Sweethearts by Sara Zarr
Begin Reading
Table of Contents
A Preview of What We Lost
A Preview of The Lucy Variations
Newsletters
Copyright Page
In accordance with the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, the scanning, uploading, and electronic sharing of any part of this book without the permission of the publisher constitute unlawful piracy and theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), prior written permission must be obtained by contacting the publisher at [email protected]. Thank you for your support of the author’s rights.
For Mark
October 18, 1998, 3:30 p.m.
A DRIPPING FAUCET.
Crumbs and a pink stain on the counter.
Half of a skin-black banana that smells as old as it looks.
If I look at these things and at nothing else, concentrate on them and stay still, and don’t make any noise, this will be over soon and I can go home without Cameron’s dad ever knowing I’m here.
He is yelling.
About how Cameron is always late coming home from school. About the lizard cage needing to be cleaned and how he knew he should never have let Cameron have a pet because this is what happens — children forget and stop caring and expect their parents to take care of everything and, well, how would Cameron like it if he came home from school one day and the whole family had moved and not told him because they were tired of taking care of him, the way Cameron was tired of taking care of the lizard? I think we’ll do that, he says. Maybe tomorrow. Maybe in a week or a month. You won’t know until you come home from school and find the empty house. How would you like that?
I’m not supposed to be at Cameron’s house or anyone’s house. Not without my mother’s specific permission. But Cameron made me something for my birthday. He told me at school that it was too big to bring so he’d left it at home. I haven’t seen it yet. Maybe he baked me a cake. The idea of cake makes me think about my lunch box and the two chocolate chip cookies I saved, and the Milky Way bar I stole from the 7-Eleven on my way to school this morning by slipping it up my coat sleeve while the cashier reached to get cigarettes for someone. I could share it with Cameron; maybe even put a candle in it. If he didn’t bake a cake.
Leaves fall in front of the window over the kitchen sink. In a few weeks it will be Halloween. Thinking about what my costume could be helps me put Cameron’s father’s voice out of my head. The costume can’t cost money because we don’t have any. It can’t be hard to make because there’s only my mom and she has work and nursing school and doesn’t get to spend very much time at home. It can’t be anything from Harry Potter because Jordana Bennett and Charity Hays backed me against the wall in the girls’ room and told me they decided that certain people could be Harry Potter characters and if anyone else, for instance me, showed up in a Harry Potter costume they would make them walk naked across the school yard at recess.
You know what I think? I think this lizard wants to go free. If you’re not going to take care of it, it’ll have a better chance out in the wild. Or if you’re going to neglect it and let it die, why not just put it out of its misery now? Why wait?
I try not to imagine what Cameron’s dad is doing but pictures come into my head anyway, like the lizard being dangled by the tail or squeezed in two big hands.
A fly lands on the banana, stopping and starting in short bursts, and I make my mind go somewhere else again, to the kids I sometimes watch playing red light/green light at school. I’ve never played it myself, and they don’t invite me no matter how long I stand just a few feet away wishing hard that one of them will. My mom says that if I want friends I have to smile and be friendly, even though we both know things would be a lot easier if we were Mormon like practically everyone else at my school. Anyway, who should I smile at if no one will look at me? Cameron looks at me. He’s the only one who thinks I’m worth knowing.
Maybe I should get my coat and my lunch box off the living room couch and slip out before Cameron’s dad notices me. Cam can give me the present later. I move as silently and slowly as I can, staring down at the pink sneakers we got from the secondhand store before school started. That’s where we got my lunch box, too, which Jordana says is for babies. When I asked Mom if I could bring my lunch in a paper bag like everyone else, she said it was wasteful and more expensive in the long run.
The front door is just ten steps in front of me now. I pick up my coat and lunch box carefully, carefully, but the zipper of my coat brushes against the lunch box and makes a noise that to me is the loudest ever. No one comes, though, and I make it to the door. The knob is cool and I’m already thinking about my cookies and my Milky Way and how they’ll keep me company on the walk home, when I hear the voice of Cameron’s father behind me.
Where do you think you’re going?
CHAPTER 1
SOME MEMORIES ARE SLIPPERY.
There are things I want to remember about Cameron Quick that I can’t entirely, like the pajamas he wore when he used to sleep over, and his favorite cereal, or how it felt to hold his hand as we walked home from school in third grade. I want to remember exactly how we became friends in the first place, a definite starting line that I can visit again and again. He’s a story I want to know from page one.
My brain doesn’t seem to work that way. Most specific things about Cameron are fuzzy — the day we met, how we got so close, exact words we said to each other. There are only moments, snapshots, pieces of the puzzle. Once in a while I feel them right in my hand, real as the present, but usually it’s more like I’m grasping for vapor. I understand that you can never have the whole picture; inevitably, there’s stuff you don’t know, can’t know. But when it comes to Cameron I always want more than I have, would like to be able to take hold of at least one or two more pieces, if only because I’m convinced there are parts of myself hidden inside them.
Other memories stick, no matter how much you wish they wouldn’t. They’re like a song you hate but can’t ever get completely out of your head, and this song becomes the background noise of your entire life, snippets of lyrics and lines of music floating up and then receding, a crazy kind of tide that never stops.
