CAM PAYS A VISIT
CAM wakes up thinking about drugs.
Detective Reloj let slip that Lola was using heroin. According to Irene’s television stories, people who use drugs often end up around people who are doing bad things, or are prone to doing bad things themselves, or go through drug withdrawals without telling their doctors while also suffering from obscure illnesses, thus complicating their medical diagnoses in a dramatic fashion. Surely these plot staples have at least a minimal grounding in fact.
But Cam herself doesn’t know anything about drugs, let alone why someone would want to do them.
Irene smokes pot occasionally when she thinks Cam is asleep, but Cam feels that pot is maybe not the same thing as heroin. And she can’t ask Irene why people do drugs without Irene wanting to know why she wants to know, and she can’t tell Irene why she wants to know without telling Irene about the new investigation, and if she tells Irene about the new investigation Irene will lose it, and Cam will be confined to her quarters on bread-and-water rations for the rest of her sorry existence.
So Irene is out.
Sophie is attending a private liberal arts school, where presumably many people do drugs. But Cam can’t bear the thought of Sophie not answering if she calls. Or the worse thought that Sophie is now taking drugs herself, along with all the other things she could potentially be doing at a private liberal arts school and not telling Cam about, starting with heroin and ending with, say, orgies with the lacrosse team.
So Sophie is out.
Blair used to drink beer sometimes when she was dating James. Beer is not drugs, which, as far as Cam knows, Blair does not do. But this new, secretive, mystery Blair could be inhaling methamphetamines every weekend without telling Cam about it, and Cam would have no idea. (Inhaling methamphetamines? Smoking them? Making them into soup? Cam does not know how one ingests methamphetamines in the first place.) If Blair has become a drug expert, Cam doesn’t really want to know.
So Blair is out.
Who do I know who knows about drugs? Cam thinks.
And then she remembers the obvious.
Cam hasn’t kept in touch much in the last year with Clarissa’s best friend, Jenny Alexander, though she knows Brad spends a lot of time with her. But back when Cam and Blair were in the thick of things, fighting off reporters, trying to get back to their normal lives, Jenny sent her a message Cam hasn’t forgotten: Anytime you need to talk, I’m here.
Apparently, she’d meant it. Because a phone call later, Cam’s sitting on Jenny’s quilt-covered sofa, with Jenny’s huge dog, Baskerville, half in her lap and a mug of Jenny’s tea in one hand. The tea is as good and comforting as it was a year ago.
Jenny’s hair has grown out a bit and sticks out from her head in a fuzzy halo. She’s wearing a much-patched pair of overalls over an old wool sweater with darned elbows. Just sitting next to her on the couch makes Cam feel calmer.
I want to know why a person does drugs is what Cam means to say. But when she opens her mouth, that’s not what comes out.
“I’m having really bad dreams, and I think my girlfriend’s going to break up with me,” she blurts.
“Oh, honey,” Jenny says. She leans over Baskerville and grabs Cam tight. Suddenly, Cam finds herself crying. Why is she crying? She hates crying! Cam bawls on Jenny’s woolly shoulder like a toddler while Jenny rubs her back in gentle circles and the dog wriggles around in search of a lap.
“You’re safe here,” Jenny says. “Just let it out.”
Cam’s tears at last subside, and she sits back, mortified and dripping snot. Jenny hops up, goes into the kitchen, comes back with a roll of paper towels.
“Sorry,” she says, handing them to Cam. “That’s all we’ve got. Ellie says Kleenex are an environmental catastrophe, but I got her to compromise on paper towels—you know how hard it is to cook without paper towels?—she won’t buy them herself, but she stopped yelling at me for bringing them home. My little eco-terrorist, that one. You know she used to be in one of those groups that U-lock themselves to logging road gates to try and block old-growth clear-cuts? Well, that was all before your time.”
Jenny chatters on lightly, giving Cam time to blow her nose with a vigorous Irene-like honk, blow it again, scrub her face dry, compose herself.
“Thanks,” Cam says. “Sorry. I hate crying.”
Jenny smiles at her from the other end of the couch, where she’s resettled herself. “Happens to the best of us.”
“It doesn’t happen to me,” Cam says in disgust.
“Want to talk about it?” Jenny asks.
“Maybe later. What I meant to ask you is, why do people do drugs?”
Jenny is taken aback. “I wouldn’t recommend it,” she says. “If you’re thinking about—”
“Not for me, I promise,” Cam says. “I’m trying to understand someone else.”
“Do you want to tell me who?”
“No,” Cam says.
Jenny frowns. “Is someone in danger, Cam?”
“No. Maybe. I don’t know,” Cam says. “This person isn’t using drugs anymore. I don’t think.”
