Chapter Eight West
Chapter Eight
West
While I’d thought it would be extremely tough to avoid Cammie at the villa, I forgot one important detail—she’s an outdoor cat.
In the couple of days since she found me in the library, the only brief flashes of red hair I’ve seen have been out a window, overlooking the terrazzo outside the dining room, or walking down the path that leads to Villa di Bronzo.
Only at night, once the sun’s down, have I heard signs of life through the thin wall between our rooms.
Admittedly, I’m not in my room much, either.
After a half hour of thorough experimentation my first day here, I discovered the Wi-Fi signal is significantly stronger in the library than anywhere else on the Villa Russo property.
As if I need any more reason to spend the bulk of my time there, no one else seems to know and/or care that it exists.
It’s been ideal for my purposes. My freshman year at Elora College, a tiny liberal arts school in middle-of-nowhere Wisconsin, my closest friends became a group of guys who had a lot of classes together, all part of the small but mighty computer science and math majors.
They got me into this programming challenge called Project Euclid, a website with a bunch of high-level math problems that require you to write code to solve them.
The problems are numbered, so it’s like you’re moving through the levels of a game.
Our group chat has mostly become each person updating the others as they progress through the problems, this informal contest with one another to see who can solve the most the fastest. Sometimes we’ll voice chat if someone’s stuck and wants to know how another person wrote their code.
Other times we’ll just hang out and catch up while playing video games, giving our brains a break.
I didn’t anticipate how much I’d crave this tether to home, what a comfort it’s been as I try to find my footing in a less familiar place, amid a lot of strangers.
The confidence boost from being at least five problems ahead of the other guys doesn’t hurt, either.
So we seem to be finding our routines and haunts, Cammie and me, and successfully keeping the two separate.
But an unintended side effect of avoiding her is not seeing much of my dad, either.
I try to hide my surprise when he points this out at breakfast one morning.
I don’t think he’d love to hear that the distance between us just feels like business as usual.
Since I did come here in part to make up for all that lost time with Dad, I agree to go out to dinner with him on Saturday night.
It’s now Saturday afternoon, quickly approaching the time we agreed to meet downstairs, and I’m overdue for a shower if I’m going to look halfway presentable in public.
I grab the same small mesh caddy I used for taking my stuff to the communal showers at school, a change of clothes one step up from library loungewear, and my towel, thrown over one shoulder, before heading down the hall.
Only to stop short at the doorway to the tiled room, my path blocked by a small figure. Cammie Lovett, frozen in place, like she has a severe case of showerphobia.
I could still back away—probably should, if I know what’s good for both of us.
But I was really counting on this shower.
“Is everything…okay?” I try.
Cammie spins on me. “What? Yeah, I’m fine. Lost in thought. Are you…Did you need to use one of the showers?”
It’s a prime opportunity for a “Nope, I’m auditioning for an indie film about a man who spends a year living in a communal shower—just trying to get in character.” But something weird is going on with her, and I don’t have time to provoke a pointless fight.
“Yeah. Were you about to…? Or could I…?” I point over her shoulder, assuming that finishing either question is unnecessary. An assumption I rethink when Cammie’s head turns to see where I’m pointing.
“Oh, right. No, yeah, I’m—” Her laugh is breathy as she looks back at me with a shake of her head. “I was about to…Well, first I went downstairs to use my mom’s shower, but she wasn’t in her room when I knocked, so I’ve been weighing whether I’m desperate enough to try with one of these again.”
My confusion is getting harder to conceal. “ ‘Try’? Did you not succeed the last time?”
“Depends on your definition of success,” she jokes with a grimace. “Why, have you not had trouble? Or have you just not showered yet?”
She takes a half step back with a judgmental scan of my body, like she’s just noticed some nonexistent cloud of dirt cloaking me. “Yes, I’ve taken a shower, damn. But I haven’t noticed anything particularly challenging about it.”
“Ugh, seriously?” Cammie looks dismayed by the information, but then her eyes brighten like a brilliant idea just hit her. “Can you show me?”
My eyes bulge as I choke out the words, “What, how to shower?”
She waves this away, turning to enter the stall area but still talking like it’s a given I’ll follow. “No, no, just how to work these showers. I must have done something wrong, right?”
