Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Chapter Thirty-Three
Chapter Thirty-Four
Chapter Thirty-Five
Chapter Thirty-Six
Chapter Thirty-Seven
RAZORBILL
Wendy Wunder is a writer and yoga teacher. She lives with her family in Boston, USA. This is her first novel. And, yes, Wendy Wunder is her real name!
WHEN CAMPBELL’S FATHER DIED, HE LEFT HER $1,262.56—AS MUCH AS he’d been able to sock away during his twenty-year gig as a fire dancer for the “Spirit of Aloha” show at Disney’s Polynesian Hotel. Coincidentally, that was exactly how much her fat uncle Gus was asking for his 1998 Volkswagen Beetle in Vapor, the only color worth having if you wanted to have a VW Beetle. Cam had been coveting it since she was six, and it was worth every penny. It blended into the mist like an invisible car, and when she drove it, she felt invisible, invincible, and alone.
She hoped this was what it would feel like in heaven.
Not that she believed in heaven, or a god (especially a male god), or Adam and Eve, like half of the morons who lived in Florida. She believed in evolution: Fish got feet, frogs got lungs, lizards got fur, and the monkeys needed to walk upright to travel across the savannah. End of story.
She didn’t believe in the Immaculate Conception, either, but it could get you into a buttload of trouble if you admitted to anyone that you thought the Virgin Mary probably just got herself knocked up like 20 percent of the teenage girls in Florida. That was an idea you kept to yourself.
Because other people needed their miracles. Other people believed in magic. Magic was for the people who could afford the seven-day Park Hopper and the eight-night stay at the Grand Floridian. Magic, Cam knew from a lifetime of working for the Mouse, was a privilege and not a right.
She inhaled the car’s plumeria-oil air freshener. It was a powerful Hawaiian aphrodisiac, but since no one ever drove with her, it had only served to make her fall deeper in love with her automobile. Who was male. She called him Cumulus.
Right now Cumulus was parked on the Zebra level of the Children’s Hospital parking structure. Cam typically parked on the Koala level; she preferred the eucalyptus tree mural and the soft, muted gray tones to the stark black-and-white stripes on Zebra. But when she arrived two hours ago, there were no spots available.
If she had been perceptive enough, she would have taken this for a sign. This appointment would not go well. They’d come to the point where things would be black and white. The good ol’ gray times were over.
A family of four disembarked from the parking elevator. The mother tried to hold the hand of a healthy four-year-old as he skipped wildly and gawkily in his Spider-Man sneakers with blinking red lights on the side. A sick, bald-headed two-year-old in a pink dress slept on the shoulder of her father, who walked in a daze toward the family’s SUV, probably wondering how this had possibly become his life.
Cam knew the feeling. She needed to do something—binge and purge, get drunk, smoke a cigarette, something—to get rid of this feeling. Her hands shook as she opened the glove compartment and rustled around to see if her mom had hidden any cigarettes in there. Her fingers felt the sharp corner of something.
What’s this? She pulled the tiny square of notebook paper out of the glove box. It crackled as she unfolded it. The handwriting didn’t seem like hers at first. The pencil had pressed these letters forcefully into the paper. The o’s were round and full and the consonants stood proud and upright as if the writer knew she had all the time in the world. (In the past few months, Cam’s handwriting had become the faint and falling-down mess of an old woman’s.)
Cam stared at the sheet of notebook paper. She hadn’t seen the list in almost a year, since she wrote it last summer from the top bunk in cabin 12 of Shady Hill Empowerment Camp for Girls. The camp brochure had promised to “help girls access their inner strength and help wallflowers blossom into the life of the party!” which made Cam shudder at first. But she had wanted to spend time with her best friend, Lily, outside a hospital and it was better than becoming counselors at “sick camp,” where the sea of bald heads, the meds cart making its rounds with the pill bottles clicking together, and the occasional pity visit from a popular celebrity were constant, depressing reminders of their condition. At Shady Hill they were just regular campers—the Flamingos. Each cabin had to choose a bird, and they decided to choose one that you’d least likely find in the woods. One that would not blend in with its surroundings. Like them.
Cam closed her eyes and leaned her head against Cumulus’s headrest. She could practically hear Lily’s voice thinking out loud from her adjacent top bunk in cabin 12:
“… Then you put the list away and stop thinking about it, and slowly … eventually, the simple act of writing things down will bring them about.”
