What Happens Now

by Jennifer Castle

  I never liked the word attraction. It’s way too much about magnets, and not enough about why someone’s mere presence can make you feel pleasure and pain at the same time.

  Crush didn’t work either. I wasn’t twelve.

  What should I have called it? I just called it Camden.

  Sometimes, I’d catch him looking my way. A trick of the light, of course. Or the wishiest wishful thinking. Because there was no way I could possibly be worth that.

  “Go talk to him,” said Kendall the time we caught Camden glancing at us while he stood in line for the snack shack. “Seize the moment.”

  “I will,” I said. “I will.”

  “I mean, this moment. Not some theoretical future moment.”

  “I have to keep an eye on Dani.”

  “I have two. I’ll keep them both on her.”

  “Plus, I already have an ice cream. It would be so obvious that I was going over for him.”

  “So?”

  “Then he would know.”

  “Argh,” snarled Kendall. “You’re making me crazy with this. What are you so afraid of?”

  I looked at Camden again. He was at the window now, joking with Mabel. She was actually laughing. I hadn’t even known that she could laugh, and that it sounded like a chipmunk on helium.

  What was I afraid of? Anything that might tip me off balance and make me fall back into that place I knew was still there, waiting beneath all my newly glossed-over, smoothed-out surfaces. But I couldn’t explain it to her, because I couldn’t even explain it to myself.

  As the summer went on, Kendall gathered more details from one of her three older brothers, who seemed to know everyone with one or two degrees of separation. His mom was named Maeve Armstrong and was a medium-famous artist. They lived in a converted church that was either lavender or turquoise—the reports varied on that. He’d been homeschooled until last fall. The most delicious rumor was that his father was Ed Penniman, the lead singer for the legendary punk band the Stigmaddicts.

  All this was unconfirmed, of course. But I knew two things about Camden Armstrong for sure:

  1) His eyes were the exact same forest green as the diving board.

  2) I ached for him in places I never knew could ache, like earlobes and collarbones.

  At night, I’d lie awake and picture what Camden’s life was like. I’d think of him in his turquoise church, painting like his mother. Reading books I’d never heard of. Playing guitar or piano, whichever worked best for the songs he wrote. Because surely he wrote songs, surely it wasn’t possible for a boy to look like that and not write songs.

  I knew a third definite thing about Camden, eventually. I wouldn’t have believed it if I hadn’t seen it myself.

  One day, Camden came to the lake wearing a black baseball cap with a white X on it.

  It was a specific white X. Deeply specific, at least for me, and maybe for him, too: the logo for the short-lived TV reboot of Silver Arrow from a few years back.

  He knew about my show.

  He knew.

  About. My. Show.

  And so three times. Three times, I started walking over to where he sat by himself on the Navajo blanket. Practicing the line in my head. Laughably simple, really, but then again, all the best beginnings are. Nice hat. Are you a Silver Arrow fan?

  The fourth time was going to be the charm, I swear.

  Then Danielle was suddenly at my side, tugging on the hem of my rashguard. “Ari, I got a splinter.”

  “Again?”

  “It’s not my fault, it’s the freaking dock’s fault.”

  “Don’t say ‘freaking.’” I took her hand and led her to the lifeguard station, where they probably kept a pair of tweezers with her name on it. And yes, I’ll admit I didn’t mind the extra time to get my nerve up even higher.

  But when we got back, Camden was packing his stuff to leave.

  I bit down hard on the tip of my thumb as I watched him walk away.

  This is what I remember from the next time I saw Camden. It was late August by then.

  Camden and his friends on the dock, waiting in line for the diving board.

  The girl—I now knew her name was Eliza, I’d heard the boys yell it enough times—reaching out and taking Camden’s hand.

  Camden letting her.

  Then, Camden leaning in to kiss Eliza.

  Eliza letting him.

  Their faces breaking apart but their hands staying connected, until it was his turn to dive.

  Me not watching that dive. Me not seeing Eliza laugh at whatever he did.

  Me, walking up the beach and toward the parking lot and away, away, away from the lake, already closing the book on summer. So mad at myself for being afraid.

  And as I drove home, it occurred to me that my thinking about safety could be all wrong. Maybe safety lay in actually pursuing the things you desired. Maybe the real danger was not pursuing them and never knowing what would have happened if you did.

  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.

  It bothered me that the three of us females in the house didn’t look like a family. Maybe if we looked like one, it would be easier to feel like one.

  “Let’s wait until your next day off,” I said to Mom. “Besides, the water will be freezing. I’ll do some crafts with Dani downstairs and we’ll be quiet while you sleep. And later if you give me a list, I’ll take her to the grocery store.”

  My mother got a faraway look. I knew this was a tempting offer: one less thing to do today. An hour she could have all to herself, sleeping or watching Millionaire Matchmaker, which for her was basically like going to the spa.

  “Arianna, no,” she finally said. “It’s going to be a beautiful day. I can’t let you hang around the house. You both need to be out, being active. I’ll pack up some snacks.”

  She left the room. Danielle watched her go, then turned to me and bugged out her eyes.

  “Maybe your guy will show up!”

  “Shhh!” I lowered my voice, hoping Mom hadn’t heard her. “What do you mean, my guy?”

  “You know. Your summer crush.” Now she smiled that evil genius kid smile.

  “How do you know about things like ‘summer crushes’?”

  “Because I live. In the world. Also I eavesdropped on you and Kendall talking about it once.”

  “Well, that’s over, and you’re not allowed to talk about it. Actually, don’t even think about it. Don’t think about thinking about it.”

  (That went for me, too.)