Jenny gives her a look that bears a discomfiting resemblance to Irene’s patented Excuse Me, Cameron P. Muñoz?
“Is this for a podcast?”
“No,” Cam says immediately. “I swear. Not a podcast. Never again.”
“Does Blair know you’re here, Cam?”
“No,” Cam says. “Blair’s being … It’s complicated. I don’t want to talk about Blair either. We’re looking into something for a, uh, friend. Sort of.”
“Ooookay,” Jenny says. “You want to tell me what kind of drugs we’re talking about here?”
“Heroin,” Cam says.
“And how old is this person?”
“Fifteen. But not anymore. In the past, when the person was using the drugs, the person was fifteen.”
“Cam,” Jenny says.
“It’s for a good cause,” Cam says. “I know you don’t have any reason to believe me. But after last year, I never want to be famous again. I’m just trying to help out a friend. Who isn’t the person who was on drugs,” she adds hastily. “The friend is fine. Maybe not fine. But not on drugs.”
Jenny shakes her head. “All right,” she says slowly. “People don’t generally start using heroin as teenagers if all is well in their lives. Obviously. Maybe there was a situation the person was trying to escape, or feelings they were trying to numb.”
“Like maybe they were being abused?”
Mattie would’ve told them if they thought Lola was being abused, but Mattie wasn’t with their sister all the time. It’s hard to imagine wholesome park ranger Darren doing anything to hurt someone else, but it’s also hard to imagine him as a drug dealer, or a person who might fake his teenage girlfriend’s kidnapping for cash. He was definitely at least one of those things, even if he’s changed since.
And if there’s one thing Cam’s learned in the last year, it’s that people aren’t always what they seem.
But Jenny is shaking her head again. “Cam, hold up. Forget it. I’m not going to do this with you,” Jenny says. “I’m not armchair diagnosing a teenager I don’t know. If you think somebody is being abused, you need to get help. Real help.”
“Fair,” Cam says.
“Cameron, do you think someone is being abused?”
“Not now,” Cam says. “Not anymore.”
“Cam—”
“I promise,” Cam says. “I would get real help if I thought something bad was happening. Can I ask why you did drugs? You weren’t much older than fifteen when you started, right?”
Jenny thinks about this for a while. “Once when I was in rehab,” she says finally, “I met this girl who got drunk for the first time at someone’s pool party when she was eleven or twelve. She said she was floating on her back in the middle of this swimming pool, looking up at the moon, feeling the best she’d ever felt in her whole life, thinking, This is what I want forever. She said that was the night she fell in love.”
“With who?” Cam asks.
“With getting wasted,” Jenny says.
Cam waits for the revelation. “And?” she says, confused.
Jenny laughs. “And that’s it. That feeling. Nobody fully understands how addiction works, but in my experience, there are people who feel that bliss, and people who don’t. And if you do—that’s bad luck, honestly. You can spend the rest of your life chasing that feeling and never fully catch it again. But once you’ve been there, it’s hard to let go. That’s how it was for me, even before Clarissa disappeared. And afterward, I wanted to forget I was a person. I wanted to erase everything I’d ever been. I was so ashamed of who I was that I couldn’t look in a mirror.”
“Huh,” Cam says. She looks down at Baskerville, pets his large soft ears. He emits a pleased groan-whine.
“In Buddhist cosmology, there’s a realm that belongs to hungry ghosts,” Jenny says. “The ghosts are beings eternally tormented by desire. What the ghosts really want are things like love, acceptance, community. But they don’t know how to find those things, or those things have been taken away from them, so they try and fill their empty bellies with fancy cars, or sex, or alcohol, or shopping—whatever calms the hunger for a moment.”
“Drugs,” Cam says.
Jenny nods. “Drugs. But none of those things are real nourishment, right? So the ghost is always hungry, and feeding the ghost becomes an endless loop of suffering.”
Mattie hasn’t said anything about the returned Lola using drugs, but they didn’t say anything about the old Lola using drugs either. Then again, that’s not the kind of thing you tell your younger sibling. If Mattie didn’t know Lola was doing drugs, they wouldn’t know if she’d stopped.
The returned Lola doesn’t look like a person who’s stuck in a loop of suffering, that’s for sure. She looks like a person who smiles all the way to the bank.
Mattie thinks the new Lola doesn’t act like the old Lola.
What if that just means she got sober?
“Does your personality change when you stop using drugs?” Cam asks. “In general,” she adds hastily.
“It can,” Jenny says. “It doesn’t always.”
“But, in general, if a person is using drugs, and then they stop using drugs, they might act really different? They could seem like a different person altogether?”
Jenny eyes her. “In general,” she says, “that could generally be true.”
