Ghost Time (3 page)

So, yeah, we were at the gas station, and this man walked over, and I got scared for a second, thinking he was going to scold us about not being in school, because he looked all uptight, but Cam didn’t get flustered at all. He was just standing at the pump, filling up, when the guy walked over and said, What is that, a
sixty-nine? And Cam said, Sixty-eight, and the guy whistles, nodding at the car. Then the guy goes—he was well-dressed, too, it’s not like he was a hick or anything—he goes, I don’t suppose you’d be interested in selling it, would you? Cam stopped pumping, and he put the pump back, and he goes, You don’t suppose right, and I’m in the car listening, but the guy goes, Well, if you should change your mind, and then he takes out his wallet and gives Cam his card.

Cam took his card, and right then, his phone started ringing, so I handed it to him when he opened the door. I wasn’t really paying attention, but the man walked away, and I saw Cam start talking to someone on the phone, leaning his butt against the rear end of the car. Then he looked up and his head fell back, like he couldn’t believe what he was hearing. When he got back in, he had this look on his face, like he was somewhere else, and he checked the rearview mirror, watching the man pull away. What’s wrong? I said, turning, but the car was already on the highway. He’d been acting really weird all day, and he said, Nothing’s wrong, babe. I didn’t believe him, but he reached over and squeezed my thigh. Really, I just didn’t sleep much last night, he said, and then I started telling him, I told you so! but I stopped, because I’ve already told him he needed to sleep like a hundred times, and it’s no use.

I’d been sitting there, with our notebook in my lap, looking through Cam’s last entry while he was gassing up the car. It was page after page of 1s and 0s, but done in all these different styles, like twenty different graffiti artists had tagged and retagged this endless wall. It’s so cool—I’d never have thought of that, I said,
thinking out loud while he started the car. All information can be rendered in 1s and 0s, so I wrote you a note in code.
In code
, I said, like, yeah, right, and he cocked his head and raised his brow all Spock-like. Okay, then, tell me, what’s this say? I asked, showing him the last page, and he said, Forever. It’s
Forever
written in 1s and 0s, and I said, Ha!, cocking my head back at him, and he said, I’m serious—that’s exactly what all those pages say: Forever. Then he smiled, reaching over and squeezing my hand, like he’d never let go.

(TWELVE HOURS LATER)

5:54 AM

I was having this really bizarre dream where I come to, and I see Cam’s car—like the first thing I see is Cam’s car, parked in front of this two-bedroom house in the middle of nowhere. And there aren’t any other houses around, just this little white house, and the grass is so overgrown, it’s waist high, except for the yard right around the house. It’s not like I’m scared or anything, but it’s weird, so I walk over to Cam’s car to see if the keys are in the ignition, and they are.

I get in, and just as I’m about to turn over the engine, I hear Cam—like, his voice starts calling my name. And it sounds like he’s in the house, waiting for me, so I get out, and I walk over and knock on the front door, but nobody answers. So I stick my head inside and say, Hello? but no one answers. And then I see that there’s nothing in the house; it’s empty, and Cam’s not there. I turn around, and he calls me again: Thee, come here! It sounds
like he’s out front, right, so I go back outside, but he’s not there, either. So I walk around the house, looking for him, but I can’t find him anywhere, and then I start to hear pounding, and he keeps calling me, Thea!, Thea! His voice gets really loud, too, and I’m just about to yell at him to stop knocking and come out, when I realize it’s my mom’s voice—I’m dreaming—I was just dreaming.

I have no idea what’s going on, and I can barely open my eyes, but I told her to come in, and when my door opens, it’s not just Mom, Karen’s there, too—Cam’s mom, she’s standing at my door, looking all crazy. Seriously, I’ve never seen Karen look like that, and then she looks behind me, in my room, and she goes, Where is he? And I’m just like, I don’t know. I mean, I actually turned and looked around my room, too, like… I don’t know, maybe there was some way Cam was in my room, and I didn’t even know?

Cam? Karen says, and my mom looks at me, and I look at my mom, like, I have no idea what’s going on. I said, Karen, Cam’s not here. I don’t know where he is. And she goes, He didn’t come home last night, and then I was just like,
What the fuck? Is he okay? Was he in an accident? Where is he?
I said, He left right before my mom came home, and Karen goes, His car is here. I said, Karen, I’m telling you, I never saw him after he left yesterday, and Mom nodded, agreeing with me, and right away, I started feeling woozy, like when you lose cabin pressure.