  “You’re no fun,” said Danielle. Her expression turned sad and she added, “I wrote a letter to Jasmine about the lake because I wanted to know if any of her friends live there. But she didn’t come last night.”

  Oof. I usually knew when there was a fresh note for Jasmine, Dani’s fairy pen pal. I’d slip into Dani’s room once she was asleep and grab it off the windowsill, then write back on special green vellum paper I kept hidden inside an old math textbook.

  “You know what happens sometimes,” I told her. “Jasmine gets busy working at the fairy vet hospital and can’t write back for a while.”

  Danielle nodded, apparently satisfied with this. I loved that I could make things better for her so easily.

  My mother came back in, holding out some cash like it was the most brilliant idea she’d ever had, and said, “Here’s something for ice cream. A special treat to celebrate summer.” Her face got suddenly serious again. “Promise me you won’t get the kind with artificial colors.”

  Dani rolled her eyes. I sat up, swung my feet to the floor, and took the money from my mother.

  The Possible, I chanted to myself.

  Everything is Possible.

  Maybe I would continue to believe it. Maybe it would even be true.

  Every summer, Danielle created a rock collection that she arranged in meticulous groups along the edges of our front porch. To most people, they looked random and unremarkable, easy to dismiss as a little kid’s Accumulation of Crap. But I’d learned to see what was special about each one.

  As soon as Danielle and I stepped from the car across the lake’s parking lot, she bent to pick up the first member of the new crop.

  “Look,” she said. “It’s a perfect oval. And so smooth.” She held the rock and stroked it with one finger as if it were alive.

  “Mmmm,” I said in not-faked admiration. “Good for drawing a face on.”

  Dani nodded, then clutched it to her chest as we walked over to the admission kiosk. The kiosk was actually a tall, narrow wooden house, and years ago Kendall and I decided it looked like a latrine so we called it the Crapper. A kid from school named Julian was working the Crapper today, perched on the metal folding chair, reading a book.

  Kendall. God, I wished she were here and not camping with her older brothers, that she’d chosen me over them this weekend.

  “Hi, Julian,” I said as we stepped up to the Crapper window. “One adult, one kid, please.”

  “Hey, Ari,” said Julian, taking my money. He swished his eyes toward my arms. It had been over a year, but the buzz about my scars was still humming, because people could see them now. I’d stopped covering them up. I wasn’t trying to show them off or anything. At some point, they’d become a part of me. I woke up one day okay with them, the same way you’re okay with a birthmark or a white spot on your skin from a long-ago mosquito bite you never stopped picking at.

  It was like a physical reminder of my depression, a way for me to accept that even though I had fought and won, it would always be there with me. And also that I had power to fight again.

  “Ready for the season?” I asked Julian, who was still fixated on my arms. What do you think? Were they what you imagined?

  Julian glanced back up. “There’s carpeting on the dock this year. Splinter-proof.”

  “Fancy.” I smiled. No worries, you’re not the first person I’ve caught looking. The lookers used to bother me until my therapist, Cynthia, suggested that maybe people saw a little of themselves in those lines on my skin.

  I’d recently asked Cynthia if I could take a break from our sessions for the summer. I was tired of talking about feeling okay and thinking about feeling okay. I wanted a chance to just, you know, feel okay. She’d said yes, but she’d also made me set an appointment for the first week in September to make clear this was a trial run. It felt like a challenge, and one I wanted to win.

  It was early, the opening day crowd beginning to trickle in. I led Danielle to a nice spot under a tree far from last year’s. As far as I could possibly get from last year’s. Then I did a quick casing of the joint to confirm that nobody I knew was here yet, and that nobody else of particular interest—oh, for instance, nobody I’d had boring-deva
stating dreams about—had shown up either.

  I prayed for him to come. I prayed for him not to come.

  Danielle was ankle-deep in the water before I could even get the blanket spread out. “It’s so freezing ice-cold I’m gonna die!” she yelled. “Come in with me!”

  “Wow, you really know how to sell it.”

  “We’ll play whatever you want. Mermaids, dolphins. Sea monkeys!”

  “Tempting. But I didn’t wear my suit today.”

  Dani scanned my regulation tank top and black jersey skirt with distaste. Maybe that’s really when you become one of the grown-ups. You come to the lake and don’t even bring a damn suit.

  “You’re not leaving those on, are you?” Danielle asked, pointing at my feet.

  Oh. I’d forgotten about my boots. I’d worn them every day of the two months since I’d bought them and they didn’t even feel like footwear anymore. They were just soft purple leather perfectly molded around all the stuff at the bottom of my legs. Like I was a doll and someone had painted them on. Actually, that doll existed. I had two versions of it at home, one of them mint in box.

  “They’re my Satina Galt boots,” I said. “You know I wear them everywhere.”

  Danielle made a face. Which was really rich, coming from a child who often wore the same outfit three days straight, only taking it off for a mandatory change of underpants.

  Satina Galt was the character who made Silver Arrow what it was, to me. The boots made me feel strong. They made me feel like something Possible. Maybe if I wore them long enough, I would actually be that something. My mother understood the boots. She never let on, but I could tell by the way she looked at them sometimes, like they were a memory of a memory. Occasionally, she looked at me that way, too.

  Something over my shoulder caught Danielle’s eye and her face lit up. “Oh! Madison’s here!”

  I turned to see a girl I recognized from Dani’s class, and the kids ran to each other, hugging and squealing like they hadn’t spent seven hours at school together the day before.

  When does that stop? I thought. When you’re not afraid to claim your friends, to clasp them to your chest and shout to the world, Mine! When you know for sure, pinkie promise, that the way it is now is the way it will always be.