droopy brown eyes.
“I could work here, I guess,” mumbled Cam. The puppy licked the side of her face just once, as if that was all he could muster.
“What?” asked the vet as she plucked the side of a syringe to get the air bubbles out of it. “Keep holding him.” Elaine lifted some of the skin off of Bart’s neck and stuck him with the syringe. Bart snuggled his head into the crook of Cam’s, arm, and she hugged him close.