Chapter Three Cammie #2
Thoughts of my secret dad-finding mission have almost made me forget the unexpected blast from my past. But Mom must misread my emotions as some kind of positive attitude adjustment, as she decides it’s safe to steer us back West-ward.
“The Welcome Dinner is at eight this evening, and I’m planning to meet Danny and West in the first-floor common room at 7:50 to walk over.
I know you’ll be even more wiped by then, but I’d love for you to join us, at least for a little while.
It’s outside on the terrazzo. You’ll have to eat something for dinner anyway, right?
And I’ve heard such good things about the chef they have at Villa Russo now, so—”
“Alexandra,” I cut her off before she can somehow ramble her way back to my toilet options.
Her lips press together, twitching up on one side even as she tries to give me stern, narrow eyes. “Camilla.”
“I will be delighted to have dinner with you. I will grudgingly accept the presence of anyone else, and then I will get my long-awaited sleep and hope that when I wake up, West Jacobs being in Italy was only a bad dream.”
Mom’s sigh creates a pleasant breeze in this stifling heat, an unintentional reward for my petulance.
“Honestly, Cam, I didn’t think there was still this much…animosity between you. Isn’t three years enough time to let bygones be bygones?”
It’s clear the woman doesn’t realize she raised the reigning world champion in Grudge Holding.
I bite my tongue so hard, I’m surprised I don’t draw blood.
I rarely let myself think about West and what happened between us, so it’s easy to forget that Mom doesn’t know the whole story.
She had enough to worry about, what with her partner in crime Dr. Danny deciding to hang up his adventure hat and get a steady stateside job.
I didn’t want to pile on with the full extent of my own best friend drama.
“It was plenty of time to let him be gone. From my life. For good.” Her flat expression says she’s not impressed with my wordplay. I cross my arms over my chest. “I don’t see why that has to change.”
“Maybe because you’ve both grown from the people you were back then,” she challenges. “You know I’m always on your team. But he’s been through a lot these past few years, and it might not hurt to give him some grace. That’s the last I’ll say about it.”
She raises her palms, but neither the words nor the gesture convinces me she’s really done with this little reconciliation campaign.
I can’t concern myself with whatever West has “been through.” It’s not like our time apart has been a picnic for me.
I wasn’t just heartbroken when he abruptly left my life; I was suddenly lonelier and more isolated than I’d ever been.
Our nomadic upbringing had made it so that, besides our parents, West and I were each other’s only constant companion.
We’d been a homeschool-virtual-hybrid classroom of two, since his parents had him start kindergarten a year late to give him more time to come out of his shell and allow us to do all our schooling concurrently.
We spent all our free time together, too, with countless rounds of hide-and-seek on countless dig sites where we probably shouldn’t have been playing, and as we got older, more freedom to go out and explore our new cities, just us two.
When the Jacobses left, West went to spend his last two years at a “normal” public high school in the Indiana hometown he hadn’t called home since he was a baby.
I’ve imagined he was surrounded by dozens of new friends, kept busy with all the extracurriculars that had never been options for us before.
All the while, I was on my own. No one but my mom and a revolving door of her colleagues and students as we moved on to a couple more projects on different continents, until I went off to college last year.
It had been an exciting kind of culture shock, living and learning alongside some fifteen thousand of my peers, and between my classes in huge lecture halls and my dorm with a random, social-butterfly roommate, I was never really alone at Nolan.
But I hadn’t managed to make any close friends, to form connections that went much deeper than study buddies or regular dinner tablemates. I still feel the ache of loneliness.
Time has allowed me to move on from those more-than-friendly feelings for West. It just hasn’t let any friendly ones linger, either.
Nor has it given me any faith that, if I was to allow him back into my life, he wouldn’t drop me again in an instant, any time he felt like it.
So if I’m forced to be around him this summer—and it seems I will, if Mom gets her way—I need to stay guarded.
Not let him get under my skin, and certainly nowhere deeper.
At least for now, Mom picks up on how little I want to talk about him.
At her suggestion, we make our way back into the precious air-conditioning of my room.
She offers to stay and help me unpack, which I decline on the grounds that I plan to take a shower before I do much else.
It’s a convenient excuse, and conveniently true, but I have bigger reasons to avoid her sorting through my overstuffed luggage.
Things inside that I don’t want her to find.
After I send her on her way, I kneel on the hardwood floor beside my new bed and begin pulling all the contents out of my backpack.
I wish I was hiding something as simple as a drug stash I smuggled across the border, or a fake ID.
Either of those would probably cause less of an issue than the real contraband.
I set everything in a disorganized pile until I can reach the most tucked-away inner pocket, then carefully extract my treasure, which had been collecting dust in the back of Mom’s office closet for years.
The better part of two decades, if I had to guess.
Until now.
I run a hand across the cover, clearing it of now-nonexistent dust after its long journey—one that’s brought it back to its original home.
It’s a journal, but not just any old travel diary of a twentysomething woman abroad.
This book, bound by an elastic band that’s barely hanging on, is stuffed full of Polaroid pictures, ticket stubs, clippings from maps, and most intriguing—and perhaps cringey—of all, love letters.
On the cover, in Mom’s familiar, loopy cursive, is Italia field notes (unofficial), and on the first page’s This book belongs to: line, she’s written only Alex.
It’s still hard for me to fathom that this gold mine of a primary source has been under my nose all along.
I almost passed over it in my office closet search, where it’d been tucked away in a box under a somewhat unsettling quantity of my old baby shoes.
Seriously, did she think I might want to wear them again someday?
If there’s one thing to know about my mother, it’s that she loves to document everything.
It’s literally her job, to an extent, but she also keeps careful records in her personal life, including her daily journaling habit she’s had for as long as I can remember.
I suspect she imagines some archaeologist of the future, centuries from now or maybe even millennia, using her notes to try piecing together how we lived in the early twenty-first century.
Judging by the bizarre hiding spot of this particular volume, I strongly suspect she didn’t want anyone in this lifetime to find it. Which, in turn, makes me all the more certain it’s my key to understanding the parts of my past she doesn’t want me to know.
I normally prefer to read a book no more than once, no matter how much I love it; there are already too many to get through in this one life.
But I’ve torn through Alex’s Italia field notes (unofficial) from cover to cover, and have done countless additional rereads of specific pages or sections I marked with adhesive tabs that I may or may not have also borrowed from Mom’s office.