Girl in Snow(27)

Crowds of kids jostled with their backpacks and squeaked their shoes. Cameron tried to Untangle—in, two, three, out, two, three—but Ronnie tightened the straps of his own backpack and a pen clattered to the floor. Ronnie did not move to pick it up, only drew a reddened hand across his clammy forehead.

“Fine.” Ronnie pushed past Cameron, knocking him in the shoulder. “Don’t answer. When people ask, I’ll just tell them yes, you are a fucking freak.”

After one more suspicious glance toward Mr. O’s office, Ronnie disappeared into the swarm of stares. Cameron picked up the pen that had fallen out of Ronnie’s backpack. A Bic, with no cap on the end. It dripped at the head, where ink bled down metal. Cameron would keep it in the Collection of Pens, where he had two other Bics belonging to Ronnie Weinberg.

Cameron kept the Collection of Pens in an old shoebox at the top of his closet. When he felt bottled up, he would line up the pens in chronological order of acquisition and imagine how certain hands looked holding certain pens. It was like curating a museum of things he knew about other people, and the Bics and gel pens made him feel like those people and their hands were right there with him.



Last summer, Ronnie and Cameron went to the park. It was misting outside, the sort of rain that came down in drops so tiny you couldn’t catch them in an open palm. Ronnie kept a Bic pen in his pocket (white, chewed at the end). He twirled it compulsively as they walked. He wore plaid shorts that fell below his naked hips. A few wiry sprouts of black hair curled just above the button—Ronnie never wore underwear.

“My mom’s been such a bitch lately,” Ronnie said. “Menopause or something. That girl shit makes me want to kill myself. Can you imagine? Bleeding out your pisshole every month.”

Cameron didn’t think it was their pissholes they bled from. Mom had explained it once, but any discussion of female anatomy was dangerous around Ronnie, who truly didn’t care whether Cameron talked or not.

They sat on the swings, popping open cans of Mountain Dew with cracks, bubbles, hisses of cool steam. Ronnie pulled out his cell phone, squinting as he typed a text message. Ronnie had his own cell phone, one of the first kids at school to be so lucky. A green Razr flip phone, sleek and sophisticated. Cameron didn’t like to be around people who texted without his own piece of plastic to shield him. We already have a phone at home, Mom said. We don’t need anything fancy. She finally bought a cell phone for emergencies, but the battery was never charged.

“This playground sucks,” Ronnie said, putting the phone back in his pocket. “Do you remember when we were kids and we had to play on this shit? It looks so sad. God, though, I could get used to scheduled naps and arts and crafts again.”

Cameron faked a laugh. He looked at the mountains. They loomed on the outskirts of town, persistent shadows that stood and watched. The mountains probably found it all amusing, these families in their beige houses lined up on the street like stationary soldiers. The mountains made Cameron feel so scrubby.

“And Beth DeCasio! During art class, do you remember? She’d paint those watercolor pictures of horses that looked like Satan. Swear to God, if I could get my hands on one of those now, I’d worship it like the fucking devil. Beth got hot this summer, didn’t she?”

“I guess.”

“Her tits look like water balloons. You could just pop ’em.”

Ronnie had bitten his fingernails down to ten circular bumps, red at the edges and brown underneath. Now, he used them to scratch off a flaking piece of scalp.

“How would you fuck her?” Ronnie asked.

“What do you mean?”

Cameron had never thought about fucking Beth DeCasio. Not that she wasn’t pretty. Beth DeCasio was very pretty, with her shiny black hair and tight tank tops and the way she walked in small skirts.

“You know,” Ronnie said. “Like, doggie style? Rough? Passionate? Sensual?”

Last year, Mom found the porn magazine in the top drawer of Cameron’s dresser. It was the three-year-old issue of Playboy Ronnie had stolen from his dad. The issue with Rayna Rae in the center, legs spread—Cameron spent hours wondering about the pink between her legs, so slippery and rubbery, something you’d want to touch just to see how it would feel.

Cameron came home from school to the magazine, open on the coffee table and covered in sticky notes dictating the portions Mom disapproved of. You can’t expect women to look like this. You see the shape here? She paid thousands of dollars for those breasts. They had a long talk about changing bodies and the objectification of women and Cameron couldn’t remember the rest of the conversation. He hadn’t looked at Mom once throughout the entirety of the talk, because this was the most shameful and miserable and embarrassing moment of his life. When it was over, Mom didn’t hug him or kiss him on the forehead. She took one step toward him, hesitated, and turned around, murmuring something about dinner in twenty minutes to mask the fact that Mom and Cameron were changing.

She was a woman. He was a man. This would always exist between them. She could lecture him all she wanted—about fake breasts and loving people gently, differently—but all this aside, neither of them had any control over what kind of man Cameron turned out to be.

Cameron had just watched internet porn for the first time, and it made him want to cry. Those shiny women—their springy bodies that went smack, smack, smack. He watched with a tingling and urgent fascination. It wasn’t love, he knew, because love was not supposed to hurt anyone, but it felt somehow related. It rose like love, it swelled. Sex. Mystery of mysteries. The biggest hurt.