Cam handed the phone to Perry, who gladly recounted for Izanagi the highlights of the trip. When she was done with her long, meandering account, it was still sunset.
Asher arrived at their table with a live lobster in a box. It scratched at the sides a little as he set it down on the floor.
“Cam,” said Alicia, “where are we going to put a lobster? We don’t even know where we’re staying tonight.”
“You don’t actually have to take him,” Asher offered.
“Sorry,” Alicia apologized. “It’s just we’ve driven all the way from Florida. We tried to call the hotel, but no one ever answered.”
“They’re renovating it,” he explained.
Cam kept her gaze focused on his feet. He even had holes in the toes of his construction boots. Weren’t those things impossible to destroy?
“They could have said that on their voicemail. Does Maine not have voicemail?” she asked.
“We have it.” The banging from the kitchen started up again, and it seemed like their cue to hurry up and leave. “Sorry about him. Hey, you could stay with me if you like.”
“Really?” asked Alicia.
“Mom!” Cam glared at Alicia. She envisioned a beer-drenched bachelor pad with gray, sheetless futons on the floor. “Stranger Danger,” she said.
She and Perry had spent a few years as latchkey kids. There was no money for babysitting, and Alicia worked nights. So she had drilled them with rules about stranger danger, showing them scary videos and even signing them up for a class about how to protect themselves from being kidnapped. Stranger-danger class frightened Perry so much that when she was six, she refused to talk to anyone who wasn’t a blood relative.
“He’s not a stranger,” Alicia said. “He’s Asher.”
“Mom, he’s just being nice, and he’s trying to get us out of here so he doesn’t get fired. He doesn’t really want us to stay with him.”
“Really. It’s okay. You wouldn’t be staying with me, with me,” Asher clarified. “I stay in the carriage house. But the main house is my grandfather’s, and it’s empty for the summer. I’m trying to fix it up. You can stay if you don’t mind me rattling around in there a bit.”
Cam turned to her mother. “We came here for a lobster. We can’t leave with this guy’s house.”
A pot slammed to the floor. “Shit!” someone yelled.
“We have to get out of here soon before Smitty turns the hose on us. I’ve seen him do it before,” Asher warned. “So what do you think?”
Alicia put a hand on Cam’s shoulder, squeezing firmly, painfully, which was her signal for Cam to keep quiet. “Thank you. That would be wonderful.”
“You both realize he could be a serial killer,” said Cam as they piled back into Cumulus.
“Nope,” said Perry. “Way too cute for that.”
“Relax,” Alicia said to Cam. “We came here expecting miracles. Maybe this is our first one.”
“This is number twenty-seven, by my count,” Perry said as she recorded Cute boy offers us a free house in her notebook.
“Please,” said Cam, rolling her eyes. Getting offered an abandoned house did not qualify as a miracle in her book.
Asher drove a Jeep, of course, and he had them follow him straight up a hill away from the ocean to the top of a bluff.
“What the . . .” Cam muttered as Alicia parked. A very square, very white home stood stacked on top of itself in square layers like a wedding cake. The house had a sloping lawn and a beautiful view of the ocean. It had an enclosed porch all the way around the bottom level, black shutters, and a black front door with a brass knocker in the shape of a dragonfly. A sign tacked to the mailbox read AVALON BY THE SEA.
They all stared at the house with their mouths open. “Are you kidding me?” asked Cam. The house was bigger than Lily’s.
“Make yourselves at home,” Asher called from the window of his Jeep. “I’ll come back to check on you guys later.” Then he drove toward a smaller cottage farther down the hill.
Even Cam felt euphoric and giddy as they clambered out of the car, giggling, and took off their shoes so they could feel the cool grass under their feet. Alicia turned up the radio and left Cumulus’s doors open so they could hear the music and dance the sacred volcano-goddess hula, to the tune of Pink’s “Please Don’t Leave Me.” Even Perry tried.
“Better, Perry!” Alicia exclaimed, as she was rolling through her own steps. “Right arm first, Cam.”