Over the summer, Lily had become obsessed with making fun of the self-help books she found in the self-esteem section of the camp “library.” While the other girls were sneaking their way through the yellowing pages of After-School Action and Graduating to Passion that someone’s cousin had hidden beneath one of the library’s floorboards, Lily read about “affirmations.” They’d spent one afternoon in front of the cabin’s cracked and patinaed bathroom mirror jokingly informing their reflections that they were beautiful and powerful and deserving. Lily read about “visualizations,” and they giggled as they closed their eyes and imagined a rainbow of light purifying their diseased organs. Then it was this list.
“Lil,” Cam had said, but Lily was on a roll, twisting a strand of the green part of her hair around her finger as she summarized out loud.
“You can’t type it or text it. It has to be handwritten on paper, old-school like. And you can’t show it to anyone else, or it won’t come true.”
“Come on, Lily—you don’t believe in that, do you? Write it, and it will happen?”
“Of course not. But we should do it. Just for laughs. Here,” she said, and she threw Cam the oversize three-foot-long orange pencil she bought at the Davis Caverns gift shop on the last all-camp field trip. “Get writing. A list of everything you want to do before you die.”
Cam doodled in the top margin of her notebook. “What should we call it?” she asked Lily, who was already scribbling furiously. “‘Bucket list’ is so grandpa.”
“What’s another phrase like ‘kick the bucket’? ‘Pushing up daisies’? We’ll call it the Daisy List,” Lily said without looking up.
“No way,” said Cam.
“I don’t know, Campbell,” sighed Lily. “Just call it the Flamingo List then.”
“Isn’t that sort of irrelev—”
“Just write it.”
Cam sighed, wrote Flamingo List in big block letters, and then thought about what to include. It should be realistic, she decided. What she really missed since becoming sick was normalcy. That’s why she came to Shady Hill instead of cancer camp, even though the cabins smelled like mildew. Maybe because they smelled like mildew. Cam wanted a life that was mildewed. Metaphorically speaking. So she began making a list of all the regular stuff she might miss out on if she didn’t make it through her teens. Like Lose my virginity at a keg party, she wrote. Or Wallow in misery, mope, pout, and sleep through Saturday …
“What do you think it’s going to be like?” Lily interrupted. She had finished her list and sat tentatively on her bunk, chewing the end of her pen.
“What is what going to be like, Lily?” Cam asked. Lily could jump right into the middle of a conversation, forgetting that Cam did not necessarily inhabit her brain to experience the beginning of it. “Senior year? The Winter Olympics? The prom? Sex? Tonight’s dinner?”
“Death,” Lily answered.
“Death.” Cam paused. “Well, I guess there’ll be the tunnel and the white light and the looking down at your own body.…”
“I didn’t think you believed in an afterlife,” Lily said.
“I don’t,” Cam answered. “The so-called ‘near-death experience’ is a neurological event. A big dream set off by massive amounts of hormones released by the pituitary gland. It’s all caused by dimethyltryptamine. Not God.”
“Oh,” said Lily, disappointed. She looked out the window.
“Well, what do you think it’ll be like?”
“I think it’s going to be dark at first. There has to be darkness when your body shuts down. Then a bright rainbow bridge will arch through the blackness, and stars will blink on around it, lighting your path to the Spirit World.”
Cam smirked. “Spirit World? Wait, let me consult my dreamcatcher.…”
“Heaven,” Lily said. “I believe there’s a heaven.”
Cam opened her eyes, staring out at the bleak underground parking lot. Maybe it’s time I start crossing some of these off, she thought, running her eyes down the list again. Since the last item seemed to be the only quest fully within her power right now, she would start with that one first.
She called Lily. “What should I steal, Chemosabe?”
“What?” Lily’s voice was raspy and slow, as if she had just woken up.
“It’s on the list.”
“What list?” Cam could hear sheets rustling and the bed squeaking as Lily pulled herself into an upright position.
“Remember that list from summer camp?”
“Why is shoplifting on your Flamingo List?” Lily asked, exasperated. “You’re not supposed to force it, anyway, Campbell. You’re just supposed to let things happen.”
“I’m feeling the need to hurry things along a bit,” Cam said. She let her forehead fall to the steering wheel and rolled her head along the upper arc of it.
“Get some Burt’s Bees lip balm, then. I just ran out,” Lily said, conceding. Cam could practically see her squinting as she inspected her dry lips in the mirror.
“And what else?” Cam asked.
“A plastic flamingo from the dollar store,” Lily threw out. “Like one of those lawn ornament things.”
“That will be a challenge.”
Cam lifted her head from the steering wheel and patted her car.
“To Whole Foods, Cumulus,” she said, and they were off.
CAM LOVED THE SMELL OF WHOLE FOODS: A BLEND OF SANDALWOOD, patchouli, lavender, dirt, garlic, and B.O. Whole Foods was one of the few places in Florida where Cam did not appear suspect in her tight black hoodie and the torn-to-shreds, faded black skinny jeans that she could wear only because the big C had wasted her half-Samoan body to a size zero.