I sat up and I go, Wait a second, and I got my phone, and I tried calling him, but he didn’t answer. Not only that, there was no message—his voice mail didn’t pick up, the line just went
dead, disconnected. I looked at my phone, and then I tried again, and the same thing happened again. By that point, I was totally awake, and Karen and my mom were standing there. But when I looked at Karen, the way she looked at me, I knew she’d already tried and experienced the same thing: no answer. His car is here—it’s out front, in your parking lot, she said again, and I go, I’m telling you, I watched him drive away last night, and I haven’t seen him since, Karen.

We walked into the living room, the three of us, and Karen said she’d called the police, and they said to give it a day, twenty-four hours, since he’s eighteen and legally an adult, but that there hadn’t been any car accidents reported. My mom offered to make her coffee, but Karen said, No, thank you, heading for the front door. She apologized for overreacting, and Mom and I walked her out, but I could tell something was going on by the look on her face, something she wasn’t saying. After Karen left, I tried calling Cam again, and then I texted and I e-mailed, too, and I thought maybe he’d gone camping or… I don’t know. I sat on the side of my bed after I got out of the shower, staring at the ground, the same way Karen had, and all I could think was,
Where the hell are you?

I haven’t taken the bus once in six months, but before I left for school, I tried again. I called, texted, e-mailed. I went to his site, but even his website was gone. No, not just down, gone—it was
gone
. No address, nothing: vanished. I swear, when that happened—I mean, I tried three, four times, then I searched on Google, and when nothing came up, every hair on my arms stood up and my hands got all clammy. He wasn’t at school, either—I
kept looking for him, expecting him to walk around the corner any minute, but no. So I texted him all day, until finally, I was just like,
Okay, three things: one, this sucks; two, you suck; and three, where the hell are you? I’m really pissed, so get back on the grid!
It wasn’t until I sent the message that I had the strangest feeling about the grid.

It’s this running joke. Because Cam loves to talk about getting rid of everything—his cell phone, credit cards, going off the grid and disappearing completely. So all day, I kept remembering how he’d just said that, the day before, on our way to school, and I just rolled my eyes. Then he goes, You laugh, Thee, but watch: One day, I’ll go off the grid. And you’ll be like, Where’s Cam? Every time I thought of him saying that, I texted him, like at least fifty times. No answer.

(TEN HOURS EARLIER)

7:35 AM

He picks me up every morning, and that’s the only thing that gets me out of bed, Monday mornings. And Tuesday, and Wednesday, but anyhow. I kissed him, and then I sat back, shaking my head at him, like,
What have you done now?

You know how a little kid will spaz out after a birthday party, all jacked up on sugar? Well, that’s how Cam is after he pulls an all-nighter, trying to figure something out in his head. I call it the geek tweak when he goes on these rants about the laws of physics and the space-time continuum. Like, say, what if time’s a double exposure, or a multiple exposure, or even an infinite multiple exposure? Seriously, last week, he was going on about how the perfect model for a time machine is a song, and he was, like, What if a song is a time machine, Thee? Think about it—it’s mathematical, it’s coded, you’re transported every time you hear
that particular equation, right? But, see, for Cam, the point isn’t coming up with an answer, the point is the possibilities.

Sometimes you can almost see sparks shooting out of his ears when he gets going, talking about time travel and time codes—Cam’s
obsessed
with the idea of time codes, of identifying exact moments in time. He has this theory that if time has a code, then you’ve just got to hack the code. Because if you figure out how to hack the code of a specific moment in time, you can change the entire course of history. And looking at him, as we pulled out on the highway, heading into town, I knew that’s why he looked so tired. Cam gets insomnia, which is normal, I guess, but this is the sort of stuff that keeps him awake at night.

Oh, wait, let me guess, I said. Did you stay up all night hacking the code again, babe? I mean, since you are the world’s foremost hacker and all, right? I said, trying so hard not to laugh, but I couldn’t help it. Oh, laugh all you like, little missy, but one day soon…, he said. Yeah, yeah, yeah…, I said, wishing we could just keep driving—right through town, and the next town, and the next.

