November 15 falls on a Tuesday. If the essay contest people are going to notify winners by “mid-November,” this is as “mid” as “mid” can be. I check my email all day long—before classes, after classes, surreptitiously under my desk during classes: nothing. Maybe they’ll tell us by snail mail, not email? But when I check the mail first thing when I get home after school: nothing. The New Yorker editor emailed me on a Saturday, so maybe the contest judges work odd hours, too. But when I go to bed at ten, I’ve still heard nothing. I reach for my phone to check my email first thing when I wake up Wednesday morning, and keep checking it all day Wednesday. Ditto for Thursday.
Nothing.
It’s starting to look as if I have a clean sweep of failure at everything.
After ballet on Thursday I go to Kylee’s house for dinner, and we make necklaces together with the beautiful handcrafted glass beads she got at the bead show in Denver. She keeps saying that the agents were wrong and my novel is wonderful, but it’s hard to let myself believe her. Well, if I’m no longer going to be a writer, maybe I can be a necklace maker. I don’t think there’s as much rejection in necklace making. There isn’t any equivalent to a New Yorker necklace magazine. As far as I know, there aren’t any brutally honest necklace agents.
* * *
Friday is the last day before our weeklong Thanksgiving break. It’s also the day of the middle school dance, when Cameron might or might not be there, and the band might or might not play his song, and he might or might not ask me to dance. It’s a day fraught with fraughtness.
We get our report cards eighth period, which for me is science with Mr. Cupertino. Isabelle is the only one of my friends who is in that class with me. Even though parents can check grades on Infinite Campus, we get a paper printout of them in an envelope for us to take home for our parents to sign, in case there are some parents who aren’t as obsessed with Infinite Campus as my parents are. Plus, some teachers take forever to update the website, which drives parents like mine absolutely foaming-at-the-mouth crazy, but all teachers have to turn in all the grades for report card day. And report card day is when our grades become real and final.
When Mr. Cupertino hands out the envelopes, I channel Cameron and don’t open mine. I put it in my science binder without even peeking.
“How’d you do?” Isabelle asks as we head to our lockers after the dismissal bell.
I shrug. “I don’t know. I haven’t looked yet.”
She stares.
I smile.
Maybe this is why Cameron is the way he is. It’s lovely to feel so strong and pure, indifferent to what everyone else is worried about. Like I’m standing outside in a driving rain and everyone else is huddled under their umbrellas moaning about how wet their feet are getting, and not a drop of rain is falling on me. Or maybe it is falling, and I just turn my face up to the sky and say, Oh. Water.
Of course, the minute no one is looking, I stand by my open locker, slip the envelope out of the binder, and open it.
All A’s except for a B in pre-algebra.
Kylee appears next to me, ready to walk home together.
“What are we doing this weekend?” she asks. I love that she doesn’t say anything about her report card or ask anything about mine. In her own way, Kylee is as cool as Cameron.
“Sleep?” I suggest. “You could knit?” Kylee’s parents have allowed her to knit again, with a one-hour-a-day limit.
In the past I would have said, Write, but I still feel too terrible from Calling All Authors, which should have been titled Destroying All Authors. I didn’t end up actually burning my novel—I couldn’t do it—but I don’t want to write anything ever again, except what I have to write for journalism class. As it turns out, I’m not someone who thrives on massive rejection and gets stronger and tougher from brutally honest criticism. I’m someone who thrives on encouragement and praise. Of which lately I’ve been getting precisely none.
I push these thoughts from my mind. “And tonight we have—”
“The dance,” Kylee says. “Are we definitely going? Because last time—”
“This dance will be different,” I promise. “The sixth-grade one was just supposed to be an experiment to see how we’d do.”
Kylee laughs at the obviousness of the experiment’s results. We’re outside now, in the mob of kids searching for their parents in the long line of cars idling in front of the school. I’m glad Kylee and I live close enough that we can walk.
“There won’t be any sixth graders at this one,” I tell her. “Just seventh and eighth graders. No popcorn war. No punch disaster. This will be a dance where people actually dance.”
It might even be a dance where Cameron dances with me.
“Okay,” Kylee says. “We’ll go. But we’re not standing by the refreshment table. And if Henry Dubin asks me to dance, I’m just going to say … What am I going to say?”
“You’ll say that you’re sorry, but you were just about to go to the bathroom.”
“What if I get back from the bathroom and he asks me a second time?”
“You’ll say that you have to go to the bathroom again. It must have been something you ate.”
“So you’ll be out there dancing with Cameron”—I haven’t told her my fantasy, but she figured it out on her own—“while I’m spending the night in the bathroom pretending to have diarrhea?”
“Yes,” I say. “That’s the plan.”
People walk past us, still talking about their report cards.
“I had an eighty-nine, and I can’t believe she didn’t round it up to an A…”
“Mr. Pearson only likes you if you laugh at his jokes, and, believe me, they are the dumbest jokes you’ve ever heard…”
“My dad is going to kill me…”
We’re crossing the bridge on the creek a block away from the school. Yes, our school was built on a flood plain. Any time we get a long rain kids start hoping the school will be flooded and classes will be canceled. It’s never happened yet, but it might someday.
“Look,” Kylee says, stopping suddenly, halfway across the bridge. “Is that Cameron?”
There’s a kid, facing away from us, standing on a flat rock in the middle of the creek.
It is Cameron.
“What’s he doing?” Kylee asks.
He’s stacking rocks, one on top of the other, placing each one carefully on the one below so they’re perfectly balanced. He’s not arranging them in order of size, little ones on top of big ones. That would be too boring. That would be too easy.
My mother says the first thing I ever loved was rocks.
The wind has come up, but Cameron isn’t wearing a jacket. His tennis shoes must be soaked with the creek water rippling against them.
Now I see there are several rock towers in the creek, each one constructed from five or six rocks, each one different. Did Cameron make them all? He wouldn’t have had time to make them all today; the bell rang just ten minutes ago. Does he make a new one every day? Or is there a community of rock artists, who might even be strangers to each other, coming in solitude to make their own rock sculptures and then go on their way?
“What if someone comes and knocks them down?” Kylee asks in a low voice. “Or the wind topples them over? They’re not held together with glue or anything.”
I don’t answer. I’m too busy watching Cameron, who clearly doesn’t care about permanence or publication, who wouldn’t be upset by what two literary agents said about him if he even bothered to listen.
The rock formations are beautiful, but it’s even more beautiful to watch him in the process of creating, like watching a ballet with only one lone dancer on the stage, and no audience.
Except for us.
As Cameron places the final rock on top, he stands back to survey his work. That’s when he looks up and sees us.
It would be wrong, it would feel crass, to shout a big friendly greeting. Hey, Cameron!
Kylee seems to know this, too. She’s intuitive that way, plus she’s not a shouty person in the first place.
He raises one hand to us in a silent gesture.
We give small waves in return.
“Let’s go,” I whisper.
We keep on walking.
“That was cool,” Kylee says a block later. “Sort of … magical.”
“Yeah,” I say. “It was.”