Whole Foods embraced people like her. Oddballs with a touch of the native to them. This was where people tried to get in touch with the native. The authentic. And where they pretended to be more tolerant. So Cam sniffed an aluminum-free deodorant stick while she stuck some Burt’s Bees lip balm into her green canvas biker bag shellacked with a collage of ripped bumper stickers. The top one read, IMAGINE … and the rest bore such slogans as A FREE TIBET, MARRIAGE FOR ALL, NO HUMAN BEING IS ILLEGAL, PEACE IN THE MIDDLE EAST, THE GOLDEN RULE, HEALTH CARE IS A HUMAN RIGHT, and WHERE’S MY VOTE? (in solidarity with the Iranian people who had had their election stolen by an evil dictator).
She was the only person in Osceola County, Florida, who cared about things like stolen elections, freedom, human rights.… The rest were too busy procreating, which started early down here. Three couples had gotten engaged at her senior prom.
Cam hadn’t gone to senior prom because they probably had rules about dating your car, but if she’d been there, she would have wished the happy couples pomaika’i, “good luck” in Hawaiian. They would need good luck. A miracle, really. Without a miracle, each of the couples would end up divorced and trying to raise three kids on twelve dollars an hour, increasing the population of trailer-park-livin’, broke-down-car-drivin’, dollar-store-shoppin’, processed-food-eatin’ diabetics that populated the happy Sunshine State.
But maybe it would work out for them. Cam hoped so. Maybe they were different.
She stuck some calendula root into her sweatshirt pocket. She didn’t even know what it was, but she loved the sound of it, cal-en-du-la root. She’d swallow some on the way out the door.
“Excuse me?” chirped a voice behind her.
Cam jumped. Was she busted already?
She turned to find the typical Whole Foods shopper: fifty, gray hair tied back in a loose bun, blue eyes, no makeup, baggy pants, Clarks, organic cotton shopping bag. More and more ex–college professors and social workers were making their way to these parts because this was all they could afford in retirement.
“Yes?” said Cam, fiddling with the bottle of calendula root in her pocket.
“Who does your hair?”
“Um. My hair?”
“Yes, it’s such a great cut.”
Cam’s thick black hair was short. She buzzed it with her dad’s old electric clippers on the one-inch setting. “I do it myself,” she said.
“Well, it really suits you. You have such a beautiful face,” Typical Whole Foods Shopper said as she put some fiber capsules in the front basket of her cart.
“Thank you,” said Cam, and she waited for the lady to turn the corner before sticking a tiny box of chlorine-free, all-natural tampons into the cuff of her jeans.
She’d heard that before. “Such a pretty face.” God, she hated that. Pre-C, that was code for, “What a shame. She’s so fat.” Now it was code for, “What a waste. Such a pretty lesbian.”
It killed Cam’s mother that she wouldn’t let her hair grow back after the chemo. Her mom thought long hair was powerful. Plus, without long hair, Cam would never get to dance in “Aloha.” Without long hair, she was relegated to the kitchen in the back of the hotel, where she spent hours as a prep cook, carving out pineapple boats for the Polynesian rice.
“There’s always Perry,” Cam would say to her mom. “She could dance with you someday.”
“Agh!” Cam’s mom would throw up her hands in disgust. As a hula dancer (who was really an Italian-American woman from New Jersey), her hands were very expressive. Alicia had met Cam’s dad in New York when they were in their twenties, dancing in clubs and the occasional Broadway chorus. She took Polynesian dance class just to spend more time with him and then eventually made a career out of it.
Perry, Cam’s eleven-year-old half sister, could never dance in “Aloha.” She was the result of a post-divorce one-night stand their mom had had with a cast member from “Norway” in Epcot. Perry had white-blonde hair and moved with heavy steps, like a Viking.
“Perry is a lot of things,” her mom would say, “but she is no dancer.”
Cam’s mom wanted her to dance not simply because she wanted a legacy but more because the dance had healing powers. At least for the spirit. And Cam did dance—it was in her blood—but she did it alone, at home, in front of her Spikork mirror from IKEA.
TYLER, A WHOLE FOODS TEAM MEMBER scanned the bar code on the breath mints she’d decided to pay for.
“You’re a cashier,” Cam mumbled, staring at the green name tag with the cheap white letters.
“What?”
“You can see through their bullshit, right? You’re not a team member. They don’t really care about you as a person.”
“Okay. Whatever.”