Of course Cam knew that. It was the first dance she’d ever learned when she was three, but she was trying to hide the blueberry spots. When she turned her wrist and fingers in the right posture toward the everlasting sunset, though, she noticed that two of the biggest ones had disappeared. There was no trace of them—not even a scab or a scar or the faded outline of a ring. Just the smooth, taut, brownish skin of her forearm. Must be the salt air, she concluded, because she was suddenly able to breathe a bit easier, too, that little wheeze on her exhale becoming less and less distinct.
The song ended, and Cam felt tired. She wanted to put her new lobster in the bathtub, so she walked up the porch steps with his box tucked under her arm while Alicia and Perry kept dancing. Cam listened to the waves crash in the distance as she thought of possible names for her new pet. Pinchy, Red, Scuttle . . . She was about to wipe her feet on the welcome mat when she looked down.
She got closer, sat down on the front stoop, and gasped.
“Mom! Mom! Perry! Come here quick!” she screamed.
They must have thought Cam was going to have a seizure because they sprinted to the front porch.
“Are you okay?” Alicia asked. She put her hands on her knees and tried to catch her breath. “What’s wrong?”
Cam pointed to the ground.
It was Tweety.
He was just sitting there, blinking innocently up at Cam, from the black, rubber welcome mat of Avalon by the Sea.
ELEVEN
“HEY, TWEETY, CAN YOU SAY FAIR-WEATHER FRIENDS?” ASKED CAM.
Her mom sat at the kitchen counter, cutting up bits of papaya and feeding them to Tweety. Alicia and Perry were convinced that his presence here was a miraculous sign that they’d come to the right place. For the last week, ever since they moved into the Maine house, they had been showering Tweety with attention, and Cam was sick of it. They hardly knew he existed when they lived in Florida. They never even called him by his name. It was always “that bird.”
Cam rummaged through the pantry for something to eat. They had gotten more and more comfortable in the house. At first they tiptoed around, making sure to cover their tracks, trying not to leave any evidence of their inhabitance. They stayed in just two or three rooms because they were not used to so much space. But slowly Asher, who seemed to find some excuse to fix something every day, assured them that no one was coming back. They eventually began to relax, spread out, leave a dish or two in the sink.
Cam grabbed the peanut butter and a spoon and dove in. “And did you have to pimp his cage?” she murmured before washing the peanut butter down with some milk. Alicia had bought him a new deluxe cage from the town’s pet store. It was black with white zebra stripes and decorated with a tiny purple couch and an orange shag area rug the size of a panty liner. “His old one was perfectly fine.” The cage sat at the end of the kitchen’s center island. The bright colors of Tweety’s décor clashed with the muted, mustardy brown–painted kitchen.
Alicia held another piece of papaya out for Tweety. “The entire twenty-two years I lived in New Jersey, I never even saw a papaya,” she said. “The fruit stand in town is a miracle. You would know about it if you ever left the house.”
“Finding a papaya at the fruit stand is not a miracle,” said Cam as she tried to open a cabinet that seemed painted shut. They should have just left the natural woodwork, she thought. Finally the cabinet unstuck with a smacking sound and swung open with an empty vibrating thud.
The house was nice enough on the inside, but it needed a woman’s touch. No w
oman would tolerate the painted-over cabinetry or the lamps made of anchors, the musty smell of wet wool, the tartan plaid bedding, or the ancient maps and star charts that hung on the wall beside the shellacked dead fish and deer-antler trophies.
“It’s a miracle in Maine, isn’t it, Tweety bird?” said her mom, puckering up next to the cage to give Tweety a kiss.
“Give me that. You’re not allowed to feed him anymore,” said Cam. “I don’t want you confusing him with your false allegiance.”
“He’s a miracle, Campbell.”
Tweety finding them in Maine was no miracle. Pets found their way home all the time. It was an instinct. The homing instinct. Hadn’t anyone heard of the homing instinct? Cam was thrilled that Tweety had a homing instinct, but she wasn’t giddy enough to call it a miracle. Even if it wasn’t their home that Tweety flew to. Even if he knew exactly where to find her. It was still an instinct. A migratory response.
