“Tuna Tartare,” she said flatly, stopping behind a bucket of ice cream that I wouldn’t have eaten based on its grayish color alone. My stomach rolled. “What’s your most popular?”
Camped out in front of the cash register, Callum sighed loud enough for me to hear at the opposite end of the store.
“Vanilla lavender,” she answered, managing to flatten her voice even more.
“If you get something with vanilla listed in the flavor after this, I will never let you forget it,” he said.
“You told me to go with my gut.”
“If your gut is telling you to order vanilla in a place named Ice Cream Apocalypse, you need to get your head checked.”
“Don’t you mean my gut checked?” I lifted an eyebrow at him and stopped in front of a flavor that had gotten my attention the first pass.
Callum tapped his wallet against the counter, waiting. “That, too.”
“I’ll have the honey jalapeño, please,” I announced proudly because, you know, deciding on an ice cream flavor made the list of top ten proudest moments.
The employee’s face read, Finally. “Single or double?”
“Or triple?” Callum added, his voice matching the Finally tone.
“Double.”
“Bowl, sugar, or waffle cone?” the employee asked.
“Or chocolate-sprinkle-dipped waffle cone?” Callum added.
I rolled my eyes at him. For someone pushing me to hurry up and make a decision, he wasn’t helping. “Waffle, plain.” I waited, just in case she was going to fire off another question, but when she got to work scooping a couple of fist-size balls into a waffle cone, I figured the grand ice cream inquisition was over.
“Happy now?” I said to Callum as another employee handed him his ice cream cone.
“When my blood pressure’s recovered, I’ll let you know.”
“You need to work on your patience,” I said, thanking the server when she handed me my ice cream cone. She disappeared quickly after that, before she had to deal with another stream of questions from me.
“You need to work on your decision-making process.”
When the other employee rang up the cones, Callum handed over a twenty before I could finish digging in my pocket. “I can get mine.”
“Already taken care of.” Callum pocketed his change after dropping a tip in the jar, grabbed a few napkins, and waggled his brows at me. “Now you owe me.”
After that, we meandered down the sidewalk. Flagstaff was a neat city. Not what a person pictured when they imagined Arizona—no cacti, endless desert, or blistering heat—but more the kind of place a person would imagine in Colorado or Wyoming. Outdoorsy and welcoming.
As much as I’d gotten used to Camp Kismet, it was a relief to be away from it. A relief to not be a counselor or a big sister on call 24-7 or a referee for her parents. It was nice to just be…me. Phoenix. Someone who didn’t feel like this world and the next one over were resting on my shoulders.
“So it doesn’t seem as if your family’s embracing the whole come-together spirit of camp,” Callum started, glancing over at me to check my reaction.
I exhaled and took a bite of ice cream. Embracing it? Yeah, right, more like repelling it. “You caught that in the dining hall, did ya?”
“I think I caught it, yeah. Literally.” He paused in front of a closed coffee shop and turned to face me.
I kept walking. I wanted to keep moving, especially if we were going to start talking about the plague known as the Ainsworths. “Thanks for that, by the way. I didn’t have much of a chance to thank you for saving—”
“Your gulliver?”
His abrupt words made me laugh. Never in a million years had I imagined I could laugh when talking about my family. “That and my pride.”
“What’s the deal with your family, though? I mean, your parents are still together and you guys obviously have money.”
“Everything’s the ‘deal’ in my family.” Callum caught up to me after a few steps. “My parents probably aren’t going to be together much longer, unless divine intervention steps in, and whatever you think we possess is about to be repoed or sold at auction.”
It was surreal, having this kind of conversation with a person who’d been a stranger two weeks ago. It had taken me weeks before I could work up the nerve to tell Emerson about what was going down in the domestic home front, and here I was, spilling it to some guy who was my boss slash friend slash question mark.
“I’m sorry. That’s got to be rough on you.” He offered me his half-eaten cone suddenly, like he should have offered me a taste fifty licks ago.
