Cam left when we left. He got up as soon as he saw Jeremiah coming over to get me. "So long, Flavia," he said.
I started to unzip his hoodie, and he said, "That's all right. You can give it to me later."
"Here, I'll give you my number," I said, holding my hand out for his phone. I'd never given a boy my phone number before. As I punched in my number, I felt really proud of myself for offering it to him.
Backing away, he put the phone into his pocket and said, "I would have found a way to get it back without your number. I'm smart, remember? First prize in oration."
I tried not to smile as he walked away. "You're not that smart," I called out. It felt like fate that we'd met. It felt like the most romantic thing that had ever happened to me, and it was.
I watched Conrad say good-bye to Red Sox girl. She gave him a hug, and he hugged her back, but not really. I was glad I had ruined his night, if only a little bit.
On the way to the car a girl stopped me. She wore her blondish-brown hair in two pigtails, and she had on a pink low-cut shirt. "Do you like Cam?" the girl asked me casually. I wondered how she knew him--I thought he'd been a nobody just like me.
"I barely even know him," I told her, and her face relaxed. She was relieved. I recognized that look in her eyes--dreamy and hopeful. It must have been the way I looked when I used to talk about Conrad, used to try to think of ways to insert his name into conversation. It made me sad for her, for me.
"I saw the way Nicole talked to you," she said abruptly. "Don't worry about her. She sucks as a person."
"Red Sox girl? Yeah, she kind of does suck at being a person," I agreed. Then I waved good-bye to her as Jeremiah and Conrad and I made our way to the car.
Conrad drove. He was completely sober, and I knew he had been all along. He checked out Cam's hoodie but he didn't say anything. We didn't speak to each other once. Jeremiah and I both sat in the backseat, and he tried to joke around, but nobody laughed. I was too busy thinking, remembering everything that had happened that night. I thought to myself, That might have been the best night of my life.
In my yearbook the year before, Sean Kirkpatrick wrote that I had "eyes so clear" he could "see right into my soul." Sean was a drama geek, but so what. It still made me feel good. Taylor snickered when I showed it to her. She said only Sean Kirkpatrick would notice the color of my eyes when the rest of the guys were too busy looking at my chest. But this wasn't Sean Kirkpatrick. This was Cam, a real guy who had noticed me even before I was pretty.
I was brushing my teeth in the upstairs bathroom when Jeremiah came in, shutting the door behind him. Reaching for his toothbrush, he said, "What's going on with you and Con? Why are you guys so mad at each other?" He hopped up onto the sink.
Jeremiah hated it when people fought. It was part of why he always played the clown. He took it upon himself to bring levity to any situation. It was sweet but also kind of annoying.
Through a mouthful of toothpaste I said, "Um, because he's a self-righteous neo-maxi-zoom-dweebie?"
We both laughed at that. It was one of our little inside jokes, a line from The Breakfast Club that we spent repeating to each other the summer I was eight and he was nine.
He cleared his throat. "Seriously, though, don't be so hard on him. He's going through some stuff."
This was news to me. "What? What stuff?" I demanded.
Jeremiah hesitated. "It's not up to me to tell you."
"Come on. We tell each other everything, Jere. No secrets, remember?"
He smiled. "I remember. But I still can't tell you. It's not my secret."
Frowning, I turned the faucet on and said, "You always take his side."
"I'm not taking his side. I'm just telling his side."
"Same thing."
He reached out and turned the corners of my mouth up. It was one of his oldest tricks; no matter what, it made me smile. "No pouting, Bells, remember?"
No Pouting was a rule Conrad and Steven had made up one summer. I think I was eight or nine. The thing was, it only applied to me. They even put a sign up on my bedroom door. I tore it down, of course, and I ran and told Susannah and my mother. That night I got seconds on dessert, I remember. Anytime I acted the slightest bit sad or unhappy, one of the boys would start yelling, "No pouting. No pouting." And, okay, maybe I did pout a lot, but it was the only way I could ever get my way. In some ways it was even harder being the only girl back then. In some ways not.
Chapter twenty - two
That night I slept in Cam's hoodie. It was stupid and kind of sappy, but I didn't care. And the next day I wore it outside, even though it was blazing hot out. I loved how the sleeves were frayed, the way it felt lived in. It felt like a boy's.
Cam was the first boy to pay attention to me like that, to be up front about the fact that he actually wanted to hang out with me. And not be, like, embarrassed about it.
When I woke up, I realized that I had given him the house number. I didn't know why. I could have given him my cell phone number just as easily.
I kept waiting for the phone to ring. The phone never rang at the summer house. The only people who called the house phone were Susannah, trying to figure out what kind of fish we wanted for dinner, or my mother, calling to tell Steven to put the towels in the dryer, or to get the grill going.
I stayed on the deck, sunning and reading magazines with Cam's hoodie balled up in my lap like a stuffed animal. Since we kept the windows open, I knew I'd hear if the phone rang.
I slathered myself with sunscreen first, and then two layers of tanning oil. I didn't know if it was an oxymoron or what, but better safe than sorry was how I figured it. I set myself up with a little station of cherry Kool-Aid in an old water bottle, plus a radio, plus sunglasses, and magazines. The sunglasses were a pair that Susannah had bought me years ago. Susannah loved to buy presents. When she went off for errands, she'd come home with presents. Little things, like this pair of red heart sunglasses she said I just had to have. She knew just what I'd love, things I hadn't even thought of, had certainly never thought of buying. Things like lavender foot lotion, or a silk quilted pouch for tissues.
My mother and Susannah had left early that morning for one of their art gallery trips to Dyerstown, and Conrad, thank God, had left for work already. Jeremiah was still asleep. The house was mine.
The idea of tanning sounds so fun in theory. Laying out, soaking up sun and sipping on soda, falling asleep like a fat cat. But then the actual act of it is kind of tedious and boring. And hot. I would always rather be floating in an ocean, catching sun that way, than lying down sweating in the sun. They say you get tanner faster when you're wet, anyhow.