“Is that because getting sober fixes all your problems?” Cam asks.
Jenny laughs out loud. “Getting sober is when your problems really start,” she says, chuckling.
“But you’re not on drugs anymore,” Cam says, confused.
“Exactly,” Jenny says. “And once you’re not on drugs anymore, you have to deal with yourself. With the ghost. Everybody wants a tidy ending, right? ‘I was in the closet, and I was sad and lonely, and then I came out, and now everything’s perfect.’ ‘I did a bunch of heroin, and I was sad and lonely, and then I got clean, and now everything’s perfect.’ But that’s not how it works at all. You’re still the same person, with the same traumas, the same coping skills—which may or may not be good ones—the same problems. The same hungry ghost, if that’s how you want to think about it, and now the ghost doesn’t have anything to eat.
“When I got clean, I was just as big of a mess as when I was using. And on top of everything else, my feelings were right there. Everything I’d been using to get away from landed on me all at once, and then I had to deal with it. I still have to deal with it, every day. Being sober is the hardest work I’ve ever done.”
Cam considers this.
Did her life change after she came out? Not really, since the people closest to her—Irene and Blair—already knew she was gay.
Yes, totally, because now Sophie is her girlfriend, and Sophie is incredible and amazing and life-altering.
But Cam is still Cam. Cam still does reckless, stupid things and runs over other people’s feelings and makes mistakes and is obnoxious sometimes.
So is she the same, or different?
Is this what Jenny means?
And what, if anything, does this tell her about Lola?
“So if a person got sober, they might still act the same as before?” Cam asks.
Jenny only raises her eyebrows.
“You can’t tell me about someone you don’t know,” Cam says. “Message received.”
“Now, do you want to talk about why you really came here?” Jenny asks.
“No,” Cam says sullenly.
“I used to have awful dreams too, after Clarissa disappeared,” Jenny says.
“You did?” Cam looks up. “What about?”
“They weren’t subtle, let’s put it that way,” Jenny says. “Like The Silence of the Lambs, but all the chopped-up girls had her face. It got so bad I was scared to fall asleep.” Cam shifts uncomfortably. “Not a great way to live,” Jenny says. “That’s a big part of why I started using.”
“Did it work?” Cam asks.
“For a while,” Jenny says. “But then the nightmares started back up, and on top of that I had a drug problem. I wouldn’t say hard drug use was an ideal solution.”
“Irene sent me to a therapist,” Cam confesses.
“Did that work?”
“I wouldn’t say it was an ideal solution.”
Jenny smiles. “Don’t give up so fast,” she says. “It can take a long time to find the right therapist.”
Cam does not want to spend a long time finding the right therapist. She does not want to spend a short time finding the right therapist. She wants to stop dreaming about Clarissa, and she wants Sophie to call her back, and she wants Blair to stop acting weird, and she wants Mattie to go away, except now she’s curious about Lola’s deal, so she wants to know the answer to the mystery of where Lola went with no disruptions to her daily life or physical safety.
Baskerville gives her a mournful look.
“None of this is easy,” Jenny says, as if she can see directly into Cam’s skull. “What happened to you was really traumatic.”
“Nothing happened to me,” Cam says.
“Cam, you could’ve died. Blair and Irene could’ve died. And I heard about the online stuff. People were sending you death threats. That’s a lot for anyone to deal with.”
“Blair doesn’t have nightmares,” Cam says.
“You don’t know that.”
Right, Cam thinks. Because Blair doesn’t tell me anything anymore.
Not that she’s told Blair about her nightmares.
But that’s different. Right?
“Wait, how did you know about the death threats?” Cam asks.
“Oops.” Jenny looks embarrassed. “Uh, Brad may have mentioned it.”
Great, Cam thinks. Irene’s talking to Brad instead of Cam about the nightmarish messages people have sent her family over the last year. Just add that to the list of Terrible Things No One Is Talking About.
“She doesn’t want to stress you out any more than you’re already stressed,” Jenny says. Is Jenny psychic? “She needed someone to vent to, Cam. It’s not your fault.”
“It is my fault,” Cam says. “That’s the thing. All of this is my fault. If I hadn’t started that stupid podcast and dragged Blair into it, none of this would’ve happened.”
“No, it’s not,” Jenny says. “Cam, you didn’t kill Clarissa. None of this is your fault.”
“I—” Cam stops, trying to find the right words. “I wish it had never happened,” she says. “I wish none of this had ever happened. I wish Clarissa got to live her life.”
“You and me both,” Jenny says. “But it did happen. And you and Blair found out the truth. You helped the people who loved her find a way to end that story. Nothing will ever bring her back. But after all that time wondering, I know what happened to her. Brad knows what happened to her. We know that she didn’t leave us on purpose. Her parents got to bury her. What you and Blair did is huge, Cam. I never thought I’d get to have that kind of relief.”
