Chapter Six West
Chapter Six
West
I knew I should have stayed in my room this morning. I didn’t sleep well after the drama at dinner, and I had this feeling when I woke up, like from the moment I got out of bed and agreed to face the day, I was about to walk into a bigger mess.
I should have listened to that feeling. I shouldn’t have gone down to breakfast out of some sense of obligation to hang out with Dad before his workday got started.
Definitely shouldn’t have let that same impulse take me down to the dig site, just because he was excited to show me around. That’s where the trouble found me.
The trouble, in this case, being Camilla Lovett.
I wasn’t lying when I said that if anything happened to her, I wouldn’t be able to forgive myself.
That’s a fun little game my anxious brain has liked to play for as long as I can remember, though it got much worse in my early teens.
It pretends that I have some nonexistent power to help friends or family members or—I don’t know, whatever Cammie and I are to each other now.
To protect them from any and all bad things that could happen.
Then once I’m out in the world, getting into some less-than-comfortable situations to try to help, I’m too anxious to do anything but shake and sweat and spiral internally.
The past few years in therapy, I’ve worked through my tendency to catastrophize.
I can recognize the signs and usually talk myself down before I let the fears consume me.
And at home or at school, in the quiet, secure corners of the world I’ve settled into, I don’t really get into anxiety-inducing situations.
I think I’d convinced myself that my capacity for leaving my comfort zone, for having new, exciting experiences, was like a battery.
And that all these years of keeping my life so contained and controlled were charging the battery up for a future when I’d put myself back out there.
Now that I’m taking a few careful steps toward that future, I’m beginning to wonder if my adventure battery just corroded from disuse.
The internal doom spiral started up around the same time we boarded the train, especially once I realized we weren’t going to Pompeii.
If anything happened to Cammie and me, how long would it take for our parents to find out?
The carriage was too hot. There were too many people crowded in around me.
It’s not like any one of them seemed especially threatening, but being in crowds in big cities and unknown places, my unease is instant and inescapable.
I’m constantly waiting for some Big Bad to occur.
A part of me is almost grateful for Cammie’s antics, as they’ve been a good distraction from my own mind.
I felt better while we were in the museum, not just because there was cool stuff to see—it was also less crowded than out on the street or on the train.
I was able to breathe more easily, felt the security of the familiar, calming environment of the exhibits and galleries.
Dr. Constantini had been impossible not to like.
But then she went all Mission Possible But Still Inadvisable, digging through the professor’s stuff without permission and giving me no choice but to be her accomplice, when she won’t even tell me what she’s up to.
Now we’re back out in the city and my discomfort is ramping up.
I’ve been very patient, all things considered.
I lick around the entirety of my cone of pistachio gelato, doing whatever I can to try to salvage my semiclean hands.
It’s so hot outside that this gelato-eating experience is much more about drip management than enjoyment.
A race against time and the sun itself to try to finish our desserts before they melt entirely.
The sun is usually winning.
So we haven’t done a whole lot of talking since Cammie and I got our frozen treats from a vendor in a piazza near the Museo Archeologico.
Aside from my unease with our environment, I feel this massive cloud of all those unspoken things looming over us.
Cammie doesn’t seem bothered, however. In fact, she’s giddier than I’ve seen her so far.
An extra bounce in her stride ever since we left Dr. Constantini’s office, but especially after that break to—very suspiciously—“write the names down” in her little mystery notebook.
I’ve seen the wheels turning in her head, can tell she’s off somewhere far from here mentally.
Far from me and my desire to understand what’s going on, to know anything about her life and her secrets in the present day.
When I take the last bite of my gelato cone and see her do the same with her strawberry version, I decide to revisit the issue.
“So…” I begin cautiously. “Your big secret is that you’re, what, planning to surprise your mom with some old friends she isn’t expecting at the anniversary party?”
Cammie blinks and turns my way, looking disoriented, as if she’s seeing me for the first time—wondering how I got here, sitting across from her at a sun-drenched bistro table in the middle of Naples.
“What?” she asks.
“The reason you snuck off to Naples but told your mom you were going to Pompeii, and pried into Dr. Constantini’s old files behind his back—all of it is to create a bonus guest list?”
“Oh,” she says, and it sounds like I didn’t think I had to spell this out for you. She shakes her head. “Right, yeah. That’s the plan. So if you could try to keep it to yourself, I’d appreciate it.”
Where there used to be the sweet aroma of freshly made waffle cones, I now smell only bullshit. I narrow my eyes at the enigmatic girl across from me while she pretends to be laser-focused on folding her cone’s wrapper into a paper football.
