Chapter Thirty-Four
In the summer before ninth grade, Cam’s mom scooped me for a family trip to the Santa Cruz boardwalk. Somehow Cam convinced me to ride the Whirlpool of Death, a roller coaster that makes three full-circle loops.
“We’re going to get stuck,” I had told him as we strapped ourselves in. “The power’s going to shut off at the worst possible moment, and we’re going to be trapped on this thing while we’re upside down.”
But Cam said that wasn’t possible because of something called kinetic energy. Apparently, roller coasters are designed to move through those loops with or without power. They only need power to get up the steepest hills. The rest is just physics.
When I ran away from Cam and hopped the Judah train, I figured the treasure hunt had the same kind of thing.
Kinetic energy. That betraying the yearbook crew and racing ahead of Cam would be totally fine, because as soon as I found the treasure, everything would be okay.
I could deal with all the consequences of my admittedly questionable actions while holding on to an actual piece of hidden San Francisco history.
I didn’t think I would get stuck in the middle of a loop on the way.
It turns out, applying for a dig permit from the San Francisco Recreation and Park Department does not have kinetic energy.
It has the opposite of kinetic energy. While I’ve waited for my dig to get approved over the last two weeks, I’ve had to watch Gabriel, Julia, and Sunny avoid me at every turn in the hallways.
I’ve had to trade silent death glares with Cam while we’ve both been abnormally tight-lipped with each other.
I thought I knew what it was like to be a loner before.
I thought I had been mostly on my own since Cam left me.
But that wasn’t true. I didn’t realize I had made new real friends until those new friends also disappeared.
This really is what it’s like to be stuck while completely upside down.
I check my watch again for the Recreation and Park ranger to finally lead me on the Nature Safety course and let me dig my hole.
I’m waiting directly outside the Legion of Honor museum.
I’ve visited the museum—or more so the golf course surrounding it—almost every day since submitting my application.
Luckily, the place I want to dig is totally open, totally undisturbed.
Aside from a random pile of sticks I found during one of the visits, there hasn’t been a single sign of anyone else dropping in.
I guess the permit requirement must have scared Cam off entirely.
Finally, a small vehicle comes rumbling over the hill.
It looks like the byproduct of a pickup truck and a golf cart mating in the wild.
A woman with long braided hair steps out of the minitruck/golf cart.
She’s holding a clipboard with two thick manuals stacked on top. She hands one of the manuals to me.
She looks around. “Waiting on one more.”
“No we’re not,” I say. “I don’t have a partner. It’s just me.”
Only then does it occur to me that she didn’t say it as a question.
“Sorry!” someone yells.
I turn just in time to see Cam running up the last of the path. He’s carrying a full-sized shovel over his head. “Bus was late.”
I stare at him. “No. Absolutely not.”
He stops and looks back at me. “What are you doing here?”
“My permit application was accepted.”
He shakes his head. “Uh, no. My permit application was accepted.”
The Park official eyes us back and forth. She lifts the other hefty manual and hands it to Cam.
“Actually, you two are lucky you both submitted an application. We don’t usually accept any alterations to our parks. But with multiple requests, the department was concerned about managing unauthorized digs. So they’ve agreed on the condition of a single alteration.”
Cam and I stand there stupidly.
“Excuse me,” I say. “A single alteration?”
“One hole,” the official clarifies.
Cam looks at me. “You didn’t even bring a shovel,” he says.
I point to the roller bag by my side. “I brought a whole set of gardening tools. Which includes trowels.”
“But no shovels.” He looks back to the official. “I feel like only people with actual shovels should get to dig.”
She sighs and writes something down on her clipboard. Great—we’re already annoying her.
“You get one hole,” she says again. “I’m sure your combined shovel and gardening kit will suffice.”
I don’t love the way she said “gardening kit.”
She asks us to leave all tools in her vehicle and open our manuals to page four. From there, we take off on foot in between the trees.
It’s funny that this is called a Nature Safety course, which would seem to suggest staying safe while out in nature.
But really, it’s a course about keeping their nature safe from us.
The “safety” isn’t our safety but the park’s.
Any plant life will need to be cleared by an official before disturbance.
If we encounter a PVC pipe, we are to stop digging immediately, as it protects the irrigation lines.
If we encounter any signs of animal life, we are to stop digging immediately.
If we encounter any signs of archeological significance, we are to stop digging immediately.
Cam raises his hand. “But what if we’re specifically out here to dig up something of archeological significance?”
The Park official squints at a line on our forms. “The applications specified a burial date of 1983.”
“Correct,” I say.
She waves her hand dismissively. “That’s not something we would deem significant.”
Cam and I both turn to each other and share a combined look of exasperation.
“The treasure was buried by Gilbert Baker,” I say. “He invented and created the first LGBTQ+ rainbow flag. He’s a pretty significant figure.”
“Is that right?” the official asks. She looks the slightest bit intrigued. “Is that what’s supposed to be buried? The first flag?”
Cam and I both laugh.
“No,” Cam says. “The first flag was humongous. Yards and yards of fabric. But Gilbert hid seven treasures to celebrate gay icons around the country. Two of the treasures have already been found.”
The official does a small double take. “Really?”
“Really,” I say. “One in Grand Rapids, Minnesota, and one in New York City. And San Francisco’s is supposed to be the big one.”
“Huh.” She scratches the back of her head and flips through the last two pages on her clipboard. “Well…I think that about covers it for the Nature Safety course. Are you both ready to dig?”
Cam looks over at me. “Don’t we have to agree on the same place first?”
“You already did,” the woman says. She holds up a photo of my hill, but this photo was taken more recently. As I lean in closer to the photo, I see the pile of sticks I came across the other day. Except here they’ve specifically been arranged to form an X.