I don’t know why—I’d shared plenty of ice cream cones with plenty of people, germs be damned—but this felt different. Kind of like he was offering me a piece of him, and I couldn’t decide if I should take it. Weird.
“Thanks,” I said, giving his ice cream a taste. It was just ice cream, not a promise ring. “Not bad. I’d offer you a taste of mine, but I already know honey is too sweet for you.”
His nose crinkled when I lifted my cone toward him. “Thanks anyway.” He shook his head and stepped a foot away. “What are you going to do if they get a divorce?”
“Survive. Adapt. Do whatever I have to before I graduate and head off to college.”
“Rise from the ashes.” I could hear the smirk in his voice, so I elbowed him.
“Or I could crap on the sidewalks. Dove.” I elbowed him again.
He gave me a wider berth, laughing. “Sounds like you’ve got it all figured out.”
I wanted to answer, Hardly. I stayed quiet, though. Most days, I wondered if I had anything figured out. When the house was foreclosed on, where would we live? Would I still be in the same school district? Would we have to move to a different state? Would I ever see my friends again? And what about Harry and his private school?
“Speaking of having it all planned…,” I started, knowing it was time to shift the conversation before I collapsed into a panic attack. “What about you?”
Half his face lifted, like he’d been caught. “I’ve got everything planned that’s important.”
“Like your future,” I pressed.
He sighed. “You’re not subtle, you know that?”
“I know that.”
He tossed the last bite of cone into his mouth and crunched it like he had a serious issue with it. “If that’s your way of asking me if I’ve decided on the college issue, no, I haven’t. Since I’ve been tossing the idea around for two years, it’s pretty unlikely I’m going to come to a decision in two days.”
I stopped in front of an outdoor clothing store. He kept walking. “Come on, I just opened up about my mess of a life. You can’t return the favor?”
“I don’t know if I’m going to college or not. That’s the answer I gave you before, and that’s my answer now.” He kept walking, but his pace slowed. He was waiting for me to catch up.
“Okay, so you don’t know if you’re going to college. That’s not what I want to know.” I jogged up to him and matched his pace. He wouldn’t look at me, but at least he wasn’t glaring holes into the sidewalk. “But do you want to go to college?”
“That’s the exact same question,” he replied.
“No, it’s not.”
“They’re the same.”
I took the last bite of my ice cream. “They’re different.”
“Same.”
“Different.”
He groaned and shot a look at me. “You’re persistent, too. And annoying.”
“Still waiting…” I shrugged. “Come on. I shared my story. Sharing is caring.”
His body tensed as if he was bracing for an impact. “I want to go to college, sure—I’d be the first in my family to go.” His pace slowed to a crawl, like he was pulling a sled holding a family of elephants. “But if I want to go or not is irrelevant since I’m pretty solid on the fact I won’t be able to go to college.”
“Why not?”
He sighed
in frustration because, yeah, I’m sure it was so unexpected that I’d ask a follow-up question. “For reasons A, B, and C.”
I shoved my hands into my pockets. “So you slacked off the first couple of years of high school. Big deal. Everyone does.” Callum shot me a look, not buying the everyone-slacks-off theory. “You worked hard last year, and you’ll work hard this year, and you’ll wind up with a decent GPA. Plus, you can run a mean four and eight hundred, so that will count for something. Screwing up a few classes isn’t a reason to give up on college if you really want to go.”
Callum rolled to a stop in front of what looked like an old Catholic church. The kind with lots of wide steps leading up to wooden double doors. It even had a steeple. He collapsed down on one of the lower steps and clasped his hands together. “It was more than a ‘few’ classes, and that is only reason A.”
“What’s B and C?” I lowered onto the same stair beside him, keeping a safe distance between us.