The memory of my ninth birthday is that way. Sometimes it’s in pieces. Sometimes it’s an endless loop, from start to finish. But it’s always there.
I do have more memories of Cameron, things I know for sure, good and bad. Like:
The time we both got pulled out of class during the lice check and the whole rest of the year other kids called us the Cootie Twins.
The way he always got in trouble with our second-grade teacher, Mr. Duke, for not paying attention, for not sitting still, for having chronically untied shoes.
How us being together all the time made us a bigger target, the whole of our exile being greater than the sum of our outcast parts. How we didn’t care because we had each other.
The three days Cameron didn’t speak — to me or anyone else — after he missed a Tuesday of school and came back with his wrist in a cast. He still walked home with me, still sat next to me on the outside bench at lunch, a cheese sandwich in his good hand and between us the free cartons of milk we both got because of being low income. But he didn’t say a word the rest of the week. I’d ask him questions and he’d shake his head no, or nod yes, or just look at me with big eyes. When we saw each other again on Monday, he acted like everything was normal.
I remember that Cameron made me feel special, protected and watched over, loved. If Matt Bradshaw came around at recess to call me fat and smelly, Cameron would fight him, usually ending up in the principal’s office. When Jordana imitated my lisp or called me Fattifer, he stole her lunch and threw it away. One snowy day th
And there was the ring.
Right before the summer between second and third grade I was in the back of my mom’s brown Geo Prism, which was parked in front of the ugly building where we rented a one-bedroom apartment. Mom had gone inside to trade her Village Inn uniform for her nursing school scrubs before taking me to the babysitter. I remember that I had a library book about possums and I liked the way they walked on mossy logs and peered out from holes in trees and how their paws looked like little human hands. I tried saying it without a lisp. Possum, I whispered, putting my tongue behind my teeth the way I’d learned in speech therapy. Mossy possum paws. I’d be ready next time Jordana pointed to Sam Simpson and said, “Who’s that, Fattifer? I can’t remember his name.” She made me nervous, and it came out Tham Thimthon no matter how much I’d practice at home.
I didn’t want to think about Jordana, so I opened my lunch box where I knew there was a plastic bag half full of crackers that I’d taken from a first-grader’s lunch when she wasn’t looking. Stealing food was a bad habit, more of a compulsion really, and not only did I want a snack but also I needed to destroy the evidence, a process I enjoyed: holding the crackers in my mouth and feeling the hard, salty crunchiness dissolve into a slightly sweet mush. When I reached in my lunch box to get them, I found a small white cardboard box that I knew for a fact had not been there at lunch.
I slipped the lid off the box and lifted up a small square of cotton to see a ring with a silvery band and sparkly blue stone. Underneath the ring was a piece of paper that had been folded, folded, folded, and folded again to fit the box. I opened it. It was a drawing of a house with a fence around it, and a tree. Pencil-line rays from a round sun beamed down on two stick figures holding hands. Beneath the picture in a messy second-grade scrawl, it read:
To Jennifer,
I love you.
From Cameron Quick.
My mom got back in the car then, tossing her books onto the passenger seat and slamming the door. I watched her eyes in the rearview mirror as she asked, “Whatcha got there, kiddo?”
I closed my hand around the ring. “Nothing.”
Other things I knew about Cameron:
He did crazy stuff sometimes, like tell everyone he was going to walk home from school without touching the cement. Five or six kids followed us the day he said that, watching while Cameron jumped from hoods of cars to fence posts to grassy parking strips until the space between the hood of the car he was on and a bus stop bench was too far and he missed, spraining his ankle. Retard, they all said, laughing. Stupid retard.
There was another time he stopped talking. He didn’t come to school the day after my birthday, and then when he did come back, he was dead quiet for days. I felt like maybe he was mad at me, that somehow none of it would have happened if I hadn’t been there and I wanted to ask him what his dad did after I left but I could never get the words out. In the end, we didn’t say anything about what happened that day, to each other or anyone else.
The one thing you’d think I’d really remember is the biggest blank of all — the beginning of fifth grade, when he spent a whole week at our apartment. It was just him, me, and my mom, and I don’t recall much other than that he was there and that I didn’t feel alone for one second. We went to school together, came home together, ate all our meals together, watched TV together. It was like I had a real family.
A couple months later, he missed another day of school. I figured he’d come back; he always did. Then he didn’t come the next day, or the next day. I thought about what happened on my birthday and was afraid to ask anyone where Cameron might be until not knowing felt worse than knowing and I couldn’t stand it anymore. Finally I asked our teacher, Mrs. Jameson, about him, and she said, Oh, well, he’s moved, didn’t you know that?
What?
He moved, honey. Now go sit down so we can have current events.
I sat at my desk and let tears drip onto my notepaper while Jordana flicked staples at me every time Mrs. Jameson turned her back. Baby, she hissed. Big fat baby. What Jordana didn’t understand was that she couldn’t hurt me. Nothing could hurt me as much as knowing Cameron was gone and hadn’t said good-bye.
