Chapter Eight
For a moment, I’m transfixed. My feet stay planted on the front doorstep.
The pure outlandishness of what just happened clears away slowly, exhaust pluming after a car guns it.
The tip of one finger stings, and as I look down and see a tiny bead of blood, I realize Cam jerked the file back so hard that it gave me a paper cut.
Cam.
What the hell is his problem anyway? He’s acting like I’m the worst person in the world for not immediately including him in all this. But he’s the one who walked away from the hunt—and me—in the first place.
“Dropped like a bad habit,” Mom tutted as she stroked my hair that evening, the day I came home from the park with a puffy red face and tear tracks down my cheeks. It’s probably the closest she’s ever come to being maternal.
Even so, Mom was wrong. Dropping a bad habit is supposed to be hard. It takes time. Cam made forgetting me look easy.
He didn’t drop me like a bad habit—he dropped me like I was a mistake.
I yank myself back into the moment and press my thumb pad over the small cut to stop the bleeding. My right leg sails over Cam’s duffel bag as I leap off the steps. If Cam thinks he’s going to get away with ghosting me a second time, not to mention outright theft, he’s absolutely insane.
“CAM!” I scream out.
I race across the street to where he turned, trying not to fall as the sidewalk slopes downward. Cam and I used to joke that if we ever tripped on the way to school, our neighborhood is so steep that we’d tumble all the way into Golden Gate Park.
I get to the next avenue and see that Cam’s already a tiny dot in the distance.
Even with our tumbling jokes, he’s never been afraid of leaning forward while running.
While every normal person compensates for the sharp hills in San Francisco, tilting their shoulders back and tucking their butts in while walking down, Cam simply acts like gravity does not exist.
“Just let your legs do what they want to do!” he would yell out in middle school. As if my legs had any personal interest in buckling, getting completely tangled up, and making me eat shit off the sidewalk.
I try to hustle as much as I can while looking like an eighty-year-old being blown backward.
Damn Cam for taking off with my flyer and then heading straight for the downhill, knowing I won’t follow him at full speed.
I gulp down more air and start to run, determined to snatch the file out of Cam’s hands as quickly as he grabbed it from mine.
The next block spits me out into a sea of heavy traffic on Nineteenth Avenue.
Two cars are honking at each other on a left turn, a screaming match that won’t find a compromise.
I look across on Judah, but Cam’s not there.
I tip my head to the right, where Nineteenth runs south, then left, as it snakes north into Golden Gate Park. There is zero sign of him anywhere.
Shoot.
I wait for the jumble of cars in the intersection to clear out.
Maybe he’s pressed up against a street pole or crouched behind an A-frame sign, just waiting for me to run past. Two more light cycles go by, but nothing moves apart from the steady motion of traffic.
My chest is heaving. My legs are on fire.
I can’t tell whether it’s the running or the anger that’s making my blood churn so hot and fast.
I’m going to have to give up, I realize. I’ll have to tell Sunny, Gabriel, and Julia that not only did I not get the book, but actually, I lost the flyer too.
Great news. Fantastic.
I pull out my phone and stare at the lock screen, my brain suddenly going blank as I look down at my chosen wallpaper.
It’s a photo of me, which, admittedly, sounds pretty self-absorbed. But I can’t seem to change it, even when I get a really good shot of fog curling around the Golden Gate Bridge or the rare pic of Mount Sutro exposed against a robin’s-egg blue sky.
I think the real reason I’ll never change the current photo is because, secretly, it’s another photo. And I’m the only one who can see both.
At first glance it’s just me lying in the grass.
Closing my eyes and laughing. I had stretched out my arm to take a selfie, but I was laughing so hard when I clicked the button that the phone was already shaking.
The resulting image is blurred and hazy.
Looking at it is like climbing directly back into that laugh, hearing it vibrate in my belly, feeling the squeeze of tears in the corners of my eyes.
The world gets drunk and tips to one side.
At least, that’s how it feels to me. Because the other side of the photo—the half I cropped out nearly two years ago—is the person who made me laugh so hard, the entire world shook.
I look at myself and I see him there too.
His nose is only a few inches from mine.
(It was a tricky crop job.) His mouth is open, mid-rant in whatever silly impression he was doing.
His eyes are crinkled almost as much as mine, and you can tell from studying his face (not that I’ve ever done this) that I’m making him laugh as much as he’s making me laugh—a weird symbiosis between us.
Like he can’t be funny if I’m not there to nearly pee my pants in reaction.
The long meadow grass in the background bows forward, hanging over my forehead.
Every picture of us had nearly identical backgrounds back then.
Always after another long day of poking around some park in the city.
Always after collapsing on our backs and staring up at the clouds. Always nestled in greenery.
“Wait.”
I look north again. Two blocks away, the old Breon Gate pillars stand on either side of the road as it swerves away from the urban landscape, suddenly disappearing into a sea of endless trees.
Cam and I used to head into the park through one of the hidden stone entrances attached to each pillar.