My hand comes up to my hair before I realize I probably shouldn’t mess it up any further, as my odds of actually getting to wash it before dinner are dropping.
Cam begins arranging her things on the shelf and hooks in the center of the room.
She doesn’t go so far as to undress yet—small mercies—but gestures toward herself to indicate I should join her. In the showers. What is happening?
“It’s not that complicated—just turn the handle to start the water, then the hot and cold knobs for temperature.”
“Okay, well, there must be some…finesse to it that I was lacking, so if you can just show me real quick, I’ll leave you alone.”
It’s apparent that she’s stuck on this plan, and I’m as stuck either following through or never getting to shower in peace.
Heaving a sigh, I approach the center shelf, stack and hang my belongings accordingly, and enter one of the stalls, still in my sweats and T-shirt.
“Stand behind me, I guess, so it doesn’t spray you too much. ”
I reach up to angle the showerhead away from me and feel Cammie’s warmth at my back.
Forcing very tame thoughts into my head—about calculus, and software, and other stuff far from where I’m standing in a shower with Camilla Lovett—I go through the steps of turning on the water, adjusting the temperature until, testing the stream with my hand, I find it appropriately warm.
Then I turn to find Cammie even closer than I imagined she was, looking at me with wide blue eyes like I just solved a Rubik’s Cube in record time.
For my own sanity, I step around her, intending to gather my stuff and wait in the hall until she’s done in here.
“Well, what the hell happened when I did that? I was in that corner stall right there, and—”
That makes me pause in my retreat. “Wait. The nonfunctioning one?”
When I turn back to her, Cammie points to the stall in question. “Well, yeah, it was shitty, but it functioned enough to wash everything I needed.”
With the answers clicking into place, I shake my head. “I guess no one told you when you moved in—we’re not supposed to use that stall. It’s got all kinds of issues, apparently, and isn’t even supposed to put out water. So maybe you fixed it?”
Cammie scoffs. “I certainly did not! Thanks for the intel, even if it came several days too late. A huge relief, really—any other stall in here is about to feel like a dream.” She points to the one still running water. “Are you using this, or can I?”
I shake my head quickly. “Go for it.” I weigh my options while she takes her towel from its hook and steps into the shower stall, closing herself in with the curtain.
Then, one by one, articles of clothing are swung over the top of the curtain rod for safekeeping. No part of the girl who was just wearing them is visible, but it still feels like my whole body flushes red as I turn around on instinct.
There is no option. I’ll just have to look and smell a little less than my best, and the people in this small Italian village, who I’ll likely never see again, can deal.
“West? You still in here?” Cammie calls out.
“Yeah.” My voice cracks, because of course it does.
“I thought you were showering.”
It takes me a few seconds that sound like hours of silence before I say, “I’m just gonna wait, I think. How long do you think you’ll be?”
“It’s already so much better than the last time, I might be in here all night,” she says dreamily before adding a flatter, “Or roughly twenty minutes.”
My jaw drops. “Twenty?”
“I don’t know if you’ve noticed this, but I have a lot of hair.”
“Oh my—”
“Weston, just start your own damn shower. It’s only weird if we make it weird, and I’m not planning to do that. So if you don’t either…”
I could retort that I don’t think we have planned any of the numerous points in our relationship where one or both of us “made it weird.” But even without my phone or any other clock available, I feel my time running out.
More than that, maybe, I feel the subtle gauntlet she’s thrown. The one that says, I can be a mature adult—so mature as to shower in the same general vicinity as you without losing my shit. Can you?
My only option has reversed.
“What is there to make weird? I shower with all my former friends.”
Cammie’s groan is quiet, but not enough to be drowned out by the water. I chuckle to myself while I take my things into a stall I deem a safe distance from hers and pull the curtain closed.
For a couple minutes, it seems like that’s the end of it—that we’ll each go on about our business with no more interaction. As I’ve just reminded her, she doesn’t want to interact with me anyway.
So I nearly fumble my shampoo bottle when Cammie calls out, “Listen, West…”
I go still under the spray of water as it hits the back of my neck and shoulders. When I don’t hear anything else, I give the most hesitant “Yeah?” uttered in human history.