I look over at Cam. “You did this?”
He shrugs and nods. I want to be annoyed, but I can’t help cracking a smile. “Now look who’s the ex marking the spot,” I say.
Cam smiles, frozen for a moment. I wonder if he remembers saying the same thing to me, back when we were kneeling in front of the pipe in the Chong-Moon Lee Center.
But then Cam blinks, and suddenly the smile’s gone. He heads to the minitruck and grabs his shovel while I hoist my roller bag up and out of the truck bed. It clanks loudly as I drag it over the dirt path toward the hill. Cam carries his shovel up ahead.
He looks back at me. “You sure that thing is supposed to go off-roading?”
“Obviously not,” I groan.
Cam sighs and swings the shovel down next to him. He offers it to me. I take hold of it tentatively.
“What is this? Am I in charge of digging now?”
“Obviously not,” Cam says, mimicking my voice. He picks up my roller bag by the handle and hoists it the rest of the way across the golfing green. I can hear the things inside shift and clatter, but Cam doesn’t complain about the weight even once.
We reach the base of the hill. Cam drops my bag and climbs up to the pile of sticks he placed along the hillside. He pulls out a printed photo from his pocket and holds it against the backdrop. I set down his shovel and scramble up next to him.
“What’s that?” I ask.
“Printout,” he says. “From the microfilm reader.”
“You went back to the library?”
Cam lowers the photo and looks at me. “Oh, come on, like you didn’t?”
I swallow. “I did. I just figured you would be too busy to go there again.”
His jaw tenses. “I told you, I like research too. You just don’t listen to me.”
“Yes I do! You’re the one—”
The Park official claps her hands from the base. We both jump and turn to her.
“You have one hour!” she calls to us.
Cam and I nod briefly and head back for our tools. I unzip my suitcase and pull on my gardening gloves. Cam moves the sticks aside and tips his shovel into the ground.
“You’re sure about this?” I ask.
“Oh, shut up, Ivy.”
He chops up and down through the grass, creating a two-foot-by-two-foot square.
We set the sod carefully to one side, then bring a plastic tarp next to the gaping hole we’ve just made in the ground.
From there, Cam’s in charge of moving each shovel-load of dirt.
He grabs as much as he can, then shifts so I can come in and break up the packed earth with one of my trowels.
We actually make a ton of progress using this method in the first twenty minutes, to the point where even the Park official has abandoned her camp chair to sit near us and point out anything that looks remotely interesting.
Then, forty minutes in, we hit a wall.
Not a wall wall. But a level of dirt so horribly, densely packed that it may as well be a wall.
Cam shifts the loose soil and I keep chipping away, but we go from moving full shovel-loads to handfuls, and then to the equivalent of dirt crumbs. I only manage a single scrape on my last turn. When Cam approaches, he doesn’t even try to move the loose soil away.
Instead, he tosses his shovel aside and climbs directly into the hole. He tucks his arms and legs in. Only the top of his head pokes out.
“What are you doing?” I ask.
My hands ache and we’ve found absolutely nothing, but there’s still a firm countdown on the clock. According to the official’s watch, we have less than fifteen minutes to dig.
Cam rubs his hands over his thighs.
“It’s not here.”
“Yes it is,” I say. “We can’t give up now. We are literally ten minutes away—”
“Away from making a slightly deeper hole,” Cam finishes. He shakes his head, resigned. “But it’s just not here.”
I let my trowel fall onto the grass. “Well, who made you boss, Cam? When did we decide that because you’re the one who found the book, you get to call all the shots?”
He gazes up at me, pondering.
“You know what?” he says slowly. “I am so done with this argument.”
“Well, so am I!”
“You’re not, though.” Cam climbs out of the hole and stands in front of me.
“Because you bring it up every other second. Which one of us gets to be in charge. Which one of us deserves the treasure more. I brought it to you to share it with you, you idiot. I brought it to you because I liked you and I wanted to share something special with you. But from day one, all you have cared about is taking over. You’re the one who wanted to have some big talk about the title before we could even crack the book open! ”
He makes a little squeaky voice. “ ‘Oh, Gay Treasures, what does that mean? Are you gay, are you gay? You have to be gay to read Gay Treasures because I said so.’ ”
“I never said that,” I say angrily.
“You said it all the damn time!” Cam yells. “You thought only you deserved to do the hunt because you were the one who came out first. I didn’t want to talk about being queer because I was still figuring out what being queer even meant for me!”
I stare at him.
“And you,” he says, motioning to me. “You kept making it worse, kept making it harder for me to figure out! Every time I tried to bring up something about us, you kept turning it into you. You made being gay your entire identity.”
“Holy shit,” I say. “I cannot believe you’re shaming me for being gay right now.”
“I’m not shaming you! I’m trying to explain this concept to you, because even now, years later, you’re so freaking thick that you’re still not getting it. I liked you, Ivy. I like you.”
My teeth are practically chattering. My legs are shaking.
“Why the hell do you think I first came out as a lesbian?” I whisper. “I was trying to tell you I liked you too.”
Cam stares at me. “But I’m not a girl.”
“Obviously!” I throw my arms out. “But how was I supposed to know that two years ago? You said nothing to me. You kissed me and then ghosted me for an entire year! What the hell was I supposed to take away from that moment, Cam?”
He nods, head bobbing as he thinks. Then he turns and looks directly into my eyes. “That you didn’t know me,” he says. “Not really. That’s the heartbreaker for both of us, isn’t it?”
“Time!” the Park official calls out.
Cam picks up his shovel and puts back the first load of dirt.
“Let’s just be done with this, once and for all,” he says. He sounds so worn and exhausted. “We tried our best, but it didn’t work out. End of story.”