Chapter Twenty-Four
Julia’s voice carries an eerie echo as she finishes reading the poem aloud. The five of us sit in silence, quiet and contemplative. Finally, after a minute or two, Gabriel speaks up.
“So…this definitely isn’t the treasure, then?”
I look over at the necklace hanging limply in Sunny’s hands and sigh.
“No,” I say. “I guess it’s not.”
Sunny shakes her head and mutters something under her breath.
“What do we do?” Julia asks.
Cam clears his throat awkwardly. “Well, I think we should—”
“No.” Sunny whips her head toward him. “You are not a part of group decisions right now. In fact…” She turns to the rest of us. “I think Cam should be out.”
Cam’s jaw falls open. “What?”
“We only let you open the box with us because of the key,” Sunny says. “Now you’re out again.”
Gabriel sucks in air through an awkward, full-tooth grimace.
“Um.” Julia leans into Sunny. “Maybe now’s not the time to throw anyone out.”
“But he’s not a part of this!” Sunny stands in the middle of the circle. “Ivy, back me up here.”
“I…I think…we should…”
I can’t put the words together. Things are complicated, I want to explain.
I feel like I’m caught between two different treasure hunts.
If we were in any other Gay Treasures city, we would have found the treasure by now.
And all thanks to the yearbook crew. Sunny was the one who first found that photo for the yearbook dedication page.
Julia snapped a picture of Harvey’s birthday party flyer before Cam stole it.
Gabriel made every fuzzy internet document readable so we could decipher it.
We all went through the archives, followed the changes in the city, found a single spot from some vague words and a number.
When I look back at how far we’ve come, I see Sunny’s point—Cam’s not a part of it.
I think of the photo on my phone background.
It’s strange and infuriating…but I can’t get away from seeing Cam, from knowing that even if he’s right outside the frame, he’s still a part of the bigger picture. He’s the unspoken subtext. The origin story buried underneath it all.
“Maybe we need a break,” Julia says quietly. “All of us,” she adds.
Sunny looks at her. “What do you mean?”
Julia sighs and scans the decrypted poem in her notebook.
“This is…a lot. And we’re already running on fumes from the earlier clues.
Let’s just take photos of everything and lock it up until Monday.
We can meet after school and discuss what to do next.
If anyone has an idea, great. If not, we’ll get started together.
Or…mostly together, if it’s what the group decides.
” She can’t quite make eye contact with Cam as she says this last part.
“But at least until Monday afternoon, we’re all in. ”
Cam swallows and nods solemnly.
“Who’s keeping the box?” he asks.
“Obviously not you,” Sunny says. “We already decided it’s Ivy’s. I don’t think that’s changed.”
Sunny sets the necklace down into the box and closes the lid. My cheeks are warm as she passes the box over to me.
“Wait,” Gabriel says. He turns his camera on. “I need to take photos of that.”
“Oh. Right.”
We lay everything out on the floor between us. The coded poem. The scroll of pictures. The pendant necklace and tiny skeleton key. Gabriel twists the zoom lens, resetting it each time.
Click. Click. Click.
I fold the note and slip it carefully back inside the box, then lay the scroll and necklace on top—exactly as we found it.
We filter back down the library stairs and wait at the Civic Center Station.
Sunny pointedly avoids eye contact with Cam, even though we’ve all agreed to Julia’s suggestion.
It’s strange, because just one week ago, I would have thought that no one could possibly despise Cam as openly as I do.
To not be his biggest enemy in this moment feels, well—unexpected, to say the least.
We sit side by side by side on the train, with Gabriel, Julia, and me cushioning the space between Sunny and Cam.
My knee bumps lightly into Cam’s every time the driver makes a hard turn.
But then we dip inside the Sunset Tunnel, and in the darkness I notice that Cam keeps his knee pressed into mine until we emerge on the eastern edge of Golden Gate Park.
Sunny, Gabriel, and Julia get off the train at their usual stops. Sunny narrows her eyes at Cam before she heads down the steps.
He holds up his palms in surrender. “I’m not even doing anything!”
As Julia steps off, she nudges my shoe. “You coming?” she asks.
I shake my head. Cam looks at me but doesn’t say anything. Julia just shrugs and hops down onto the pavement. I take a deep breath as the door closes behind her.
The train rolls down the next three streets, then stops again. Cam stands up.
“Here?” he asks. We’re now two stops past my place and one stop early for his place. But I stand up after him. He knows exactly what I’m thinking.
“Yeah,” I say. “Here.”
We walk out into the usual gust of wind.
Mount Sutro is smocked in a gown of clouds.
Without a word, Cam turns and strolls onto Sixteenth Avenue.
I lean into the wind and follow him up the next block to the first set of mosaic steps and then a few blocks farther to another set that leads to Grandview Park.
This was a spot where we liked to sit and think, especially when we were stuck during the hunt two summers ago.
