Girl in Snow(41)

The beginning of Tangled enveloped Cameron—a hissing, furious cloud.



Cameron had not chosen Lucinda. She was simply brighter than anyone else. And Cameron’s Collections—Lucinda had planted them, and they’d grown and made him better. He liked her tan body and her ski-jump nose. And Lucinda had that pull. Like she’d unraveled his intestines, tied them to her bedpost, and was tugging him back there, constantly, inch by painstaking inch.

Lucinda kept a figurine balanced carefully on her nightstand, and Cameron had loved to watch them together. A ballerina in a purple tutu, with one leg stretched in an arabesque—a term Cameron knew from Mom. The ballerina wore a pink V-necked leotard, her blond hair pulled into a tight ceramic bun. She had pinprick red lips and was no bigger than Cameron’s hand, palm to pinky, if he flexed. Lucinda would sit with the figurine before she went to sleep, like she was daring the ballerina to move.

Cameron loved to watch them during his Statue Nights. The little dancer stood guard over Lucinda as she slept, a toy version of the girl—graceful, slender, so controlled. The easy elegance of this pas de deux.



“Hey,” Jade was saying. “Yo. Dude.”

Cameron was lying on the ground. His winter coat was covered in dust and his head ached. It must have hit the floor. Jade kneeled beside him, blurry in the light of the single stained-glass window: a shepherd leading his herd up a shaggy grass hill.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “Jesus. I didn’t mean to upset you. Are you okay? Do you need, like, a hospital or something?”

Cameron sat up, dizzy. The flat ceiling of the chapel above him did not look holy.

“No; we have to go,” he said. “The funeral.”

“We still have an hour,” Jade said. “Come on. Let’s get you out of here.”



The man at Tasty’s Ice Cream eyed Jade’s bare legs and her boots, which were covered in sawdust and plaster. Cameron ordered a small mint chocolate chip cup and pulled a crumpled five from the bottom of his backpack. I got it, he told Jade, because he’d never been to ice cream with a girl before and it seemed like the right thing to do. But the total came out to $5.95, so Jade dug through the pockets of her camouflage jacket for change, which she counted in her cupped palm.

There was a bench outside, between the ice-cream store and the church. They sat in the cold. Jade stuck out her tongue and licked the dripping sugar from her spoon. The ice cream was too sweet. Cameron put the cup down on the bench and tried not to think about it melting in his stomach.

“Are you okay?” Jade said. “I mean, you were only out for a second. But I’m really sorry.”

“I’m fine,” Cameron told her. “It happens sometimes.”

“I just thought maybe that place would help you talk. Always does for me.”

Cameron snuck a glance at Jade’s pink plastic Hello Kitty watch. Thirty minutes still. You have to go, Mom had told him last night when she’d laid his dress pants out on his desk chair. People will ask questions otherwise. And this, more than anything, filled Cameron with impossible dread.

“Tell me about your dad,” Jade said.

“Please,” Cameron said. “I don’t want to talk about the police.”

“Am I being insensitive?”

“Yes.”

“Well, I hate the police, too. Especially here. It’s fucked, the whole system. How your dad walked like that, how technically he was innocent, when everyone knew he almost killed that girl.”

“Please,” Cameron said.

“Do you think he did it?” Jade asked.

“Yeah,” Cameron told her.

“And you still love him, right?” No one had ever posed this question before, and it made Cameron’s trapped little heart want to shrink deeper in its cage.

“I don’t know.”

“It’s okay, you know,” Jade said. “I mean, it’s okay to love someone who does something bad. Just because you do something bad doesn’t mean you’re not a good person. Look at it this way: wouldn’t you rather be a good person who does one awful thing than a bad person who does a bunch of good ones?”

Cameron thought of Lucinda then. How he’d twist the corner of his comforter into a lump shaped slightly like a torso and wrap his body around it. Just tight enough to feel the contours. He’d convince himself, in the soft blue of his bedroom, that the comforter was warm, and the cotton pressing against him was not his blanket. Instead, lavender pajama pants. And under those pajama pants was skin, hot, wet skin, skin that folded in all the right places, that smelled like vanilla lotion, the sort of skin you could see only when you’d knocked down some unspoken barrier. Boy—man—in each push he came closer to the yellow curls of hair he imagined spooling across the pillow like fine strands of yarn.

Jade angled her body on the bench to face him, bare legs pointed toward the street, abdomen pudged over the waistline of her dress. Cameron felt bad for her then, sitting in her combat boots with no real battle to fight. The acne on her forehead looked on the verge of bursting, dozens of pustules clustered around her hair. A filmy line of chocolate had surrounded her mouth, like his grandma’s lipstick when she talked too much.

He watched as Jade dragged the plastic spoon across the paper bottom of the cup. They sat like that. At 11:31, Jade said, We should go, and Cameron said, Yes, and they threw their ice-cream cups in the trash can on the curb.