Unforgiven

by Lauren Kate

"It's over," he said, suddenly knowing what he had to do. They would go their separate ways today, each nursing a broken heart. There was no other way. "The wedding, everything."

  He spiked his words with bitterness, and when Lilith opened her mouth, he heard words angrier than the ones she spoke. This would become his side of the story: the words he needed to hear to end everything.

  "You're breaking my heart," she said.

  But what Cam heard behind her words was: You're a bad man. I know what you are.

  "Forget about me," he said. "Find someone better."

  "Never," she gasped. "My heart belongs to you. Damn you for not knowing that."

  But Cam knew that what she really meant was: I hope I live a thousand years and have a thousand daughters so there will always be a woman who can curse your name.

  "Goodbye, Lilith," he said coldly.

  She cried out in agony, grabbed their marriage license, and flung it in the river. She was on her knees then, weeping, her arm extended toward the water as if she wished to take it back. He watched the last evidence of their love disappear with the current. Now it was only Cam who had to disappear.

  In the dark days and decades that followed, every time Cam thought of Lilith, he remembered some ugly new detail that had never happened that day by the river.

  Lilith spitting on him.

  Lilith pinning him furiously to the ground.

  Lilith giving up on their love.

  Until the truth--the one that Cam refused to tell her--sank beneath his memory of her rage. Until, in his mind, Lilith had abandoned him. Until it got easier for him to live without her.

  He would not let himself remember the tears cutting her cheeks or the way she touched the mighty carob tree as if saying goodbye. He waited until the sun set and the moon rose. When his white wings bloomed at his sides, they sent a burst of wind rippling across the grass.

  The Cam who left the Jordan River that night would never return.

  Seven Days

  At breakfast the next day, Lilith whipped the stale Pop-Tart out of Bruce's hand and set before him a steaming bowl of oatmeal.

  "Oats a la Lilith," she said. "Bon appetit."

  She was proud of her concoction, which included pomegranate seeds, coconut shavings, walnuts, and fresh cream, all courtesy of Cam's groceries.

  When she'd confronted him about her photocopied lyrics, he'd pretended not to know what she was talking about. But the groceries were a dead giveaway of a guilty conscience trying to bribe her into forgiveness.

  "Smells amazing," Bruce said, raising his spoon. He was dressed for school in a slightly rumpled collared shirt and a pair of khakis, his hair clean and slicked back. Lilith still wasn't used to seeing him out of pajamas. "Where'd you get all this fancy food?"

  "Cam," she said, slopping a ladleful of oatmeal into a bowl for her mother, who was blow-drying her hair.

  "Why'd your face get all red and scowly when you said Cam's name?" Bruce asked. His bowl was already clean. "Is there more? And did Cam bring over any chocolate chips?"

  "Because he's a jerk, and no." Lilith gave him the bowl she'd been making for her mom and started fixing a third portion. There was no use trying to ration the good food--better to eat and enjoy it, especially now that Bruce was feeling better. He needed to stay healthy.

  Lilith dropped into the chair next to her brother and tried to imagine someone ever hurting Bruce the way Cam had hurt her. "You have to be careful with people. We can only really trust each other. Okay?"

  "Sounds lonely," Bruce said.

  "Yeah," she agreed with a sigh. "It does."

  But it was better than letting people like Cam wreck your life.

  "Go away," Lilith said, slamming her locker as Cam approached in the hall before the bell. She ignored the bouquet of irises in his hand. Their soft scent, which Lilith had loved when she'd found the flowers on the antique desk two days ago, now nauseated her. Everything Cam touched nauseated her.

  "These are for you," he said, holding out the bouquet. "I'm really sorry."

  "Sorry for what, exactly? For making the photocopies?"

  "No," Cam said. "I'm sorry you had such an awful day yesterday. This is me trying to cheer you up."

  "You want to do something to cheer me up?" Lilith said. "Die."

  She yanked the flowers from him, threw them on the floor, and stormed away.

  Cam backed off during homeroom and poetry, and after that Lilith had a lovely respite of classes without him. The black cloud over her even cleared a little in biology, because she'd actually done her homework, for a change.

  "Can anyone tell me the difference between the mitochondrion and the Golgi apparatus?" Mrs. Lee asked from the whiteboard.