We said they were our secret doorways, leading into our own version of Golden Gate Park, where no one else could follow us.
I tuck my phone back into my pocket.
I know where Cam is.
The traffic ebbs with the next light, and I make my way down Nineteenth Avenue, slipping through one of the hidden doorways in the Breon pillars. If Cam thinks he can escape into some private dimension of the park, I’m onto him.
I dip west, leaving the main road and threading between the trees until I find the narrow footpath that cuts across the park.
I walk between Mallard and Elk Glen, two tiny lakes that don’t really have business calling themselves anything more than ponds, but whatever.
I cross Hellman Hollow and watch the families sprawled out on blankets, passing around store-bought containers of fresh strawberries, or friend groups scattered across the field with baseball mitts, one person pointing a Wiffle bat to the sky.
At the edge of the meadow, I see two people lying next to each other, staring into the tree branches as their fingertips brush. I look away quickly and swallow.
As I get closer to JFK Drive, I see the doorway rising out of the iridescent green water of Lloyd Lake—which, again, is another pond essentially wearing the title of “lake” like it’s their dad’s comically oversized dinner jacket.
I cross the road and stand at the edge of the water, peering toward the white marble columns plunked in between the trees in the distance.
Portals of the Past.
Cam and I didn’t name it that, although we totally would have, had it been our own secret place to christen.
It’s a Greek-architecture portico that used to be attached to a huge mansion in downtown San Francisco in the late 1800s.
When the 1906 earthquake hit, this was apparently the only thing in the whole neighborhood that survived.
A journalist took a super eerie photo of the earthquake’s wreckage through the open, empty door.
The clean-cut view in the center between the columns now reveals a scraggly hill behind it, covered in tufts of long grass. I wait and watch until, after a minute or two, the toe of a sneaker quickly wags in and out of view.
“Got you,” I say to myself.
I hopscotch over the stepping stones next to the burbling waterfall and make my way around the perimeter of Lloyd Lake.
As I get closer to the portal, the path opens into a wide clearing, something the city probably did to make room for all the wedding ceremonies I’ve seen here.
I step onto the marble porch and lean against the inner right column.
“Knock, knock.”
I hear Cam suck in his breath.
“Dude, I know you’re here,” I say. “Just give me the flyer back and we’ll call it a freaking wash of a day.”
“I don’t have it.”
I step through the stone entrance and see a cluster of trees at the base of the hill, where Cam’s draped himself over his favorite tree branch like a bobcat. This used to be our main meeting place in Golden Gate Park.
“What do you mean, you don’t have it?”
He shrugs, his fingers lazily entwined over his stomach. “I stashed it.”
“You did not,” I growl. “I may not be Sha’Carri Richardson, but I followed you out here fast enough.”
“That so?” Cam lifts an eyebrow and smiles, but I immediately notice it’s another Cheshire Cat smile. I have to tread carefully.
I walk over to the tree, subtly scanning the area.
“It’s not stashed here,” Cam says in singsong. I want to climb the tree and throttle him.
“I’ll go back to your house and take the book.”
“What makes you think my mom will let you in?” he asks.
“Your mom loves me.”
“Loved.”
The past tense pierces my heart so sharply that I almost gasp. I try not to let it show.
“I’ll go grab your duffel bag, then,” I call up to him. “I’ll swipe your backpack the moment you set it down at school. I’ll take things off your desk every single day. I swear to God, you will not have one sharpened pencil in class for the rest of your LIFE!”
But I can tell none of this lands. Cam closes his eyes like he’s in a hammock on the beach. He starts to hum some random tune until it becomes the theme song from the old San Francisco–based sitcom Full House.
Everywhere you look, everywhere you go…
“What do you want?” I ask.
“Whaddya mean?”
“For the flyer. What. Do. You. Want.”
The humming stops. He angles himself away from me. “I’m keeping the flyer,” he says over his shoulder. “Because that’s what I want.”
“To do the hunt, or just to keep me from doing it?”
He shrugs again. “Haven’t decided.”
I’m nearly frothing at the mouth with unfiltered rage until I freeze, a sudden realization dawning on me. Cam’s hiding himself on purpose. The closed eyes. The scrambling up our tree. He’s only pretending to be above all this.
I hop back onto the marble riser.
“I’ll just go get another flyer,” I announce with false bravado. “And then I’m getting another copy of that book, and you’d better believe that I’m going to dig up the treasure myself. Completely without you.”
Cam goes stiff on the branch. He pushes himself onto his elbows and twists to look at me. “Guess I’d better find it first, then.”
It’s true that, in this moment, he has everything and I have nothing. The book, his. The flyer, now also his. The odds are hopelessly in his favor.
But it’s also true that right now, for whatever reason, Cam looks completely and uncharacteristically terrified. Which means that even with a score of two to zero, I have a fighting chance of winning this thing for real.
“Good luck with that,” I say, walking back through the columns.
The words come out like a warning.