Burn (7 page)

Robbie chuckles. “That’s not going to happen. How about a trade? I’ll do that history assignment and you do my math?”

Cameron considers this. “I like the sound of that.”

Robbie waves over the textbook. “What’s the next question?”

“Number one.”

“What?”

“I skipped it.”

Robbie reads the question, flips through the book, and a minute later reads an answer off to Cameron.

“You write it,” Cameron says and rolls the pencil toward him.

“You have to put it in your own writing,” Robbie insists. “Otherwise Mom and your teacher will know you didn’t do it yourself.”

Cameron eyes him hard. “You know a lot about cheating,” he says.

“Not really. Beginner’s intuition.”

“Sure.” But Cameron picks up the pencil and starts writing. “Give it to me again.”

Robbie reads from the book and Cameron edits out some of the words he doesn’t think are absolutely necessary. He does it for answers three and four, too. They’re just finishing up the last question when Randy walks through the door.

He doesn’t knock. He stopped doing that a long time ago.

“What are you two up to?”

“Homework,” Robbie says.

“Whose?”

“Mine,” Cameron admits. “Robbie’s helping me, then I’ll help him with math.”

Cameron decides it has to be the guy’s uniform, the badge pinned to his chest, that pulls the confession from him. He and Robbie sit a long minute under Randy’s considering gaze before their mother’s boyfriend decides they’re telling the truth.

“Where’s your mom?”

“Upstairs. Getting ready for dinner,” Robbie says.

“Good. I thought we’d go surf and turf tonight,” Randy says. “Maybe Hanover’s on the Lake.” He walks across the room and says over his shoulder, “You boys will need to clean up a little.”

He moves through the house, up the stairs. Cameron hears his keys and change jangling in his pockets.

“He’s coming to dinner,” Cameron says.

“He’s been trying harder. I heard him tell Mom he wants to take us to an Eagles game. That’s five months away.”

Cameron thinks about this. When they first got together, his mom stayed with Randy three months straight. It never lasts longer than that.

“Maybe he’ll stick around longer this time,” Robbie suggests.

Cameron hears the way his brother’s voice lifts, gets a little thin with hope. He remembers how he used to go to bed at night thinking that if Randy came around the next day maybe they could pass the football or play some one-on-one. It never happened. Just about the time Cameron started believing the guy had endurance, he always disappeared.

“He won’t,” Cameron says. It’s better not to even start thinking it.

TUESDAY

6:15PM

They can’t have Chinese or Italian. Cameron sits in the back of Randy’s Dodge King Cab and pulls at the collar of his shirt. His mom made him button it until it was cinched around his neck. Bad enough if the shirt fit him, but he wore it last when he was thirteen, more than a year ago.
Yeah, Mom, even I do grow a little,
he thinks. “The shirt is too small,” he told her. She suggested he roll back the cuffs; he did. Randy told him the collar would look better if he wore a tie, but he wasn’t asking him to. Randy only wore the tie that came with his uniform; he didn’t own any others and was real happy about that.

Randy never joined them on family night out. And they always voted on where they ate.

“Randy has veto power,” Robbie had said, as they stood in their bedroom looking at each other in their navy blue pants and ironed shirts. His mom never ironed; she threw everything in the dryer. “This is getting serious.”

The hope was back in his voice.

“We look like the Hardy Boys,” Robbie said.

“Yeah.” The biggest geeks ever. “He’s not staying, you know.”

“I’ve been counting,” Robbie confessed. “They’ve been back together one hundred and eighteen days. They’ve never lasted that long.”

“As your older brother I feel it’s my responsibility to warn you — don’t believe it. Don’t buy into it. Mom won’t keep him.”

“Why?”

“After Dad?”

“Dad wasn’t all bad.”

Cameron spun away from the mirror. “You have amnesia,” he said.

“He took us to ball games,” Robbie pointed out.

“And got drunk on beer, slapped us if we complained about it, and forgot to feed us.”

“He didn’t forget,” Robbie said and shrugged. “He said it was women’s work to feed us.”

“Whatever.”

“I guess you’re right,” Robbie said. “I wouldn’t want another guy around long-term after Dad.”

“I think she wants Randy around,” Cameron said, “but she’s afraid that she’ll get a repeat performance.”