“Reason B is I don’t want to just bail on my mom. Summers are one thing, but four years is a long time, and I’m all she’s got left. My dad…my brother…they all left her. I couldn’t do the same.” His hands were clenched so tightly together, veins were starting to pop through the skin.
“But you’d be going to college. You could still visit. Weekends, holidays, et cetera, et cetera. You wouldn’t be bailing on her for good like your dad or getting thrown in the slammer like your brother.” As I replied, I started to understand why Callum was such an enigma. “I get what you’re saying, and I think it’s kind of heroic of you to want to take care of your mom, but I can’t imagine she’d want you to just give up on your dreams so you could hang around and eat dinners together.” When I peeked over at him, he was looking up at the sky.
“It might not be the greatest reason in the world, but there are a lot worse reasons than wanting to take care of my mom.”
I nodded. He was right. How hard had I worked to get where I was, and how many times had I contemplated hanging close to home so I could keep an eye on Harry? “So what’s reason C?”
The stretch of silence that followed confirmed that this was the big reason.
He clasped his hands together and shrugged. “I bomb tests.”
“You bomb tests?” I repeated slowly, wondering if I’d heard him wrong. “What kind of tests? Certain subjects?” I scooted an inch closer.
“Any test. Any subject.”
I paused, thinking. Callum personified calm-under-pressure in every situation I’d seen him in; I couldn’t picture him losing his cool when a test got slammed down in front of him.
“Really?” I asked.
He nodded.
“But you said you did well last year. You had to have done well on tests to do that. Junior year was a nightmare.”
“I did well last year in comparison to the years before that, but I still bombed when it came to test time. I just had enough teachers who took pity on me and were willing to let me make up tests and give me enough extra-credit assignments that I made it.” He lifted the collar of his flannel up around his neck. “High school might be one thing, but I’d be an idiot to expect the same kind of treatment in college. I’d flunk out before midterms of my first semester.”
“Aren’t you the optimist,” I muttered as I rubbed my hands together.
“I’m a realist, Phoenix. If I can’t pass a test with any kind of regularity, I’m not going to make it through college, so why shouldn’t I save myself the misery and just accept it? There are plenty of things I can do that don’t require a college degree.”
“I never said there wasn’t, but you’re the one who admitted you wanted to go to college if you could.”
“Which I can’t.” His voice actually sounded less irritated than it had at the start of this college talk. Progress.
“So you’ve got a few hurdles to jump—big deal.” I angled my body toward him.
“What you call hurdles, the rest of the world calls blockades.”
I groaned, kind of wanting to shake some sense into him or out of him. “Even if you did know one hundred percent that you couldn’t hack it in college, wouldn’t you at least want to try?” I paused to let that sink in good and deep. “Wouldn’t you regret it forever if you didn’t give it a chance?”
Callum thought about that for a minute. Then he shook his head. “The devil on my shoulder is telling me no.”
“What’s the angel on the other side telling you?” I nudged the toe of my boot against the toe of his boot.
“That I’m an idiot for even thinking about it.”
“Come on. I can help you with this stuff. I’m a pro at tests.” I tapped my head, like that was all the proof he needed. If the Lame Police were on duty, they would have come and hauled me away. “You taught me the ins and outs of camp stuff, and I’ll show you the ins and outs of owning a test.”
I was expecting him to object right away. Instead, he was quiet, like he was actually thinking about it. “You already have to spend all day with me training and running. You really want to spend another minute more than you have to with me?”
I waved him off. “I don’t mind. Besides, it will be kind of great getting to boss you around for once. Lecturing you on what to do and what not to do.” I rolled my fingers together all cryptic-like. “It will actually be pretty damn cathartic.”
He shifted on the step, tilting his head so he could look at me. “You’re sure?”
“In case you confused it for my unsure face, this is my sure one.” I circled my index finger around my face a few times.
When he looked at me like he wasn’t sure, I stuck my tongue out at him.
That got a smile out of him at least.