  Lilith found herself gazing in amazement at the fingers outstretched above her head. She couldn't believe she was raising her hand, voluntarily, in biology.

  Mrs. Lee snorted coffee when she saw Lilith in the front row, waiting patiently to be called upon. "Okay, Lilith," she said, failing to mask her surprise, "give it a shot.

  Lilith was only able to give it a shot because of Luis. Yesterday, during lunch, he had approached her in the lunch line.

  "I was working on a new beat for 'Flying Upside Down' last night," he'd said, tapping out the syncopated rhythm on his tray.

  "I was thinking we could speed up the tempo a little, too," Lilith had said.

  Luis paid for his burger, and Lilith used her coupon for free lunch. At first she was nervous that he would say something judgmental or snarky about it, but he hadn't said anything at all. Then they spotted Jean sitting by himself, and Luis went to sit down across from him, like it was no big deal, even though Lilith didn't think she'd ever seen them sit together before. The two boys looked up at Lilith, who'd been standing nervously over them.

  "Do you need a formal invitation?" Jean patted the seat beside him. "Pop a squat."

  So she did. Lilith realized that from this vantage point, seated among friends, the cafeteria felt completely different. It was warm and bright and loud and fun and, for the first time, lunch went by too quickly.

  They had lots to say about music, but what surprised Lilith most about that lunch period was that they had things to talk about other than music. Like how Jean was nervous Kimi's parents wouldn't extend her curfew on prom night.

  "You gotta go over there, dude," Luis said. "You gotta sit down on the awkward couch with her awkward dad, tell him about your college prospects or whatever. Pump yourself up, but be respectable and respectful. Girls' dads love that crap."

  "I can't believe I'm taking advice from a freshman," Jean joked, taking a fry in the eye from Luis.

  But the freshman turned out to be something close to a genius at biology. When Lilith moaned about her homework, Luis started singing: "The plasma membrane is the bouncer keeping all the riffraff out."

  "What's that?" Lilith had asked.

  "It's, like, my version of Schoolhouse Rock!" he'd said, and sang the rest of the song, which was catchy and contained a mnemonic device for every part of a cell. When he finished, Jean started clapping, and Lilith hugged Luis before she even realized what she was doing.

  "I don't know why I never thought to make up songs to help me study," she said.

  "You don't have to." Luis grinned. "I'll teach you everything I know. Which is, like, everything."

  Now, in biology, Lilith remembered Luis's low voice singing to her the day before--and amazingly, she got the answer right. She couldn't wait to tell him.

  At lunchtime, she found him in the cafeteria, pumping the soda dispenser for more ice. She trotted up and started singing. He turned and grinned and harmonized the final line with her.

  "Lifesaver," she said. "Thank you."

  "More where that came from," Luis said with a lopsided grin.

  "Really?" Lilith asked. She would love this to become a regular thing. She couldn't afford to hire a tutor for all the subjects she was failing.

  "What do you got after lunch?" Luis asked,
sipping the foam from his Coke before it spilled.

  "American history," she groaned.

  "I have an amazing rock opera breaking down the battles of the Civil War," he said. "It's one of my best."

  "Lilith?" A tap on her shoulder made Lilith spin around. Cam was holding out a lunch tray of her favorite: lasagna.

  "I'm not hungry," she said. "What part of 'die' did you not understand? Do I need to say it louder?"

  "Dude, I'll eat that lasagna," Luis said.

  Jean Rah had gotten up from his table. "What's going on, guys?" he asked.

  Cam passed the tray to Luis as Lilith said, "Cam's out of the band."

  "What'd you do this time?" Jean said, shaking his head. Next to him, Luis was forking lasagna into his mouth, wide-eyed.

  "Lilith thinks I photocopied her lyrics and spread them all around the school," Cam said, tugging at the collar of his T-shirt. "It's unclear why she thinks I would do that, but she does."

  "Naw, Lilith," Luis said, wiping sauce from his lips with his hand. "I'm the library aide, and I had to make some copies yesterday. That copy job was right ahead of me in the queue. All I knew was it was like a thousand pages long." Luis rolled his eyes. "You have to have a code when a job's that big. This one was sent from an external computer. It came from the account 'King Media.' "

  Jean frowned. "So it was either Chloe King or--"

  "The intern," Cam muttered. "Luc."