Cam held out a piece of papaya for Tweety, and he turned his head, snubbing her. “Not you, too, Tweety bird, geez.”
She left Tweety downstairs with his new friend and climbed the spiral staircase back up to her room on the widow’s walk.
“Campbell, why don’t you hang out with us?” asked her mom. “What are you doing up there all alone all the time?”
“I just feel like being alone,” Cam said as she twisted up the stairs with her jar of peanut butter and a huge, two-foot stalk of celery from the “miracle” fruit stand.
Unlike most widow’s walks in Maine, which were just splintery railings on the roof, this one had a glass room—a cupola—in which the proprietor’s widow could sit for hours and pine for her husband unperturbed by the elements.
Cam had turned it into her bedroom. She loved it up here, suspended between the clouds and sea, between life and death, removed from anything close to reality.
It had just enough room for a mattress, a small wooden chair on which she set her laptop, and her suitcase, which she lived out of because there was no closet. Her suitcase was an actual case, not one of the sloppy nylon and plastic sacks of today that people have trouble recognizing on the baggage carousel. It was a proper forties crocodile bag that she had inherited from her grandmother. It still had stickers on it from when her great-grandparents took an ocean liner “overseas.” A faded orange one read, LISBON. A round green one said, BARCELONA.
She rummaged through it now, looking for something that would keep her warm. Dressing for warmth was such an alien concept to her. She now understood why people would deign to wear that shapeless utilitarian garb from Patagonia. What she wouldn’t give right now for a fleece jacket. She was even sort of fantasizing about a turtleneck. Or a down vest. She layered on what she had—a black scarf, a ripped gray cardigan, and her thin faux leather motorcycle jacket. Then she reached her hand into the suitcase’s yellow silk “unmentionables” pouch. Instead of the pair of wool socks she was hoping for, she pulled out the magical maple leaf from New Jersey and then her Flamingo List.
The paper was wrinkled and soft after having been crumpled up and flattened back out a few times since Cam’s fight with Lily in North Carolina. Cam had almost thrown it away, but something wouldn’t let her.
“Lose my virginity at a keg party,” she read at the top and wondered what she had really meant by that. She got a bad visual of some creepy jock slyly locking his parents’ master bedroom door as the music blared from the crowded living room. But that wasn’t what she’d meant.
When she wrote it, she had imagined a consensual, playful encounter underneath a pile of coats with some old friend like Jackson who would not take it too seriously and yet not completely ignore her when it was over. It would be something they could wink about in math class.
It frightened her a little, but she respected the idea of getting it over with and moving on. People didn’t get married at seventeen, and they didn’t wait until thirty to have sex. So it could make sense to do it quickly, like removing a Band-Aid. You could tear it off and be done with it, rather than picking and pulling at it for years, wondering about “where” and “when” and “with whom.”
She looked down the list and stopped at Have an awkward moment with my best friend’s boyfriend. When she wrote that one, she had imagined a flirtatious transgression. A onetime kiss. Not the weird moment with Ryan at the picnic. But that definitely counted, she thought. She crossed it off proudly, as if it were an actual accomplishment.
She opened the glass French doors of the cupola and walked outside. She listened to the sounds of Maine, which rather disappointingly and un-idyllically included the screeching giggles of her sister and the bikini-clad, tweeny-bopper friends Perry had already made in her one short week in Promise. The girls played on the public beach about a quarter mile away from the house, and yet Cam could hear them above the waves, above the wind, above the truck making its way down Main Street. She could hear them above just about everything else. She watched through the telescope that someone had left on the porch as they scrambled among the rocks like a colorful swarm of insects playing some game that included stealing and hiding the handsome lifeguard’s binoculars.
Not surprisingly, it had only taken Perry two days to infiltrate Promise’s sparkly pink tween underground. Once on the inside, she quickly rose to the top of its ranks, organizing a small Ugg-clad army of giggling attendants to do her bidding and make things right in Perryville. In just one week, Avalon by the Sea had been the host to two slumber parties in the basement, where poor Tweety had to be subjected to off-key, high-pitched karaoke girl-pop long into the night.
