Chapter Thirty-Five
There is something about Cam that has always made me put my guard up.
Maybe it’s his confidence. The way he seems to stride through life so smoothly.
He gives out smiles like they cost him nothing, even though receiving one feels like winning the lottery.
There’s such an imbalance with him. You get the feeling that you could come and go and his life would stay more or less the same.
But for you, his choices mean everything.
His absence would be, has been, is still—even now—devastating.
There’s so much to lose, liking a person like that.
And I have always been terrified of losing.
The second the sod is replaced on top of our dig spot, Cam picks up his shovel and walks back out the way we came, around the hill and through the trees. The Park official and I watch him go. She turns to me once he’s out of sight.
“Tough break,” she says consolingly. “For what it’s worth, I was really hoping you would find something.”
She hands me a business card. “My email address is on the bottom, right here. I’d be interested to know more about this treasure hunt. Sometimes we do little exhibits inside McLaren Lodge at Golden Gate Park. Maybe see if you want to put something together.”
“Okay,” I say, taking the card. Even though, at the moment, I have no real intention of going home and making some stupid poster board exhibit. I can’t treat the hunt like a kid treats a science fair project about honeybees. It’s way too personal for that.
I wish I could leave my suitcase behind, dump it in a ditch somewhere, throw it off the edge of the cliffside and into the ocean. But technically, these are Mom’s gardening tools, not mine, so instead I have to do the stupidest walk of shame ever and drag it back onto the city bus.
I get home and kick the bag into the side yard, then go upstairs to shower.
I want to curl up in my bed and hide away there forever, forget that the treasure hunt, that me and Cam, ever happened.
But I can’t even look up at the ceiling without picturing the same view of it through Cam’s hair.
His hands on my waist. His heart beating so fast against mine.
What do you want?
“No,” I whisper, sitting up. I can’t replay that memory. It took forever to get the first kiss from the park out of my head.
I pull on my oversized gray denim jacket and slump out of the apartment. It would be nice to go nowhere—a black hole in the space-time continuum that can just suck me up. I pause, thinking. I don’t know of any black holes, but I do have a spot that might work.
The sidewalk slopes down through the entrance to Golden Gate Park.
I take the familiar path winding between the highway and the fields, across the width of the park, to Lloyd Lake.
I can see the Portals of the Past in the distance, looming over its own reflection in the water.
The bushes around the portico are filling in with the sweet-smelling flowers of late spring.
I brush past them, thinking of when I used to pluck the petals off fallen flowers as a little girl.
I pick a flower off the stone steps now, pulling on its petals absently.
He loves me, he loves me not. He loves me, he loves me not.
Not, the last petal says definitively. Ouch.
I poke my head through the entryway of the portal and look over at our tree.
The large branch extends out to me like an open hand.
I briefly consider climbing up onto the branch, but that was always Cam’s spot, not mine.
Instead, I sit right where I am, pressing my back against one end of the doorway and pushing my feet against the other side.
I look down into the lake and see a version of myself reflected in the water. The image is murky and unclear.
“Gabriel could fix that,” I say to myself. And despite the stupidity of that statement, it makes me smile. I imagine Gabriel smoothing the lake like paper, dialing in contrast, brightness, definition. Like every view of the world could be a picture for him to translate and make better.
As I look into the lake, it hits me: I wish Gabriel were here now.
I wish any of my new friends—well, my old friends—my new-old friends were here to distract me from myself.
I feel antsy in my own body. Like I’ve accidentally left the stove on somewhere in my head, and I don’t know how to go in and turn it off.
I lean into the cool stone and close my eyes. If Julia were here, would she see magic in this? Sitting inside a doorway to the past? I want magic to exist so, so badly in this moment. I want to slip right through the Portals of the Past and be able to travel back in time.
I think about when I stood next to Sunny in front of the kintsugi display at the Asian Art Museum. Actually, if I could have any sort of magic, I’d want to spin gold out of nothing, Rumpelstiltskin-style, then use it to bond every relationship I’ve shattered back together.
A magical kintsugi to fix my own life.
I picture all the broken fragments in my head. When I think about my friendship with Gabriel, or Julia, or even Sunny, the pieces are bigger. It’s like a bowl cracked in two. If I can just figure out the right thing to do, the right words to say, I can fix those cracks. The pieces already line up.
With Cam, it’s a lot more complicated.
Putting the pieces of our friendship together feels more like doing a tricky jigsaw puzzle. There’s the book, the hunt, the first kiss, and then the second. There’s the day I came out to Cam. And the day he came out to everyone. The memories all feel barbed and untouchable.
I try to sort through them anyway.
I want to decode them, to understand why Cam keeps pulling me in and pushing me away.
He made that wanted poster for me to see; I just know it.
But he’s also the one who said getting close to me was a mistake.
Why? What do I keep doing that drives him away, over and over?
Why do we keep circling each other and repeating the past?
I think about Cam lying in my bed next to me. I can feel his skin, hot and clammy, under my palm as it skates across his stomach. His heart thrums against my ear. I whisper into his neck.