“Relief?” Cam asks.
“If you never know whether what you’re grieving is really gone, it’s easy to get stuck,” Jenny says. “It’s like living in a waiting room. I was sure Clarissa was dead, but I didn’t know. No matter how much work I did, how much of a life I built for myself”—Jenny waves a hand, encompassing her house, the dog, the garden, her girlfriend—“that uncertainty was always festering somewhere deep inside. Knowing what happened doesn’t make what happened any easier. But it’s helping me make peace with it.”
“Did you make peace with it?” Cam asks.
“Ask me again in another year,” Jenny says.
Cam wonders what Sophie would say, and her heart contracts. Something really smart about how finding Clarissa doesn’t balance out Cam and Blair inserting themselves into someone else’s story and making a public spectacle out of it.
She wants to tell Sophie that her heart hurts, and she doesn’t know what to fight when the answer is everything, and she doesn’t know how to fight when it feels like she does everything wrong.
But Sophie is three thousand miles away.
And now Cam’s crying again.
Jenny hands her another wad of paper towels and sits quietly with her while she sobs. With anyone else—Irene, Blair, Sophie—especially Sophie?—this would be unbearable, but something about Jenny makes Cam feel okay.
If there is a list somewhere of people Cam is cool with breaking down in front of, Jenny’s is the only name on it.
“Sorry,” Cam says again, snuffling.
“Don’t apologize for having feelings,” Jenny says. “Not to anybody.”
“Sorry,” Cam says automatically, and then she laughs, and Jenny laughs too.
Cam mops her face, laugh-crying. “Shit!” she says. Baskerville tries to eat one of her paper towels.
“None of that, old man,” Jenny says firmly. Baskerville gives her a look of mournful admonition.
“You should be a therapist,” Cam says. “I would go to you for therapy, if you were a therapist.”
“That’s a very nice thing to say, but I’d be an awful therapist,” Jenny says. “I always tell people what to do and get mad when they don’t listen.”
“I think I might need someone telling me what to do,” Cam says.
“That’s not therapeutic,” Jenny says, laughing. “That’s a dictatorship. But I’m always here if you want to talk, Cam.”
“Me too,” Cam says. “I don’t have any good advice for you, though.”
“You never know,” Jenny says. “And you can keep me apprised of the hip activities of queer young people.”
“I think we make a lot of TikToks, but I’m not very au courant,” Cam says. “I could ask Sophie.”
“Sophie’s the girlfriend? Want to talk about her?”
“Irene says we might be growing in different directions,” Cam says to Baskerville. As if she and Sophie are plants. Cam is a cactus: spiky, sturdy, and unpleasant, with the occasional blossom.
Sophie? Sophie’s a dahlia. Bright and blazing and gorgeous.
“It happens,” Jenny says. “Give it time. You know what they say about the things you love. Let them be free and flap around a little. If they come back, blah blah blah.”
“I don’t want anything I love to leave me,” Cam says.
“I know the feeling,” Jenny says.
A great melancholy descends. Cam and Jenny are quiet for a long moment.
“I had panic attacks for a while too,” Jenny says conversationally, breaking the silence. “Pretty bad ones.”
“Huh,” Cam says. As if she doesn’t know what Jenny’s getting at. As if her own face isn’t as easy to read as a newspaper headline. Not for the first time, she curses her utter lack of a poker face.
“They don’t just go away,” Jenny continues. “You have to put in some work.”
“Like what?” Cam asks. “I mean, not that I’m having—not that I—”
Jenny doesn’t bother to let her finish. “Therapy,” she says, relentless.
“I don’t want to talk about—”
“There are techniques you can learn to manage them, even if you don’t want to do traditional talk therapy,” Jenny says, cutting her off briskly. “Breathing exercises. Mindfulness. Support groups.” Irene, Cam remembers, said basically the same thing. Are Jenny and Irene in some kind of Cam group chat? Cam considers this very real possibility with horror.
“Just saying,” Jenny says. “All right, I’m done. But you can always talk to me.”
“Okay,” Cam says. “Thanks.” She does not feel grateful. But she knows Jenny is trying to help, and that Jenny has been through a lot herself, and here Jenny is now, on the other side.
Maybe Jenny has a point. Even if she is in a chat with Cam’s mother.
Cam stops petting Baskerville. He pushes his nose into her hand and sighs with such reproach that Cam and Jenny both laugh and the heaviness lifts.
“All right, that’s enough of the sad shit,” Jenny says. “Tell me. Is it true Irene’s totally whipped?”