“Disney was the first to use that trick. They call their employees ‘cast members’ so the poor guy twisting balloon animals thinks he’s a star at Disney.”
TYLER just grunted.
“If you have to wear a name tag, you’re an employee,” she went on.
“I know you took the lip stuff,” he said, handing the breath mints to Cam. He had strong, knuckly fingers, messy black hair, and brown eyes with one adorable golden fleck in the left one.
“But you don’t know about the calendula root. Or the tampons,” she said. Or the natural sea sponge she’d stuck in her bra. “Have a nice day.”
And as she slowly made her way to the door, she imagined a Rolf moment from The Sound of Music—the one where Rolf finds the whole family behind the tombstone in the abbey and hesitates, deciding whether or not he loves Liesl, before blowing that pansy-ass Nazi whistle. Did TYLER, A WHOLE FOODS TEAM MEMBER, love her, or would he blow the whistle?
He loved her.
She was free, walking across the Alps of the parking lot to the neutral, loving Switzerland of her car. She let out a sigh and wished for a second that she were in the Alps. Living in Florida was like living on the sun. She could actually see the gaseous heat rising from the asphalt.
Cam arranged her Whole Foods booty into a still life on the dashboard and sent a photo of it to Lily. She crossed Experiment with petty shoplifting off of her Flamingo List and stuck it back in the glove box. Then her phone rang with the Lily ringtone, “I Believe in Miracles,” by the Ramones. She’d picked it because she suspected that perhaps Lily did believe in miracles. In a small, somewhat sarcastic kind of way.
“Good job, Cueball, I didn’t think you had it in you,” she said when Cam picked up.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Nothing. You know how you are.”
“How am I?” Cam asked, opening the little pot of Burt’s Bees and sliding the goop across her pursed lips.
“You know, that thing where you’re brutally honest and truthful and always right even when you’re sick and tired of always being right because you know it makes you seem obnoxious. I thought that would get in your way.”
“I heard some bad news today, Lil.”
“We’ve heard bad news before.”
Cam was silent. She unstuck the suction cup of her dashboard hula doll and waved her back and forth so that her eyelids opened and shut.
“It doesn’t matter,” Lily went on. There was a pause. No one said anything. And then: “Nothing matters but getting that flamingo.”
“’Kay,” said Cam, and she hung up. She sucked in some breath, which buoyed her for a moment. But after she exhaled she felt everything inside her—her stomach, her solar plexus, her throat—getting wrung out by an imaginary pair of cruel and strangling fists.
Cam drove past the pink and aquamarine–canopied strip malls until she found the one with the Family Dollar. No one dressed in black shopped in Family Dollar. That was pretty much a rule. She would not blend.
Cam donned her grandmother’s old straw beach hat with the yellow ribbon for a splash of color. She put on her big red sunglasses. And, luckily, while she was crossing the parking lot, she was able to catch a Family Dollar plastic bag that was swirling away in a miniature tornado.
She walked up to the sidewalk sale and pretended to peruse the plastic, lead-painted offerings made in China. The flamingos were stuck pole-first into a big cardboard box, where they butted up against one another and stared with their black spray-painted eyes at the tiki torches, kiddie pools, water wings, and plastic margarita glasses that were all half-price for summer.
Cam examined one closely, as if one needed to inspect the quality of one’s plastic flamingo. Then she dumped it headfirst into her Family Dollar bag, suffocating it, and made it all the way back to her car. She was searching for her key when someone tapped her on the shoulder.
“You going to pay for that flamingo?”
Rats, thought Cam, but before she could say, “What flamingo?” she felt it happening. It felt like fear, only stronger. She could feel a cold breeze; her left arm began shaking. Her head seemed to fill up with air like a head balloon. An electric shock shot through her spine, and then she got dizzy and lost her balance. It was like being struck by lightning.
And then it was black.
WHEN SHE CAME TO, DRENCHED IN SWEAT AND WITH A POUNDING headache, she struggled to remember where she was and who in God’s name this mustachioed man, staring at her through inch-thick glasses could be. His name tag read HELLO, MY NAME IS DARREN.
“Hello. My name is Cam,” said Cam. “Where am I?”
“Dollar store parking lot. You stole a flamingo.”
“I don’t think we formally established that,” she said, still fully reclined on the blacktop. It was so hot that the asphalt beneath her was beginning to melt. She felt a little tar bubble beneath her fingers and pierced it with her fingernail.
“Well, it’s in the bag, and you don’t have a receipt.”
“Did you call 911?”
“Yes. They’re on their way.”
“All righty, then, cowboy, I’ll need to motor on out of here.” Cam could hear the siren approaching in the distance, and she winced in pain as she slowly lifted herself from the pavement. These would be city paramedics and not the pretend Disney ones that she could shoo away with a doctor’s note.
