What Happens Now(5)

Maybe regret was the thing that really knocks you off balance into whatever’s waiting below.

September, then Halloween. November and Christmas.

The dreams would come randomly, when I hadn’t even been thinking about him (I swear). Sometimes once a week and sometimes more. Often, they came at the end of a Black Diamond ski slope day, the kind of day where you have to be an expert at life to get to the bottom without breaking a bone.

It was always something simple and pathetically G-rated. We’d be walking. We’d be holding hands. We’d be driving in a car with the windows down. When I woke up, I’d try to go back to sleep and pick it right back up. More, I begged the powers of, well, whatever’s in charge of this stuff. Please, please, more.

“Destructive,” was Kendall’s comment when I got up the courage to tell her about the dreams. We were back at her house early from the lamest-ever New Year’s party, turning on the TV to see the ball drop.

“I have no control over them,” I protested.

“Maybe not,” she said. “But there are other things you can control. It’s not like he moved away or was only visiting town from another country.”

“He goes to Dashwood. That may as well be another continent.”

“Why don’t we figure out where he spends time outside of school, and then, you know, go to that place. A radical idea, I know.”

“Then I would still need the guts to talk to him.”

“Ari,” she continued, her patience wearing thin; I could see it. “You either have to find a way to connect with this guy or move on. It’s not healthy for you. And it’s not healthy for me to watch it be not healthy for you.”

I nodded. I knew she was right.

But then a week later, I saw him.

It was the frozen dead of January. On my to-do list that day was a trip to the bookstore to pick out a gift for one of Dani’s friends. I rounded a corner toward the kids’ section and there was Camden. My mental images of him were so deeply seated in summer that I almost didn’t recognize him in his parka, his hair longer as if he’d grown winter fur.

“Check this one out,” he said to his friends, the boy and the girl, the kissing girl Eliza, as he held open the pages of a graphic novel.

They checked out what he wanted to show them and then they all laughed, hard. Loud. I fought the urge to go peek over their shoulders. Maybe Eliza sensed that, because she started to turn around.

Which is when I fled like I was running for my life. A detour through the cookbooks, through the door empty-handed, the sound of Camden’s laughter jingling after me into the cold.

That night was the best and worst dream yet. We were at the lake, on the raft. He touched my leg.

Just as in a nightmare when you always come out of it right before someone stabs you or the train hits you or the plane crashes, I startled into reality right before we kissed.

That was it. (Pathetic. G-rated. Like I said.) But it felt so intense, I awoke wanting him even more. Like he’d come, then left. Like I’d snatched him away from my own self.

Kendall had been right. There were no answers to be found in the Camden Dreams. I needed reality, and hope, and forward motion. I needed what was actually possible. I was so serious about this, I made it a proper noun. The Possible. That was something I could commit to.

Then there was the boy, the real boy. It had been a whole year since that bad, bad night and Lukas was somehow still waiting for me.

So I turned to him.





THE SECOND SUMMER

(OR, EVERYTHING ELSE)





2




This is what bugs me about calendars: all those perfect, emotionless squares. Those squares keep coming, every morning after every night, whether you want them to or not.

When the square of the Saturday of Memorial Day weekend arrived—the end of my junior year—I stayed in bed overthinking exactly all of this.

“The lake! The lake!” yelled Danielle, running into my room and bouncing on the mattress.

“Yes, the lake,” I mumbled into the pillow. “But for the love of God, no bouncing.”

Mom came in and sat on the bed’s opposite edge. Her wet hair hung in tired clumps, fresh from the shower she always took the minute she came home from the hospital night shift. Her eyes hung, too. I was sure they’d somehow moved farther down her face in the last year.

Danielle kept bouncing. Mom did nothing about it, even though when I was her age, I wasn’t allowed to bounce. Because of, you know, the inevitable skull-breaking and waist-down paralysis that would result. Maybe bouncing had gotten magically safer in the last few years and I missed the memo.

“That’s right,” said Mom. “The lake opens today. I’m sorry I can’t go with you.”

Danielle stopped bouncing and crawled into my mom’s lap; my mom wrapped her arms around Danielle and leaned into her. At first glance they didn’t appear to be mother and daughter. My mother was a deep brunette, her features severe as if they were drawn with extra-thick Sharpie. Danielle, in her nearly white curls and pale pixie skin, resembled her dad, my stepfather, Richard. I didn’t match either of them, with my straight not-brown-not-blond hair you might recognize if you saw the photos I have of my father, who left when I was two. I’d recently cut that hair blissfully short, just below my chin, while Mom’s and Danielle’s hair was long.