Three percent. That’s the other thing—Cam drives me crazy with talking about how we can only see 3 percent of reality with our eyes. Like, he’s always going on about the other 97 percent, about how, if you think about how much can be seen with a microscope, that’s the tip of the iceberg. So he started in again, first thing Monday morning on our way to school, and I go, Cam, if I had a dollar for every time you’ve mentioned this, and he goes, All I’m saying is, can you imagine what the other 97 percent looks like? And go, Cam. I imagine it all the time—what do you
think I do when I draw?, thinking,
Me—of all people, how did I end up with such a geek?

The other thing Cam always talks about is the grid: he loves the idea of this world, this underworld with all these revolutionaries who live entirely off the grid, preparing for the Internet Apocalypse or whatever; I don’t know what. But Cam always says the next Che Guevara is going to be a hacker, and that hacker Che will have to use guerilla warfare tactics, always on the move, hiding out in the virtual jungles. According to Cam, hacker Che is out there—maybe even driving me to school, and I’m just like,
Dude
, you are no Che Guevara, okay? Anyhow.

Just before we got to school, I asked Cam, Which would be easier to hack into, NASA or Facebook? Facebook, he said, pulling into the parking lot, and I go, What makes you say that? Because I’ve done it, he said, turning off the ignition, patting my thigh, and I started laughing, and he goes, Don’t believe me? I looked at him and go,
No
.

He grabbed his bag from the back, and he goes, Listen, Thee. I know you love me for my rugged looks and scorching hot bod, but, for your information, missy, I am one of the world’s foremost hackers, and ohmygod, I totally lost it, laughing at his rugged bit, forget the scorching bod part. Deep down, he’s the most humble guy in the whole world, but you wouldn’t know it, hearing him talk smack. Then he goes, I’m telling you, one of the world’s foremost hackers is living right here, in a quiet little town in upstate New York. Really, why do you think we had to move here, of all the places in the world? he said, and then first bell rang.

Cam’s such a goof, I couldn’t stop laughing, getting out of the
car, and he goes, You think I’m kidding, huh? Then he grabbed my arm and started swinging me around, and I almost tripped, and Cam had to grab me to keep me from falling on the ground. I thought he had me, too, but he didn’t, and we both fell down. Smooth, right? So we’re on the ground, right in front of school, with all these kids walking past us. And even though it’s Monday morning, and we still have an entire semester to go before summer vacation, I don’t care about any of it, because I don’t want to be anywhere but exactly where I am. That’s the first time I realized that it’s all the moments I don’t have pictures of that stay with me the most.

(TWENTY HOURS LATER)

1:43 PM

Like it wasn’t bad enough, being worried sick and completely pissed off, barely able to sleep all night, the next day, Tuesday, Mr. Jenssen took my phone away in sixth period. It wasn’t my fault, either. What happened was, right after he took attendance, someone’s phone went off, and he stopped writing on the board, and he turned around with this exasperated look. He’s this smallish guy and very beige—when I think of Mr. Jenssen, I think of beige. Like he always wears Dockers and beige button-down shirts and brown shoes, and he probably has a beige wife and a couple beige kids, too. Anyhow, you could tell Jenssen was in a mood, because he turned around and said, Whose phone is that? Because they’re really coming down; we’ve got all these new rules about phones, so we’re not even allowed to bring them to class. But of course I did, because if Cam called, I wasn’t going to miss his call, no way.

Thing is, I wanted to know who it was, too. Because as soon as I heard this eerie tap-tapping snare drum sound, I knew it was Bauhaus—someone in class had Bauhaus for a ringtone, and I was like,
Wow. Is there actually someone cool in this class?
I mean, that was strange enough, but their phone kept ringing and ringing, and each ring, the ringtone got louder, and by then, the whole class was looking around, and Jenssen was about to pop a vein in his neck. But by the looks on everyone’s faces, you could tell no one knew whose phone it was, so Jenssen started walking around the room, everyone watching him, and then he goes,
I said
, whose phone is that? Who brought their phone to class?

No one answered. Everyone just stared at their hands, and by the fifth ring, it stopped, but he was
really
annoyed. He waited for like thirty seconds, and then, finally, Jenssen goes, We’ll wait to start class when someone tells me whose phone that is, and he started walking up and down the rows, waiting. Then it went off again, same song, and then I was like,
Oh, shit
, because it sounded like it was coming from my phone, beneath my desk. I reached for it, thinking someone must’ve put my bag on top of their phone, but when I pulled my bag over, it
was
my phone. I reached inside my bag, trying not to let Jenssen see, and I felt it in my hands, ringing—I didn’t know what to say, because that’s not my ringtone—I
swear
, that is not my ringtone.