“Wait,” said the Family Dollar manager. “You can’t just leave. You can’t drive like this. You were flipping around like a fish, foaming at the mouth.”
“Yup. That happens. Next time you see that, grab a tongue depressor so a person doesn’t swallow her tongue. Mind if I take the flamingo?”
“It’s $2.89.”
“Whoa, Darren, you drive a hard bargain. How about I’m just going to take it?”
Cam grabbed the flamingo and threw it into the backseat, started the Beetle, and peeled out of the parking lot. She was slowly regaining control of her limbs, but they felt heavy. Darren was right; she probably shouldn’t be driving.
Cam looked into her rearview mirror. Darren was still in too much shock to really do anything about her getaway. Hopefully he hadn’t taken down her license plate number.
Before she drove home, she decided on a perfect home for the flamingo, whom she’d named after Darren. She would take a picture of Darren the flamingo in front of Celebration, Disney’s planned community. Most of Disney’s top executives lived in Celebration, where they had rules about what you could wear and what you could drive and how many kids you should have (three) and whether you could have a pet.
“Performers” like Cam and pink flamingos like Darren were definitely not part of the plan. Cam took a photo of Darren in front of the Celebration gates. Then she drove through the community, where everything looked eerily telegenic. It was like living on the soundstage for Leave It to Beaver. She found Alexa Stanton’s house in the federalist section of the town, where each home was designed to look like the abode of a founding father, complete with yellow paint, black shutters, and stately white columns.
Alexa was the head cheerleader; she used to hate Cam because Cam was smart and could talk to Alexa’s brainiac boyfriend about politics. She used to tease Cam about her weight.
Cam threw the flamingo onto Alexa’s perfectly manicured lawn, just to let her puzzle over that. A plastic flamingo. Was it a sign? Like the horse’s head in The Godfather? Was someone after her? Alexa would never think this way, Cam knew. She would just ignore Darren and let the gardener deal with him. She would never think of the Godfather reference. Not everyone was a film buff like Cam. A consequence of sitting for hours with platinum dripping into the shunt in your chest. There was nothing else to do during chemo but watch films.
Darren hated it here, she could tell. He looked scared and alone lying on his side in the perfect square of green sod. His black eye seemed to widen and plead, “Don’t leave me!”
He should be frightened, thought Cam. He had good instincts. This land of make-believe wanted nothing to do with him and what he represented: beer in cans; bad teeth; immigrants; minimum wage; the uninsured; blood, sweat, and tears; hard rock; the real world; death.
It all came back to that, didn’t it? People were afraid to die. So they lived in Celebration.
On second thought, Cam would keep Darren.
Cam lived far away from Celebration, on Ronald Reagan Drive in a crumbling three-bedroom ranch with beige shag carpet from the seventies, spackled ceilings, and walls so thin that Cam had to sleep with headphones on so she could drown out the sounds of her mom’s lovemaking.
Cam understood that in most people’s universes the words mom and lovemaking never appeared in the same sentence. But unfortunately Cam had to live in reality, with a real mother who brought home real men from the fake countries of Epcot. Her current and yearlong conquest was Izanagi, a chef from the Benihana-style grill in “Japan.”
He was the last person Cam wanted to see when she walked through the door, exhausted from her doctor’s appointment and having had a seizure in the dollar store parking lot. He wore a pink kimono as he chopped vegetables for an omelet, juggling his knife before flipping a piece of red pepper into Perry’s mouth. Perry applauded like a trained seal.
Cam tried to sneak right into her bedroom for a nap, which should have been easy in their cave of a home. The stalactites of the spackle and the stalagmites of the shag carpet should have muffled the sounds of her entrance, but the funny thing about her mother was that she had supersonic bat hearing, appropriate for their cavelike existence. People adapt. Natural selection. Darwin. Evolution.
“Campbell!” her mom screamed from the bedroom. “Eat something. Izanagi is making an omelet.”
“Really? I hadn’t noticed. He’s so subtle about it.”
“What?”
“Nothing. I’m not hungry.”
“Cam. Please.”
She was turning into a little bit of a cancerexic. A small part of her enjoyed the fact that she could now wear skinny clothes, and she was a little afraid to eat. Another part of her couldn’t believe that healthy girls would starve themselves to look like her—a size zero, a nothing, a sick person. At least her old fleshy self would have lived to see eighteen.
Cam heard chop, chop, scrape, and then she used her fire-juggling reflexes to catch the shrimp that was flying toward her face.
“You need protein,” said Izanagi.
“Domo arigato, Mr. Roboto.”