Cam shifted the telescope to take in the figures on Avalon by the Sea’s front lawn. Alicia’s Hula 101 class was fully enrolled, with ten lumpy retired women now filing in the front door wearing bright muumuus. Each carried a foil-wrapped loaf of something to enjoy after class with their tea. Cam’s mom had asked her to assist in teaching, but Cam had been dancing for so long, she wouldn’t know how to break it into its parts.
She focused the scope on the jolliest of her mom’s students, a dark-haired woman whose eyes squinted when she smiled. She let out a big belly laugh that Cam could hear all the way on top of the house. It’s been way too long since I’ve done that, thought Cam. Belly-laughed.
When the last of the hula dancers was in the house, Cam was about to walk away from the telescope. She knew she should. She tried. She looked up for a second and began to forcefully take a step back toward her room. But she had to do one more thing. She turned around, bent her head toward the eyepiece, and scanned the town’s brick storefronts, looking for Asher.
She found him sitting on a wooden bench in front of the lobster pound, taking a break from his shift and drinking a vanilla milkshake. He had placed the football he carried around with him underneath the bench and was reading something. Cam couldn’t catch the title of the book. A jock and a braniac, she thought. “A person can be too perfect, you know,” she said out loud.
She secretly loved how his calves, covered in soft, curly blond hair, dead-ended into his perpetually untied construction boots. She moved the scope up to view his face. He had a little beauty mark to the side of his right eye and a chicken pox scar in the middle of his forehead. It was his only imperfection.
Perhaps she’d meet up with him one day at a keg party, she joked to herself. He seemed sweet enough to help her take care of item number one on the List.
“Uh-oh,” Cam said. “Incoming . . .” A girl, leggy and blonde, like a Barbie doll in short white shorts, slid next to Asher on the bench and tossed her gleaming hair. She giggled and stroked his hand with her finger. She laughed and grabbed his shoulder. She guffawed and took hold of his knee.
Tossing the hair. Excessive touching. These are the top two Cosmo Signs that She’s Into You, and yet Asher, a seemingly healthy eighteen-year-old boy, was having none of it. He wasn’t outright rude or anything. He just sat there and politely answered her questions until she got up and strutted away without realizing that the dusty
bench had left a huge gray splotch on the back of her shorts.
Asher turned back to his book, which Cam could see now was A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. He took one last slurp of his milkshake, took the straw out of his mouth, squinted for a second, and then seemed to look directly into Cam’s scope. He winked. Then waved.
Cam hit the deck. She turned her head to the side and pressed her cheek into the scorching wooden planks, trying to disappear beneath the treeline.
A half-inch splinter lodged itself right into the meat of her pinky finger, but she was too mortified to feel anything. Had he really seen her?
If her mom thought she was isolating herself before, she hadn’t seen anything yet. Cam would never leave her room again.
At least she could cross off Dabble in some innocent stalking behavior from her Flamingo List.
TWELVE
HOMER NEEDED SOME FRESH SALTWATER.
Cam’s pet lobster lived alone in the basement of the house, where Cam had found an unused twenty-gallon tank built into the brick wall. She’d filled the bottom with sand and rocks, thrown in some faux coral and seaweed, and then added a big upside-down SpongeBob pineapple for Homer to hide in.
She tapped on the glass, and Homer climbed up the side of the tank to greet her. Then he swam around, performing big, loop-de-loop figure-eights that seemed more ice skaterly than lobsterly. He’s happy here, Cam thought. Or else he was trying to get out. She couldn’t really tell.
Cam had done some research on lobsters and found out that their genus and species name was Homerus americanus . Another fun fact about lobsters was that they were once, like Samoans, rumored to be cannibals. They got a bum rap because someone found lobster shell in the stomachs of some dead ones. But they didn’t actually eat each other. They just ate some of their own personal molted shells so that they’d have enough calcium to grow new ones. It was nutritional genius, not cannibalism. They were misunderstood creatures, and Cam immediately identified with Homer.