  "Whatever," Lilith said, weirdly angry that the story she'd believed about Cam was falling apart. "Cam's still out of the band. Jean, Luis, I'll see you guys after school for practice."

  But when Lilith got to the band room after school, her friends weren't there. Instead, the Perceived Slights were getting ready to practice.

  Or rather, their new guitar tech--a quiet girl named Karen Walker, who sat next to Lilith in biology--was setting up their instruments. She chewed her lip as she plucked the strings and turned the pegs of Chloe's gleaming electric guitar. Lilith could tell Karen didn't really know what she was doing, but the band members weren't paying much attention. They were lounging on the risers, drinking smoothies and playing on their phones.

  "Um, June, did you just send me your geeky classical Spotify station?" Teresa asked the blonde to her left.

  "It's Chopin, and I listen to it when I fall asleep," June said.

  "Dork!" Chloe said without looking up from her phone. "My lucky station right now is All Prince All the Time. Dean and I listened to it last Friday night."

  Lilith thought about angelic-looking June lying in bed, dreaming to Chopin's waltz concertos. Lilith had tried sleeping to music. It was torturous. She hung on every note, marveling at the chord changes, trying to discern the various instruments.

  Maybe music left other people alone, allowing them to relax. Music never left Lilith alone.

  "Did somebody take down the sign outside that said No Freaks Allowed?" Chloe said when she noticed Lilith standing in the doorway. "Are you here to dump more of your crappy lyrics on unsuspecting victims?"

  Lilith didn't like Chloe, but she knew her well enough to realize that Chloe wasn't lying--she actually thought Lilith had passed around those photocopies herself.

  Which meant Chloe wasn't the culprit.

  Yet Luis said the copy job had come from a King Media computer. She remembered Cam suggesting that Luc might have made the photocopies. But that didn't make sense. Why would the Battle of the Bands intern try to sabotage her?

  "Have you seen Luis and Jean?" she asked Chloe. "We've got practice in here."

  "Not anymore," Chloe said, her lips twisted into a venomous grin. "We kicked those losers out. This is our turf now."

  "But--"

  "You guys can use the concrete slab out by the dumpster. Go on," Chloe said, making a shooing gesture with her hands. "Skedaddle. We're about to get started, and I don't want you stealing our sound."

  "Right," Lilith deadpanned as she shoved open the band-room door. "Because I might be tempted to copy the groundbreaking way you show off your cleavage when you play guitar."

  Lilith found Jean and Luis in the parking lot, sitting on the hood of Jean's baby-blue Honda. The temperature had soared since lunchtime, and a haze of heat rose from the pavement. The sun was a muted orange dot behind a smoky cloud. Luis's brow was damp with sweat when he offered Lilith the dregs of the huge bag of Doritos he was holding.

  "I could use some Cool Ranch right about now," Lilith said.

  "Chloe kicked you out, too?" Jean asked, kicking his feet up onto his car's headlight.

  She nodded. "Where are we going to practice now? My house is definitely not an option."

  "Mine neither," Luis said between chomps. "My parents would kill me if they found out I was in a band. They think I'm staying late today for an extra SAT prep course."

  "My place is no good either," Jean said. "I'm the oldest of five kids, and you guys do not want to deal with my siblings. Especially not the twins. They're psycho."

  "So basically we're screwed," Lilith said. She thought about Rattlesnake Creek, but they'd need a generator to power the mics, the speakers, the synthesizer. It would never work.

  "What about Cam's place?" Jean said. "Anyone know where he lives?"

  "I'm sorry, are you referring to the Cam who's no longer in the band?" Lilith said, narrowing her eyes.

  "He didn't sabotage you, Lilith," Jean said. "I know you're embarrassed, but it wasn't Cam. You should talk to him, clear the air. We need him."

  Lilith didn't answer. She liked having Jean and Luis as friends, and she didn't want to mess that up, but she'd draw the line if they forced her to let Cam back in the band. Still, now that Jean mentioned it, Lilith was curious about where Cam lived.