“So what’s life like at home?” I asked, changing the subject because I could tell the test issue made him uncomfortable.
“In Inglewood?” he said, shrugging. “It’s pretty nice, actually.” I didn’t say anything. “I know, right? People hear ‘Inglewood’ and they think gangs, violent crime, and police brutality, but that’s mostly just the media talking. The soul food is legit, it’s one of the few cities in California where the crime rate is actually going down, and it’s a place a person can afford a mortgage.” He shrugged again. “It’s home.”
“What’s your life like?” I scooted closer.
“Different. The same.”
“Do people treat you like you’re some deity back there, too?”
He chuckled, shaking his head. “That falls into the different category. The much different end of that scale.”
“Really?” I couldn’t picture Callum any less amazing than how he was here.
“At home, I work, I go to school, I help my mom around the house. Here, I just get to do the things I love, all day, every day.” He tipped his head to look up at the sky. He smiled. “Back home, I’m more grunt worker than deity.”
“Don’t you miss this, though? Not a lot of whitewater to raft or rocks to climb, right?”
“Yeah, not a lot of wide-open spaces in my hood.” He held his arms out like this church stoop in quiet Flagstaff was his hood.
“So what do you do when you’re stuck in a concrete jungle for ten months every year?”
The corners of his eyes lined. “I’m pretty much a regular at the indoor climbing wall and log a lot of highway miles on the weekends getting out of town and trying to find any patch of earth that has some kind of elevation to it.”
I sighed, feeling kind of bad for him. He was supposed to be in the wild, not enclosed in some maze of urban sprawl.
“How do you go from here to there?” I asked.
His forehead creased. “I make a lot of good memories here I take back with me there.”
“Like flying down a mountain on a bike at fifty miles an hour or seeing how many class-five rapids you can make your bitch?”
He smiled at me, nodding. “That, or sitting on the steps of some old church and having a crazy-flavored ice cream with some girl who hasn’t figured out I’
m kind of a pain in the ass.”
“You’ve been gone for almost a month and my life has shriveled into nothingness. When are you escaping that place?” Emerson whined on the other end of the phone.
“It’s not that bad. Plus, I’m making decent money, so I’ll definitely have a set of wheels by the end of the summer.”
“ ‘It’s not that bad,’ ” Emerson repeated. “Okay, where the hell is my best friend, Phoenix, and who are you?”
I rolled my eyes as I stepped outside the cabin. Harry had had a busy day canoeing and learning how to make a tepee, so he’d crashed after dinner. Dad and Mom were locked behind their bedroom door, arguing, so I’d dropped my fancy sound-canceling headphones over his ears before snagging my backpack and bolting for the door.
“You should come visit sometime if you want. That way you can see for yourself why this place doesn’t blow like I thought it would. Really.”
“Yeah, not happening.” Emerson sounded like she was cringing. “Bugs, dirt, snakes, families, singing around a campfire, and a serious shortage of cute boys. There is nothing about that equation that says summer vacation.”
“Who said there weren’t any cute boys up here?”
Emerson was quiet just long enough that I realized I’d made a fumble. So far, I’d managed to steer clear of the Callum topic with her since I wasn’t sure how to explain him to her when I couldn’t explain him to myself. Or, at least, I couldn’t explain him and me. Did we have something? Did he recognize it or was it pathetically one-sided? If we had something, would anything even become of it? If something did become of it, what would happen at the end of summer? And if, against all the high school romance odds, we managed to make it past senior year, what would happen after? I was off to college; he was deep in undecided land.
“That’s it, isn’t it?” Emerson hissed. “There’s a boy who’s come into the picture. Right?”
I winced. I couldn’t lie to my best friend, but I wasn’t eager to try to explain Callum and me. “Maybe?”
“I knew it,” Emerson squealed. “What’s his name? How old is he? Where does he live when he’s not camped out in some rustic, rodent-ridden cabin in Arizona?”