“I’m not buying it,” I state plainly.
“Hmm?” Cammie asks with faux innocence.
“There’s something else going on here. You wouldn’t give up the truth so easily if that’s all there was to it.”
Cammie flicks her tiny projectile and it pings off my chest. She snickers, then folds her arms across her torso and meets my gaze with an unimpressed smirk. “You sound paranoid.”
Despite this attempt at bravado, her cheeks get pinker and pinker under her freckles. I’m momentarily sidetracked wondering if she has sunscreen she can reapply, if I should suggest it or if she would snap something at me about thinking I’m her dermatologist. Might be worth it anyway.
“Maybe, but I think I’m right.” I shrug, matching her defensive posture even though for me, it’s more of an effort to hide the growing pit stains on my shirt.
“There’s also the whole undercover agent act when Constantini left his office—why did you need copies of everything in that file?
Did you not trust he’d give you enough names or something?
I haven’t figured out what that was about, but I think you’re looking for more than just a list of people Dr. Alex hung out with twenty years ago. ”
Her whole body goes rigid, and I know I’ve hit on something in the neighborhood of the truth. But then her expression hardens and she leans forward, elbows on the table.
“Why do you act like you know anything about me anymore?” she demands. “Even if I was up to something more, it’d be none of your business, Weston. Why would I tell you any of the alleged secrets I have when we’re not even friends?”
Before I can think better of it, I blurt out, “Yeah, so you keep telling me. I know good and well we’re not friends—you’re the one who decided that, and I’ve spent three years respecting your choice, even though it’s sucked every single day.”
For a moment, Cammie appears stunned speechless. Her strawberry-red lips part, her blue eyes wide and unblinking as they study my face, like there’s some hidden meaning behind my words written there.
What do I even have to gain from being this honest with her? Most likely, she’s not going to suddenly view everything that happened with us in a different light, so I’ve just made myself look sad and weak for no reason. But what else is new?
Cammie blinks rapidly and gives her head a shake, as if coming back to herself.
Then, just as quickly, she stands and starts walking away.
My heart rate picks up, my feet moving before I’ve consciously decided to follow her.
I don’t particularly want to go on a wild ex-best-friend chase around the city, but she might not give me a choice.
“I can’t do this right now,” she mutters, barely loud enough for me to hear over her shoulder. Frustration replaces some of my nerves.
“Can’t do what, talk to me?”
“Yeah, West. It’s just, like, not the time. I have other things to focus on.”
“I know, I know, big party plans,” I lob back sarcastically.
“Doesn’t it feel a little ironic, dredging up all these characters from twenty years ago, while you act like our three years of distance after one stupid fight are too much to ever come back from?
Blasts from the past are super fun, as long as they’re not your own. ”
Cammie groans. We’ve reached an intersection of two busy pedestrian streets and she looks both ways before turning right, seemingly at random.
“It’s called boundaries, West,” she retorts.
“I’m allowed to make them and allowed to enforce them, especially when the last time I let someone in, he”—she stabs a finger in the air to count off my offenses—“kissed me, broke my heart, then disappeared from my life, like I’d never meant anything to him. ”
My gaze narrows in on her red hair, woven into a braid that hangs over one shoulder and sways with each step she takes.
On her eyes, blazing blue fire under a sheen of wetness she’s trying to blink away.
This is the closest we’ve come to actually confronting what happened between us a few years ago, and I don’t want to waste the chance to address it.
But I also feel like my head is spinning as I try to process her take on everything, how it aligns—or doesn’t—with my own.
“Cam, you told me not to—”
“Can we just…just not, right now?” she cuts me off, rubbing a hand over her furrowed brow in what looks like both anguish and exhaustion.
“There’s no reason for us to go through all this again.
No need to force some beautiful reconciliation, when we can get through one summer, then return to our own lives, which were proceeding just fine without each other. ”
She picks up her pace, so I can’t gauge from her expression how much she believes those words. But they hurt just the same.
All at once, I feel the anxieties of the day boiling over, breath harder to force into and out of my lungs.
The sounds of the city press in, cars honking, engines revving, voices and people everywhere, an indistinguishable mass of life and activity and heat and smells, and the sun beating down relentlessly.
It’s too much. I want to be able to catch up to Cammie, offer a coherent reply, keep pursuing a way to sort all of this out.
But I can’t do it. All I can manage is a shake of my head that she won’t even see with her back to me, half a block ahead.
Then, for the first time all day, I turn and walk away from her.