Cameron.
I open my eyes.
“Oh my God.” I clap a hand over my mouth.
I don’t think Cam has gone by “Cameron” since he came out. But that’s what I said, with my hand under his shirt, inching dangerously close to his chest.
He thinks I was misgendering him.
That’s why he stood up and said I didn’t know him. He meant that I didn’t know him.
The rest of the pieces start finding one another, start fitting into place finally.
All this time I thought Cam was teasing me with his whole cool-guy routine, acting like a totally different person from the friend I first fell in love with.
When really, he’s just been trying to make sure I see him as a guy, full stop.
And the thing is…I do like Cam as a guy. I’m attracted to him as a guy. Which, I guess, technically means I’m pansexual.
“I’m pansexual,” I say out loud to the lake. My reflection smiles back up at me, as though she’s saying, Duh. Of course you are.
I like that word for me. I like how it feels when I try it on.
Maybe not as much as I loved identifying as a lesbian, but I’ll get there with time.
But Cam doesn’t know all that yet. As far as he knows, I still think of myself as a lesbian.
Which must be confusing as hell to him, considering that we’ve now made out twice, and he is very much not a girl.
My mind suddenly starts playing memories of us together like a highlight reel. Cam holding out his hand for a dance at the park. Cam waiting for me to find him in the library. Cam somersaulting into my room, holding Gay Treasures close against his chest.
It was an invitation. The whole treasure hunt was an invitation. This was always his adventure to share, not mine to steal.
Son of a bitch, I think.
He really is the Ben Gates of this whole scenario. And I’m his Ian.
A silhouette steps into the reflection on the water.
I look away, tucking my head over my shoulder.
People drop by this area from time to time—the Portals monument isn’t a huge, touristy thing, but it’s one of those hidden gems of the city that locals know about.
Architecturally, it’s sort of a marvel, having survived an earthquake that took out the rest of an entire neighborhood.
Mom was the first person to bring me here, when I was really little.
“Ivy?”
I twist my head toward the lake. “Mom?”
She’s standing there in a gray pantsuit, stunned, holding a to-go cup of coffee.
“I thought you were working today,” I say.
“I was.” She blinks at me a moment, then sits on the top step, right next to me. “I come here a lot, right after work.”
She points at a bench just past the monument, curving around the west end of the lake.
I laugh. “I come here a lot too. After school.” I point through the doorway, to the tree and the hillside behind the Portals.
Mom stares at the tree, contemplative. “Hmm.”
“What is it?”
She shakes her head. “Oh, that’s…I don’t know. I think I might’ve met your father there.”
I sit up straight, shoulder blades no longer touching the doorway.
“WHAT?”
Mom gives me a brief side-glance. “What, you thought you were the immaculate conception?”
“No, but— You never talk about that. Him or whatever.”
“I don’t,” Mom says wistfully. She looks over at her bench. As I look at it too, I realize it’s set at the perfect angle to see the branches of my tree through the Portals doorway.
“You don’t talk about it with me,” I say, understanding. “You just think about it on your own.”
Mom says nothing.
“Does it help?” I ask. “To keep it all to yourself?”
“What do you think?” Mom says shrewdly.
What do I think? Every time I’ve sat with my mom at a Chez Moi lunch, it felt like we were both stepping into the future.
That she and I got to live vicariously through fantasies unburdened by the past. But now I know that, outside of those lunches, we’ve each come back here on our own.
We’ve both stared at the same tree tied to a personal history we can’t really escape from, no matter how hard we try.
It makes me think of a dog trying to get away from something that’s tied to its own leg.
There’s no outrunning what anchors us down.
The only way to actually escape it is to look right at it, to understand it.
And maybe, hopefully, untangle it.
I turn to my mom. “I’m not going to Paris,” I say.
She takes a sip of her coffee. “They said no?”
“I’m not applying.” I squint at her. “But not because the yearbook project doesn’t count as art. It is real art, Mom. Maybe you were right, and maybe it wasn’t really my story to tell. But it is an important story. Whether you’re open-minded enough to see that or not.”
Mom stares at me. Her shock only fuels me further.
“You know, I’ve made my whole life into a stupid competition, because I always felt like you and I were in one,” I say, pointing between the two of us.
“I wanted to be as good as you. I wanted to do something that would make you proud of me. But you know what? I am practical, like you. And that’s great!
It’s a strength, not a weakness! And if you weren’t so insecure about yourself, you would see how great I am, just the way I am.
“Maybe I’ll be an artist someday, and maybe I won’t,” I say finally, “but it doesn’t matter what I choose to do. You should have been proud of me the whole time. And it sucks that you haven’t been, but that’s not my problem. It’s yours.”
I stand and shake my head at my mom. She continues to gape at me over her coffee. I wait to see if she’ll find the right words to say, but she doesn’t. She doesn’t have them.
As I look at my mom I realize that this right here—her sitting on that bench, thinking of what her life could have been, instead of being happy with what her life is now—this is what it looks like to be stuck in the past. And I don’t want to be stuck in mine for one minute longer.
I walk back down the steps.