Girl in Snow(8)

He could ask Jade why she dressed like that. He could ask what she thought about first thing in the morning—or why her parents had named her Jade, because it was unique and he liked it and he wanted interesting names for his kids someday, too. He could ask Jade what her favorite school subject was, but that seemed dumb and cliché. He could ask if she’d ever been in love, but he had enough sense to know that was too personal.

“Did that hurt?” Cameron finally said, because Jade was glaring at him, harsh, expectant. He pointed to the thin silver ring that wound around her lower lip.

“Yeah, it hurt a little.”

“Oh.”

“Want to see my tattoo?”

“Sure.”

Jade held out her left wrist. The outline of a dragon had been etched in black, its wings unfurled across white skin. The ink rippled and danced where it spread over blue veins.

“Is it real?” Cameron asked.

“Usually, I would say yes. I tell most people it is. But you keep looking at me with that intense face, so, no, it’s not real. I draw it on every morning.”

Cameron couldn’t figure out if this was the nicest or meanest thing someone had ever said to him.

“So,” she said. “Did you actually stalk the dead girl?”

“Lucinda.”

“Oh, I super don’t care.”

Cameron hated the word “stalk.” He had other words for his relationship with Lucinda, but they were words no one else would understand. Words like vibrant, frantic, twinkling, aching—

The door to Principal Barnes’s office opened and a woman with hair pinned tight against her head stepped out.

“Jade?” she said. “We’re ready for you.”

Jade rolled her eyes at Cameron like they were sharing some joke. As she stood up, Cameron caught a whiff of grape shampoo, and it occurred to him that he should have rolled his eyes in response, but Jade had already started to walk away. He didn’t expect her to look back.



Cameron had started playing Statue Nights when he was twelve years old. The summer after sixth grade, he realized he could pop out the screen in his bedroom window. The jump to the planter below was doable, if he bent his knees at the right moment.

The game of Statue Nights began with the Hansens, next door. Cameron would stand on the curb outside their house for hours, watching them eat microwaved food and argue. Mrs. Hansen would put her hair in curlers like a woman in a 1950s sitcom, and Mr. Hansen would walk around in his boxers, skin sagging and drooping in a way Michelangelo would have appreciated. You could see Mr. Hansen’s bones. They left all the lights on; it was impossible to avoid looking. The human eye was naturally attracted to light—a fact Cameron had read about the retina in The Map of Human Anatomy.

That first summer, Cameron made his way slowly down Pine Ridge Drive. If he stood perfectly still, he wouldn’t be seen. Cameron documented the tiny things: Mrs. Hansen kept Mr. Hansen on a strict diet, but he stored chocolate bars in the Crock-Pot next to the refrigerator.

Next door to the Hansens, Cameron once watched the Thorntons have sex on their kitchen table after the baby fell asleep. It looked violent and out of control at first, like fighting dogs thrashing around, then close and rhythmic—a rocking boat. After, Mr. Thornton hovered on top of his wife, kissed her forehead slow. Some nights the wife stayed up late, bouncing their crying baby around the living room while her husband took the limping little dog for ten o’clock walks, ushering Cameron home with his stranger presence on the street.

As he waited to be questioned, Cameron pulled his favorite kneaded eraser from his pocket and molded it into different shapes. Mr. O had given it to him for when he needed to Untangle, which was often. He tried to mold it into a perfect square against the surface of his thigh.

Cameron had started watching Lucinda around the same time Mr. O’s class started a unit on figure drawing. He started seeing mountains in people’s cheekbones and spider legs in people’s eyelashes and translating these into different shades of black, white, and gray. He loved the way Lucinda’s face curled and rolled.

When Cameron watched Lucinda, he played this game of Statue Nights. He liked to imagine that he was one of Michelangelo’s figures, frozen on paper, etched in one position for all of eternity. But at some point he’d hear his own heartbeat or an inevitable exhale. One of these certainties would break the silence, and he’d be forced to recognize that no matter how still he stood, he did, in fact, exist.

He never knew how much time passed, but the whole point of Statue Nights was that it didn’t matter.

On February 11, 2004, almost exactly a year ago, Lucinda’s father opened the sliding back door. I know you’re there, his voice boomed across the empty lawn. I know you don’t mean harm. But you need to leave. If you come back, I will call the police. Cameron had run home, to the other end of Pine Ridge Drive, and huddled underneath his covers with Dad’s tattered copy of The Map of Human Anatomy. He memorized the functions of the human kidney, because he imagined that somewhere near the kidney was where the body stored that hollowed feeling: guilt.

He hoped the police wouldn’t ask about that night in Lucinda’s yard. Cameron was awful at lying, and he couldn’t tell them the truth—that he found people fascinating when they thought no one was watching. He couldn’t tell them about the sincerity of life through windows—that he hated himself for it, but he couldn’t stop. He didn’t want to.