  "Library aide to the rescue," Luis said, scrolling through his phone. "I have access to the student database with everyone's address." He tilted his head back, shaking some of the hair away from his eyes. "Here it is, Two Hundred and Forty-One Dobbs Street." He shoved the last of the Doritos into his mouth, then tossed the wadded-up bag into a nearby trash can. "Let's go."

  "This doesn't mean I'm letting him back in Revenge," Lilith said to the boys who were already climbing into the car. "We'll just go check it out."

  Luis offered Lilith shotgun, which she thought was a chivalrous gesture, and Jean's GPS directed them toward the gritty side of town. He cranked up the stereo--insisting on introducing them to one of his favorite new albums, which they all loved--and drove past the strip mall Lilith always passed on her way to school. They turned into Lilith's neighborhood and drove right past her street.

  She held her breath until she could no longer see her driveway in the side-view mirror, as if Jean or Luis might be able to tell that the hideous house at the end of the lane was the one Lilith called home. She thought about Bruce inside, watching old episodes of Jeopardy! with Alastor on the couch beside him, and she felt like she was betraying him simply by being ashamed of where she came from.

  It surprised her that Cam would live on this side of town. She remembered an early conversation when he'd told her he'd slept outside the night before. At the time, she thought he'd been joking. He seemed to have plenty of money. He drove his own motorcycle, and his leather jacket looked expensive. He'd brought her groceries, served her caviar, tried to give her flowers just this morning.

  Jean turned sharply left and braked. "This can't be right."

  Lilith didn't think so, either. Dobbs was a long, straight street that had been closed down to car traffic entirely. There were no houses here. No apartments. Between their idling car and the burning hills in the distance were hundreds of patchwork tents and cardboard lean-tos set up in the middle of the road. People milled among the tents, and they didn't look anything like Cam. They were ragged, down on their luck, many of them strung out.

  "Maybe the database is wrong," Luis said, pulling out his phone.

  "Let's go check it out," Lilith said, and opened the passenger door.

  Luis and Jean followed her
to the edge of the tent city, stepping over broken bottles and moldy cardboard boxes. It was strangely cold here, and the wind was sharp. Lilith didn't know what she was looking for; she was no longer expecting to find Cam here.

  The smell was overwhelming, like a sweaty landfill that someone had doused with gasoline. Lilith breathed through her mouth as she tried to make sense of this scene. At first, it looked like total chaos: Scrawny children running everywhere, men bickering over the contents of shopping carts, fires raging in trash cans. But the longer Lilith studied the world of Dobbs Street, the more it started to make sense. It was its own little community, with its own rules.

  "I saw them first," a woman Lilith's mother's age said to another, younger woman, yanking a pair of canvas shoes out of her hand.

  "But they're my size," the second woman argued. She had blond dreadlocks and wore a gray midriff tank top. Lilith could see her ribs. "You couldn't even get your big toe in them."

  Lilith looked down at her own falling-apart combat boots, with the laces she kept having to knot together when they snapped. They were the only pair of shoes she'd had for years. She tried to imagine not having even them.

  "Maybe we should take off," Jean said, looking antsy. "We can talk to Cam tomorrow at school."

  "There," Lilith said, pointing ahead at a boy with a messenger bag slung over his shoulder exiting a dark green tent.

  Cam paused for a moment and gazed up at the sky, as if he could read something there that the rest of them could not.

  Against this backdrop, in the fading dusk light, Cam seemed like somebody else entirely. He looked older, tired. Had he always looked like that? She felt bad for him. She wondered how much of a front Cam had to put up at school to appear so confident and mysterious.

  Was this really his home? Lilith had never known people lived like this in Crossroads. She'd never imagined anyone worse off than her own family.

  He was walking their way, but he hadn't seen them yet. Lilith tugged Jean and Luis's shirtsleeves to pull them out of his line of vision.

  Cam nodded as he passed two older guys. One of them raised a fist for him to bump.

  "Hey, brother."

  "How are you, August?" she heard Cam say.

  "Can't complain. Just the toothache."

  "I'm pulling for you," Cam said with a smile. He put a hand on the guy's shoulder and looked him deep in the eyes. The man seemed to relax, transfixed by Cam's gaze.