Cam bit a tiny piece of the shrimp, and it actually didn’t make her gag. Maybe if she covered her omelet with ketchup, she could eat. “I’ll take mine by the pool,” she said, and she wasn’t joking. They really did have a pool. It was the only reason their mom stayed in this house, and the only thing she seemed able to maintain. The rest of the house was crumbling and mildewed, but the kidney-shaped pool sparkled. When Cam’s mother was twenty-five, she had vowed never to live in a house without a pool, and so Cam’s dad had bought her this one.
He’d enjoyed it, too, inviting the whole cast of “Aloha” over for parties when the weather dropped below fifty degrees. That was the only time Disney would cancel the outdoor show.
Cam missed that, and so many other things about her dad.
“Hi, sweetie,” said her mom, her wavy, waist-length hair glistening in the sun as she came out to the deck to deliver Cam’s omelet. Alicia was a stomach sleeper, which says a lot about a person. Only 7 percent of people on the planet sleep on their stomachs, and stomach sleepers are vain, gregarious, and overly sensitive. Also small-breasted, apparently, because that position couldn’t be comfortable with big boobs.
When she was pregnant with Cam, she’d had trouble sleeping on her side, so Cam’s dad had driven Alicia all the way to Clearwater, where he could dig a hole in the sand for her belly. Alicia would flop down like a beached whale and finally get to nap. Cam began her life like a baby turtle, buried in the beach. Her dad had called her Turtle sometimes, though it hadn’t really stuck.
He was thoughtful, her dad, and yet after all that—the driving to the beach, the digging of the hole, the buying of the pool, the fathering of the child—her mom still hadn’t even cried at his funeral. It was the final proof for Cam, as if she needed it, that true love did not exist. Connections between people were temporary. Selfish. Opportunistic. Designed to perpetuate the species. “Love”—romantic love, anyway—was a fantasy people indulged in because otherwise, life was just too boring to tolerate.
“Will you cry at my funeral, I wonder?” Cam asked as she sliced through her omelet with the side of her fork. The neat pillow of egg leaked its juices into the ketchup, creating a pink watery puddle on her plate. So much for her appetite.
“What? Campbell, I’ll be dead at your funeral. This thing will kill you over my dead body. I told you. Which is why I need you to apply to those schools. You need a plan for September.” Alicia had been collecting community-college brochures filled with bright photos of happy multicultural coeds, and they had been sliding around on top of one another, dry humping on the kitchen counter for months. Stomach sleepers are also prone to passive-aggressive tactics, like secretly hoarding college brochures and finding ways to beat around the bush when they really just wanted to ask how their daughter’s doctor’s appointment went.
“I’m not going to any of those schools, Mom.”
“Yes, you are. And if you hadn’t spent that money on that car, you could have had more money for books. I’m going to kill that Gus for taking your money. I swear to God.”
“Why don’t you get someone from Jersey to do it?”
“I could, you know.” Her mom took a sip of coffee and got a mischievous, nostalgic look in her eye. Old people always exaggerate the danger and lawlessness of their youth, thought Cam, because their adult lives have become so boring.
“You don’t really know anyone in the mob, do you?”
“Just a friend of a friend’s cousin.”
Her mom often glorified her Jersey roots. People from New Jersey were tough; they were cool. Jersey had the best bagels and the best pizza and the best corn and the best tomatoes, and on and on. Cam thought they should open a section of Disney called JerseyLand for all those hopeless Jersey romantics who wanted to simplify themselves. Because that was what Disney did. It provided a simulacrum of your life that looked better than the murky one you lived in and convinced you that your life was okay. Baudrillard described this concept, and Cam had written about it in her essay to Harvard. And she’d gotten accepted. Which she would never tell anyone. It was her final secret triumph, but she wasn’t stupid enough to get her hopes up.
Plus they’d only accepted her because of her extraordinary story. Being almost dead made her special, like the Olympic athletes, movie stars, eighteen-year-old venture capitalists, published authors, and children-who-were-raised-on-a-sailboat that made up the rest of the freshman roster.
“So,” her mom finally said.
“So what?”
“The PET scan, Cam. What did they say about the PET scan?”
“You’re supposed to call them. They’re not supposed to tell me anything. I’m a minor.” This was true, but Cam still would not let her mom come with her to the Children’s Hospital anymore. It was already torture to sit in a waiting room with a bunch of bald, sick three-year-olds. She wasn’t going to sit there with her mother.
“But I know you got it out of them.”
“I did,” Cam admitted.
“So.”
“Sew buttons.” That phrase always made Cam laugh. Her grandmother was the only one who still used it because she was probably the only person who still actually sewed buttons.