“Guys are assholes,” Robbie decided.

“Most of ’em,” Cameron agreed.

“I don’t think Randy is. You ever see him mad?’

“No,” Cameron admitted. “He probably puts all the mad into his job. By the time we see him he’s low energy.”

Cameron hasn’t seen Randy do much more than eat and watch sports or the news on TV.

“Middle of the menu,” Randy says now, pulling Cameron from his thoughts. “Okay, boys? I’m buying, so that means better than burgers but it’s either steak
or
lobster.”

Cameron can see him smiling in the rearview mirror. He’s got good, strong teeth but a bunch of lines around his mouth and one long crease that reaches up to the corner of his eye.

He wonders how old Randy is. Older than his mother. His father, too. But not so old he’s thinking about retirement.

Robbie says he’s ordering the trout.

“Good choice. What about you, Cam?” Randy asks, with too much gusto in his voice.

“Maybe steak,” he says. He needs to see the menu.

“I’m thinking a caesar salad with butterfly shrimp,” his mom adds, too cheerful, and when Cameron looks at her profile he sees her smile is wider than usual.

They’re trying too hard,
Cameron thinks. They all turned on like a sudden blast of air conditioning and Cameron can feel it pressing against him, drying out his eyes and making the tips of his fingers numb. He’s not the only one who notices.

So they’re eating out. At a nice place on a night that’s usually just Cameron and Robbie and their mom. They all know it. It makes Cameron’s joints stick, his mom’s voice flutter, Robbie’s eyes bright, and Randy puff up like a hot air balloon.

It’s not a big deal. They’ve had three years of Randy and Cameron knows it’s always one step forward, two steps back.

Cameron releases the seat belt and pushes open his door. He starts toward the restaurant, but Randy’s voice cuts him short.

“Hey, Cam, wait up, huh?”

Cameron stands on the curb in front of the Hanover’s sign, pushes his hands into his front pockets, and tips forward on his feet. He watches them. Robbie shuts his door and their mother’s, too. Randy waits at the front of the truck, then takes his mother’s hand. They walk toward him, shoulder to shoulder, and Cameron gets a feeling in his gut he should be used to by now. He’s looking at something he’s not a part of, could never be a part of, but wants it so bad his teeth bleed for it.

He has a father already. No returns, no exchanges.

“Stay with us,” Randy says when they reach him.

“Yeah, okay,” Cameron says, but he thinks to himself:
How? What part of me fits here?

A tall woman greets them at the door. She holds it open for all of them to pass and then discusses seating options with Cameron’s mom. They decide on sitting outside, under a heating lamp for when the sun falls behind the mountains. They troop through the restaurant, which is dimly lit by ceiling fans and candles on the tables. Cameron notices there’s not a lot of business on a Tuesday night; for every table that’s full another’s empty. He kind of likes that feeling, of people but not too many of them. Of the silence, but not total. That feeling in his skin, of being pinched, eases.

There’s even more quiet on the deck. Cameron looks around and counts only two other occupied tables.

March on Lake Erie. Sometimes there’s snow, but tonight the wind is almost nothing.

Randy pulls out his mom’s chair. Robbie sits down next to her. This is when Cameron realizes he’s back into voyeur mode — watching everything like he’s not a part of it.

It happens so easily, he never knows until he’s in it that he’s a goner. That he’s not really living, but stuck somewhere between that and dead.

He was going to try harder not to let that happen.

Especially after today, when he was the one better than the rest. The best. When all anybody could do was watch him, some of them probably wishing they could run like him. Have his speed. His endurance. He rode that high all day and even the thought of Patterson and his posse coming after him didn’t ruin it.

Tomorrow he’ll go to school and tell SciFi about Patterson’s plan. He’ll tell him to make sure he doesn’t stand too long in one place. That’s the number one rule for survival when you’re one of the hunted. That’s what friends do for each other. Warn them. Maybe they can hang out more, too. Not just in tech class. There’s safety in numbers.

Maybe Cameron’s days of being invisible are over. Maybe proof of life is right around the corner. And maybe Patterson will forget about SciFi.

“You decide, honey?”

His mom interrupts his thoughts and Cameron is in such a good mood he smiles at her.