Over the next couple of weeks I imagined all sorts of explanations, like maybe he’d moved to a place without phones. Africa, I thought, looking at the sepia-bumpy map of the world Mrs. Jameson kept in the corner. Maybe he was on a boat on the Indian Ocean. Or in an Alaskan snow cave, wearing beaver pelts and eating whale meat. He’d be back, I thought, to tell me all about it.
Soon I lost my only other potential friend, a girl named Gretchen who was new that year and had found herself eating lunch with me every day — and Cameron, when he was there — the way new kids would before they figured out who the outcasts were.
I’m glad Cameron moved, she said one day. He was weird.
No he wasn’t.
Yes, he was. I didn’t like him hanging around us. She picked up her cafeteria fork, prissy and delicate, with a sideways glance toward Jordana, trying to impress her.
You don’t know anything about Cameron, I said to Gretchen. So don’t act like you do.
Sor-ry. I didn’t know he was your boyfriend. She looked at her lunch tray. Did you take my brownie?
You want to be friends with Jordana? Go ahead.
I’d picked up my food and walked off to sit alone. Later I took Gretchen’s brownie out of my jacket pocket, picked the lint off, and ate that, too. She did get in with Jordana and her friends, and told them all Cameron was my boyfriend and we were both crazy and gross and he’d probably grow up to be a school shooter. The next couple of months, I was alone every single day at school, alone at home while my mom worked, alone alone alone, wondering where Cameron had gone and what I was supposed to do without him. The times Mom was home to tuck me in I’d ask her where she thought he was. Every time I asked, she’d get very quiet until she’d finally say, I don’t know, honey. I just don’t know.
Then one day at recess Matt Bradshaw told me that Cameron had died. The story was that he and his family had ended up in San Jose, California, where he always got into fights at his new school. That wasn’t hard to believe, given the way he’d fought Matt more than once and stuck up for me with Jordana. Matt said Cam’s enemies dared him to jump off the school roof, and he did. They said his jump cleared the school yard and he landed in the street. A car was coming; it ran over him. End of story. Jordana and Matt made a point of telling me about how Cameron’s brains got smeared all over the road.
You’re lying, I’d said to Matt. You’re a liar.
Jordana shook her head. No, he’s not. My mom saw it on the news. Everybody knows. She looked around to the kids who were gathering around us now. Right?
A few of them nodded. One said, Yeah. Ask Mrs. Jameson. We knew a long time ago, but she told us not to tell you because she knew you’d cry, like you always do.
It would explain why he hadn’t written to me.
And he’s going to hell, Matt said. The outer darkness. Forever.
The world around me got fuzzy. The last thing I saw was the grainy image of Jordana pointing while she said, Watch out, everyone, Fattifer is going to faint. And I did. When I opened my eyes they were all standing around me, Matt laughing, Jordana curious, Gretchen looking a little bit frightened.
My elbow had hit the ground hard. My knee was bleeding. I started to cry, in front of them all, and no one offered to help me up or asked if I was all right or went to get an adult. Finally the yard monitor came over to see what everyone was staring at. I remember looking up at him for help, and all he said was, “Wipe your nose,” pulling me up by my hurt elbow and escorting me into the school building, where they asked and asked me what was wrong, but I couldn’t talk. I cried uncontrollably until someone finally called my mother
I asked her if it was true.
She said, I’m sorry, Jennifer, and sat with me, rubbing my back and bringing me cookie dough ice cream. Nothing she could say or do or give me to eat made me feel any better. I told her I was never going to school again. I told her in the best words I could at the time that I couldn’t imagine my life without Cameron Quick, without that one person who knew me, without the way he saw me and made me see myself.
She said not to worry, I still had her. As if having her had anything to do with anything. I’d always had her, I wanted to say, and what good had it done me? She told me I could take two days off of school but no more, that I’d just have to try harder to make some new friends. I rolled away from her then and didn’t say one more word about it.
That night I held an imaginary funeral for Cameron in my mind, with giant bouquets of flowers and big cakes and piles of little sandwiches and the Mormon Tabernacle Choir singing. He rested, peaceful, in his coffin, hands folded in front of him. Then I closed the lid, because it hurt too much not to, and Cameron and all my memories of him were lowered into the ground. And somehow I knew that if I was going to survive, the person I was had to be buried with him.
CHAPTER 2
BIRTHDAYS ARE HARD FOR ME, AND HAVE BEEN EVER SINCE my ninth. For obvious reasons. While other kids looked forward to the attention and the presents and the feeling of being one year closer to growing up, I always wished that October eighteenth could be wiped off the calendar, permanently.
My seventeenth birthday was no exception.
In the moments between waking up and opening my eyes, I forgot what day it was. I ran through my usual morning checklist: what I would wear, which books I needed to take to school, options for breakfast, possible hairstyles and time requirements for executing them. I didn’t need to look at the clock on my nightstand to see what time it was — I always woke up at the same time, my need for routine humming even at a cellular level. It would be six, give or take five minutes. I opened my eyes to double-check anyway; no point in taking a chance. Then I saw it — a pink envelope resting against the clock, with my name in my mom’s handwriting and her signature doodle of a smiley face inside a heart and hand-drawn birthday balloons.