“Campbell.”
Cam pushed a piece of her omelet through the ketchup on her plate and then just covered the whole thing with a napkin. “So the cancer is everywhere. Pretty much. Nothing’s changed. Oh, except for some new growth around the kidneys.”
The PET scan had showed Cam’s skeleton shimmering like a Christmas tree with glowing nodules of cancer draped around her center like a garland of lights. The cross-section view of her torso looked otherworldly, like a view from the Hubble telescope or from a place deep underwater, aqueous and murky, except, again, for the bright glowing ember of cancer, which Dr. Handsome did not like to see.
Dr. Handsome—that was really his name, and it led to endless jokes about whether he was a doctor or just played one on TV—held his silver pen above the computer screen and used it as a pointer to trace an imaginary circle around the bright orange glow surrounding her kidneys. He used the same silver pen every visit. Which says a lot about him, Cam thought. The pen was probably a gift, which meant he had people who loved him and were proud of his doctor-dom. And he was sentimental if he cared enough not to lose it. It was either that or he was a little obsessive. Detail-oriented. Which is a good trait for doctors to have, Cam thought. You didn’t want them slipping up. The longest Cam had ever kept a pen was probably five days, max. She and Dr. Handsome were very different.
“This is not what we were hoping to see,” he said as he swirled the pen in a little loop-de-loop and then just let it droop between his finger and thumb. He dropped his head into his free hand and combed his fingers through his black hair and sighed.
This was the first time Cam had seen him show any negativity. He had always been so positive. His posture today seemed so defeated.
“Maybe that”—Cam took the pen from his hand and traced it around the orange—“is my second chakra, you know? I think that’s about where it’s supposed to be. The second chakra is the orange chakra. The seat of power and change. Can that machine pick up chakras and auras and whatnot?”
Dr. Handsome tried to speak, and then something caught in the back of his throat. Is he about to cry? Cam wondered. He was.
“Cam …” He composed himself. “I’m sorry. I’m just very, very tired. … Cam, there is nothing we can do.”
Cam had been coming here for five years, and she thought she’d seen all of his moods. He could be goofy and giddy when he was tired, and he was great with the little ones. He had a rubber blow-up punching clown in his office, so the kids could blow off some steam before their appointments. Cam gave the clown a little jab now and he rocked back and forth. “But you’re Dr. Handsome,” she said. She knew what really centered him was when he focused on the medicine. “Put away those emotions and pull out some of that doctor-speak. You need to talk cold, hard science. Say ‘malignancy’ or ‘subcutaneous’ or something. It’ll make you feel better.”
“Science is just not enough this time, Campbell Soup. What you need is a miracle.”
Cam’s mom sat on her favorite deck chair and leafed through an InStyle magazine. She put her coffee down on the glass patio table and without looking up asked, “And so is there a new trial we can get into?” She was pretending to be nonchalant, but Cam could see that telltale crease between her eyebrows change from fine line to deep-set wrinkle.
“There’s nothing left.”
“There’s always something left,” she said, turning another page of her magazine, to an article that showed you how to wear the latest trend (black lace) in your twenties (stockings), thirties (little black dress), forties and beyond (never!).
“They’ve run out of trials, Mom. Anything else they try will kill me before the cancer does. My counts were not good.”
“I’ll call them today, Cam. I’ll get you into something. They can at least give you some more cisplatin,” she said, finally looking Cam straight in the eye.
“Mom. You’re not listening. There’s nothing left.”
“We’ll just go to St. Jude’s or Hopkins or something.”
“We’ve been there, Mom. St. Jude’s twice. They’ve done everything they can do.” Cam was tired. She didn’t want to think about this anymore. She just wanted to sleep and forget for a few hours. The new, rubbery, custom patio cushions in parakeet green hissed a little as Cam let her head fall back. The Florida sun felt good on her face for a couple of seconds, but soon it started to feel less like warmth and more like radiation. “Dr. Handsome said I need a miracle.”
“Well then, Cam,” her mom said, sighing and then snapping a stale piece of Nicorette, “we’ll find you a goddamn miracle.”
“That’s not exactly a good way to start.” Cam opened her eyes and looked at the cloudless blue sky overhead. “You don’t damn God before you ask for a mira—”
“I’m not giving up, Campbell. I will never give up on you.” The last four syllables built to a crescendo, followed by Alicia’s hand slamming onto the glass table.
“Cancer’s not in my ears,” Cam mumbled. “Yet.”
“Dammit!” Alicia yelled and threw her coffee mug onto the cement pool deck. It shattered with an empty pop.