“Steak, for sure,” he says.

He has the menu open but hasn’t looked at it.

“With a baked potato and a salad with blue cheese.”

Cameron watches his mother’s face warm, her hands flatten against the table.

“Which cut?” Randy asks.

“Which one won’t kill your budget?”

Randy taps him with his menu and laughs. “Porterhouse, young man,” he says. “You deserve the best. Your mom tells me you’re headed for the Olympics.”

He’s not teasing. His face is creased into a toothy smile and his eyes are full of something that looks like pride.

“Two-ten.” Randy shakes his head. “What’s the fastest half mile in the world?” he asks.

Cameron doesn’t know. He hasn’t been keeping current. “Last year a guy from Sudan ran it in one-fifty-five.”

“So you have to work on shaving fifteen seconds.”

“Not so easy,” Cameron says.

“I bet you can do it,” Robbie says. “I’ve seen you run. You turn into someone else. Like a man with a mission.”

Cameron feels his face warm. His heart slows and then falls over itself trying to catch up.

“Yeah. I feel like someone else when I run.”

“You should work on it,” Randy says. “You’re young. Get the right training and see what you can do.”

“He’s going to be on the track team next year,” his mom says. “The coach talked to him about it today.”

“My PE teacher, really. He coaches the basketball team, but he was pretty amazed.” Cameron can’t help smiling.

“I never could run, not even fast enough to save my life,” Randy admits.

“Cops don’t run?”

“Most of my job is sitting in the car and writing about how one guy did this so the other guy did that. . . . We had a little excitement at the high school today, though.”

Cameron stops breathing, feels the tightness begin in his chest. “What happened?”

“Mob fight, as best as I can make out. No one really knows. We got a 911 call about a fight, but by the time we got there the parking lot was empty, except the one casualty, and he isn’t talking,” Randy says.

“Someone died?” The menu slips from his mother’s hands.

“No. The kid is going to be all right. Paramedics took him in, though. Big kid. I was surprised he got it so bad, as big as he is.”

“SciFi? Was it SciFi?” Cameron’s vision begin to darken around the edges.

“Who?”

“The big kid, what was his name?”

Cameron can hear the fear in his voice.

“I can’t tell you that, Cam.”

“Was it Elliott?”

Randy looks at him a long time. “What do you know about it?”

“I know the football team was planning on creaming us both. But Elliott was off campus today. He plays the clarinet.”

Like that’s going to save his life.

“The football team? Why?”

Cameron shrugs. “Patterson hates me. He plays front line. I lapped him today in PE and the coach called him out.”

“But why would he go after the big kid?”

“Elliott’s my lab partner.”

Randy doesn’t get it. His whole face twists into one big question mark and Cameron doesn’t blame him. It sounds lame even to him. Since when does being someone’s lab partner put a person in mortal danger? But it does when you’re Cameron’s lab partner. It does when the guy looking to kill you is Rich Patterson.

“Really, Cam?”

There’s no way he can tell Randy about being Cameron Diaz, about half the school thinking he’s a fag. He can’t tell him about that afternoon and Patterson saying SciFi was Cameron’s boyfriend. He can’t do it, so he just looks at Randy and says nothing.

“Cameron, are you still having trouble at school?”

Cameron looks at his mom.
The trouble never stopped.

He looks at Robbie. His brother dropped his menu on his plate and is watching them like it’s a tennis match, but he keeps his mouth shut.

“Normal stuff,” Cameron says.

“What happened today isn’t normal,” Randy says. “A kid was hurt. Bad enough they took him to the hospital.”

“Is he going to be okay?”
Please let him be okay.

Randy nods. “He was sitting up and talking when I saw him. Just not about what happened. He kept saying how his parents aren’t even finished paying for the teeth he lost last year. He was real worried about that.”

Cameron’s whole body implodes with anger. His eyes are open, but the world is black and the loss of sight knocks him off his center of gravity. He clings to the table while around him the wind picks up and he hears the kind of sharp cry that comes from the eye of a hurricane, like a voice calling for help. He doesn’t know it’s him calling out until Randy’s hand comes down on his shoulder.

“You all right, Cam?”

He peels his fingers off the table. Feels himself fall backward into that world where pain and fear are only ideas. Anything is better than here.