Cam’s a lot faster on stairs than I am—he’s always been faster.
But he waits patiently every few steps, making sure I’m still close behind him, before heading forward.
We twist down the last block of houses and climb up the final rickety wooden stairs to the top of the park.
Technically, this isn’t really a park. There are no fields or play structures.
It’s more of a national park—preserved land.
Grandview is one of the last few untouched sand dunes in the Bay Area.
Before San Francisco was here, the whole area was made up entirely of sand dunes.
Now they’re all covered with houses and roads.
Cam sits at the viewing bench perched on the very top of the dune.
He motions for me to join him. We look across the wide rectangle of Golden Gate Park, over Strawberry Hill, to the Golden Gate Bridge at the far end of the city.
Cam extends his arm, finger pointing out to the horizon.
He draws two invisible slopes in the sky.
“Thinking of the map?” I ask.
Cam sighs. “I was hoping the hats in the picture would line up with our view of the bridge at this angle. They don’t, though.”
“Ah.”
Cam’s hand drops back into his lap.
“You really want me out of the group?” he asks quietly.
“No,” I say, surprising myself. We look across the bench at each other. Cam holds the gaze until I give up first and look away. “I’m not sure I want you in this group either, though. Looking for treasure with you is so much more…”
“Different,” Cam supplies, “than looking with them.”
I nod.
“V, I mean this in the nicest way possible—”
“Of course you do,” I mutter.
“—but maybe things need to be different now,” he goes on, “to finish this. You and Sunny and Julia and Gabriel have done great. But I don’t think the rest of this puzzle is going to be solved on a computer screen.”
I feel some of Sunny’s rage seeping into me. “What is that supposed to mean?”
“It means we need to go back to the way we were before.”
My eyebrows shoot up. “What?”
“With exploring the city,” Cam says quickly.
“We didn’t have that map before, when you and I went out looking.
But now we do. And I don’t think the majority of markers on it are going to be as easy to spot as the freaking Golden Gate Bridge.
I think we have to get outside—boots-on-the-ground style—and start looking around. ”
All the memories of us outside before, of circling trees, knocking on bricks, lying in the grass under the afternoon sun, curl around me like a warm towel straight out of the dryer.
But there’s something dangerous mixed in too.
I’ve worked so hard to shape that summer of my life into a bruise that doesn’t ache at the touch.
It’s a good memory because it’s a distant memory, a fuzzy one, ambiguous and open-ended.
I can’t just go back to working with Cam the way I did before.
The only way, for us, has to be forward.
“What about the agreement?” I ask, drawing myself up straighter.
“What agreement?”
“No treasure hunting until Monday,” I say. “We’re taking a break.”
Cam holds up his index finger. “As a group,” he says. “Julia said that if anyone had any ideas, we could share them on Monday after school. Well, maybe by then you and I will have an idea. Maybe we’ll have an exact place to look. Maybe…”
“Don’t say it,” I warn him.
“Maybe we’ll even have a treasure.”
I rise off the bench, suddenly hot and itchy. “That would be cheating.”
Cam laughs. “Cheating? On who?”
“Not on a person,” I say, feeling hotter by the second. “On the hunt, I mean. We all agreed on it.”
“Okay. Okay.” Cam stands and ushers me back down onto the bench next to him. His arm stays wrapped around my shoulder, and I’m extremely aware of the fact that I’m sitting much closer to him this time. But not so close that it would mean anything, I remind myself.
I’ve fallen into that trap before.
“No treasure,” Cam says, assuring me. “But some more clues. We could have the whole map figured out for the group. Maybe Sunny would even start to like me.”
I roll my eyes. “Why do you care what Sunny thinks?”
“I don’t care what she thinks,” Cam says. He falters for a moment. “You’re— The four of you are all— It would be nice to not have anyone wanting to bite my head off.”
He pulls his arm back and shifts away from me. “Well? Is it a deal?”
“Fine,” I say. I hold out a hand. “But only if you bring me the flyer and the book.”
Cam furrows his brow. “Why the book?”
“It had the key to the substitution cipher, right? Maybe it will have some other clue we need too.”
My hand hovers between us. Cam stares down at it.
“Unless you don’t want to,” I add. I start to pull my hand back. But he catches it, his fingers clasping tight over mine.
“We’ll start tomorrow,” he says. “Union Square. Nine a.m. You bring the box. I’ll bring the book and flyer.”
“No shovels,” I warn him.
Cam flashes me his wide, boyish grin. “No shovels,” he says.
He offers my hand an extra squeeze before letting go. My heart throbs for a moment, tight and unsure. Being alone with Cam like this, looking for the treasure again, feels risky. There’s too much history between us. Our past is practically a minefield.
It’s only a bruise, I tell myself. A mostly healed bruise.
But as I look at Cam, I can’t escape the feeling that, even without shovels, we’re about to dig into something neither of us signed up for.