“You’re going to regret that. That was the Santa mug,” said Cam, unfazed. Her mom’s favorite coffee mug was printed with a faded, barely perceptible picture of Cam and Perry sitting on Santa’s lap taken ten years ago.
Cam was used to her mom’s outbursts. She had been living with them for years. Something had happened to Alicia in midlife, where every emotion—sadness, fear, joy, confusion, helplessness—could only find an outlet through her anger. It was especially prominent after her first cup of coffee in the morning. Her mom said it was hormonal. Cam thought it was just Alicial.
“Campbell, you have to believe me,” Alicia said, composing herself. “I am not going to let you die.”
“That’s reassuring. Really. I believe you. Now I need to take a nap.”
As Cam hugged her mother and walked back to her room, she realized she’d be spending the rest of her short life making other people feel better about the prospect of losing her.
CAM HELD HER BREATH AND DUNKED HER HEAD BENEATH THE SURFACE of the water. She needed to drown out the sounds of her neighbors cheering as they caravanned to school for graduation.
It was too hot for a ceremony on the field, so each graduate could only invite two people to watch from the air-conditioned seats of the auditorium. Cam had stuck her tickets to the “Commencement Excercise”—with the word Exercise misspelled in expensive golden ink—between pages 218 and 219 of Anna Karenina.
Cam blinked her eyes open in the bright turquoise pool. It was harder to tell that you were crying when your head was underwater. Plus the cold water felt good on the lovely blue-spotted rash that she was developing all over her forearms, called “blueberry spots.” What a cute little name for a cancerous lesion.
The buzzing of the pool’s robo-vacuum vibrated up through her spine, and she let herself sink until she sat on the slippery pool bottom. Cam had decided to skip graduation today. She had missed so much school because of her chemo and trials that she had lost touch with most people there. And she didn’t want to hear about her classmates’ plans for the future, most of which involved working at Disney, at least for the summer. Alexa and her sidekick Ashley were waiting anxiously to see if they had gotten cast as one of the Cinderellas. Cam was a little jealous that people had futures at all, if she had to be honest. She didn’t want to think about the future.
The final straw may have been that no one on the faculty could spell exercise.
Cam sprang to the pool’s surface, taking a gasping breath. Then she climbed out and dabbed at the mysterious rivulets of tears that had merged with the streaming drops of chlorinated water dripping from the ends of her hair. She blotted them away rather than swiping because her nana had told her years ago that wiping your face causes wrinkles. As if. She laughed.
Luckily she had signed up for a shift at work. That would be a welcome distraction.
Cam loved mornings in the kitchen. A restaurant kitchen in the morning was like a gentle, yawning beast. Blinking, stretching, clicking, opening, closing. You could still hear distinct, individual sounds before things got going full steam and the beast recovered his fiery breath amid the cacophony of the cooking.
Joe, the cook, was always the first one on the job, and he and Cam had a system that worked. No one talked until noon. Joe needed his coffee to kick in, and they both enjoyed the silence before the chaos.
But this morning, Joe could not shut up.
“So maybe I’ll put some tarragon in the sauce,” he said. “What do you think, Cam? A little mustardy bite to the sweet and sour?” He was stirring a stainless-steel vat of the stuff with a big wooden paddle. Joe’s hoarse and staticky boom-box choked out his favorite Zeppelin track. He had figured out years ago how to disconnect the magical mood music piped in through the infinite sound web that reached every corner of the park.
“You need to stick to the recipe, Joe. It’s only a temporary move, remember? So you can have some health insurance for the kids,” said Cam without lifting her gaze from the cutting board. She sliced through another pineapple, halving it perfectly with one swing of her mouse-ke-cleaver.
“Right,” he said. “No tarragon.” Joe was a brilliant chef who hoped to move quickly up the ranks to one of the Disney restaurants that actually had a menu. The Polynesian Hotel served meals banquet-style, which was boring—the same dinner for everyone for two seatings in a row—but it was a step up from the food court at the All-Star Sports budget hotel. Cam was trying to convince him to audition for one of those chef reality shows where you could win your own restaurant, but they couldn’t imagine what role he could play. He was completely nondistinct, a Midwestern, khaki-wearing guy of average height and weight, with light brown spiky hair.
“But that’s who you could be,” Cam would argue. “The completely nondescript Midwestern guy who comes from behind and shocks everyone with his brilliance in the end.”
She hacked through another pineapple. Her cleaver made a satisfying thud as it lodged itself in the cutting board.
“So what are you doing this summer, Cam? Have any big plans?” Joe asked as he poured a three-gallon jug of coconut milk into the vat.
“No. Not really. Why are you so chatty, Joe? I don’t like the new chatty Joe.”