Cameron didn’t notice my existence in class on Tuesday, Wednesday, or Thursday. I felt so horrible after Hunter said that Cameron thinks my poetry sucks that I pretended he didn’t exist, too. But now it’s Friday, and one way or another I have to find out where I stand with him, both as a poet and as a girl who is in love with him.
I still haven’t heard from The New Yorker, even though I check my phone constantly just in case. I wonder if Ms. Archer ever sent any of her poems there. I’d love to ask her, but it’s hard to find time to talk to her before or after class given that we have a four-minute passing period. While we sometimes get an opportunity to conference with her during class, that hasn’t happened this week. Besides, I hate the thought that Olivia might overhear my talking to her about trying to get my poems published. If Olivia heard me ask that, she’d probably rush hers off to The New Yorker, too. And the last thing I’d want is for Cameron to know that I’m trying to publish my poems about him. I don’t want him to know anything until I have the poem there, in print, proof that my poems aren’t sucky, and are in fact the total opposite of sucky.
Before class, I say “Hey” to Cameron, who as usual is there in his seat before I get to the room; he comes from first-period language arts, right next door.
To say that one word I have to screw my courage to the sticking place, as Shakespeare said. We did a couple of scenes from Shakespeare plays in the drama camp Kylee and I signed up for this past summer, which is where I learned how bad an actress she is. I may be a better actress than Kylee is, but not good enough to say “Hey” to Cameron without feeling my cheeks flame.
“Hey,” he says back, though maybe it’s more of a cross between a word and a grunt.
“What are you going to write your personal essay about?” I blurt out.
He shrugs. It doesn’t seem to be a rude shrug, more of an I-don’t-know-yet shrug.
“You?” he asks then.
Now this is turning into an actual conversation, the kind where both people talk.
“I don’t know either,” I say. “I think I might write something about my br—”
How could I be such a babbling idiot? I had planned to take my Mrs. Whistlepuff freewrite and turn it into a full-fledged essay. But the last thing I want to talk about with Cameron is brothers, especially brothers who tease younger sisters about certain poems written about certain boys.
“Your brother.” Cameron finishes the word for me, not that it’s hard to figure out what word starts with “br.”
I feel my ears reddening to match my already red cheeks.
“Hunter,” Cameron says, as if to confirm which brother I’m talking about. “You have my condolences.”
Another thing that makes Cameron seem different from the rest of us is that even in ordinary conversation he uses words most kids don’t use. “You have my condolences” means that Cameron is expressing sympathy toward me for having Hunter as a brother. What it really seems to mean is that Cameron thinks Hunter is a jerk.
Why does he think Hunter is a jerk? Is Hunter a jerk because of reading my poem to the band? After all, Cameron’s brother was the one who told Hunter to give my notebook back to me. So does Cameron think Hunter was mean then, too? Mean because my poem was so embarrassingly bad nobody should ever read it aloud to anyone else? Or mean because my poem was so amazingly good that nobody should ever make fun of it?
I’ve come to another sticking place where I need to screw more courage and force out one more syllable.
“Why?” I ask.
Cameron gives me a smile that can only be described as inscrutable, which means “impossible to understand or interpret.”
“You know why,” he says.
He smiles again, and this time it’s not a mocking smile, exactly, but sort of an amused smile. Like the smile of a boy who knows that the girl sitting next to him wrote him a love poem. I can’t tell if the smile means that he thought the love poem was good or bad. There’s a limit to what you can decipher from one single smile.
Now my face must be redder than red. It’s aubergine: the deep, black-purple of an eggplant.
I still don’t know what Cameron thought about my poem, but that he thinks my brother is awful for making fun of it suggests that Cameron gets it, that he’s on my side. Maybe in a romantic, protective kind of way?
Kylee slips into her seat, nearly tardy as always. Olivia turns around to glare at Kylee for grazing her shoulder as she dashed past.
I try to think of something else to say. “Hunter didn’t use to be like this.”
Cameron cocks his eyebrow—like, Yeah, right, but also like he’s interested in hearing more, as in interested in my brother, and so, according to the principle of transitivity we learned about in pre-algebra, interested in me.
“So what happened?” Cameron asks.
I’m about to say, I think he might have changed when he joined the band. Maybe Cameron would say that his brother changed when he joined the band, too. Maybe there’s something about being in a rock band that makes older brothers start acting mean to their younger siblings. But Cameron offered me condolences about having Hunter as a brother in a way that made it sound as if my brother was a lot worse than his, if his is even bad at all.
But just then Ms. Archer calls the class to order: “Good morning, intrepid scholars.” That’s what she calls us sometimes, which could come off as sounding sarcastic but doesn’t when she says it. “Intrepid” means bold and fearless, exactly what I want to be as a writer.
Now that class is beginning, I couldn’t answer Cameron’s question even if I knew the answer, which I don’t. The band thing was only a guess, and maybe not a good one at that.
I wish I did know.
If I knew what happened to make Hunter change, maybe I’d know what to say or do to make him change back again.