Chapter 1 #4
“No,” she said. She’d never heard him swear before; he always said it was gauche and unimaginative whenever she and Danny did it. “You’re good. It’s fine.”
Upstairs Danny was lying in bed watching a show on his laptop, the volume down too low for Ellery to hear. “How was the movie?” he asked when they came in.
“It was fine,” Camp said, at the same time as Ellery said, “It was shit.”
Danny looked back and forth between them for a moment, like he was trying to figure out which one of them to believe and not finding either one of them especially trustworthy.
When Ellery put her hand on his forehead, it was burning up with fever, the heat radiating off him like an old-fashioned bed warmer.
She gave him three Tylenol and went to the bathroom to wet a washcloth at the faucet; by the time she got back to the boys’ room, though, Danny was coughing too much to talk.
“Easy,” Camp said, laying a hand on his back. “You’re all right.”
“He needs to go to Health Services,” Ellery said.
“It’s eleven o’clock on a Saturday,” Camp pointed out. “Health Services is closed.”
All at once, Ellery wanted to cry. “What are you supposed to do if you need to go to the doctor when the health center is closed?” she asked.
Camp shrugged. “Go to the ER, I guess.”
“I’m not going to the ER,” Danny piped up, losing the end of it in another coughing fit. It lasted a long time, Danny struggling to his feet and bracing one hand on the headboard, trying to catch his breath. Ellery squeezed her hands into fists.
“This is ridiculous,” she announced when it was finally over. “He needs to go to the doctor.”
“He just said he doesn’t want to,” Camp argued, and that was when Danny passed out.
Danny had pneumonia; in the end, he was in the hospital for four days while they waited for his lungs to clear. Every morning before her first class, Ellery went out to the woods and took a picture of his tree for him, and every morning he sent her a thumbs-up in return.
“I thought only old people got pneumonia,” Camp said. He and Ellery were sitting in the dining hall, both of them poking at their food.
“I think only old people die of pneumonia,” Ellery told him.
He hadn’t kissed her since the other night, though he kept bringing her things: a bag of Sour Patch Kids, a leather-bound notebook from the campus bookstore.
The first draft of his creative project, a complete history of Preston College as told by the ghost of the maple syrup farmer from whom the land had originally been purchased.
It felt like he was atoning for something, though Ellery wasn’t entirely sure what. “But anyone can get it.”
On Thursday Ellery took the shuttle into town after her last class, then walked the fifteen minutes along the service road to the hospital.
Her cheeks were pink by the time she arrived, her glasses fogging in the sudden heat of the hospital lobby.
When she got to Danny’s room, he was asleep.
Camp was passed out, too: He’d scooted the plastic chair as close as it would get to the edge of the bed, then pillowed his head on his folded arms on the mattress.
In sleep, the tips of Danny’s fingers brushed Camp’s hair.
Ellery watched them for a moment, chewing on her glove and feeling like she’d felt her first few weeks at Preston, like she was on the outside of something that everyone had figured out except for her.
But that was silly, wasn’t it? Here were her two favorite people.
All she needed to do was walk through the door.
She stood there for another moment, then turned around and went back to the center of town to wait for the shuttle. It took a long time for it to come.
Danny came back to campus pale and exhausted looking, having lost seven pounds he didn’t necessarily have to spare in the first place. “You look like Edward Scissorhands,” Camp said, and Danny laughed.
They got back to normal; they settled back in.
Spring break was the first week of March, but the first week of March was still the dead of winter in Vermont.
Ellery ached for sunshine, for California, but she found she was unwilling to leave Camp and Danny: Since the hospital, it felt like something bad might happen if she wasn’t there to supervise.
It felt like they might not be there when she got back.
“We could go to Boston,” she suggested instead, nudging Camp with one slipper. “I think we know someone who lives there.”
“My house?” Camp asked, and Ellery thought she saw a flash of white-hot panic cross his face in the moment before he blinked it away. “We could go to my house!” he agreed, like possibly it had been his idea in the first place. “Yeah. Of course we can go to my house.”
So. They went to Camp’s house. His family lived on Commonwealth Avenue, four floors of brownstone with an orangerie and an in-ground pool in the basement, the tile a deep, haunted-looking green.
“Stop goggling,” she murmured to Danny as they stood in the foyer, the winding staircase soaring above them.
“You stop,” Danny muttered back. “I’m not.”
“How did you not tell me it was like this?” Ellery asked him. “Haven’t you ever been here before?”
“When would I have been here without you?” Danny asked. Ellery wasn’t sure. It felt ancient to her, the relationship between Danny and Camp, something that had begun in another lifetime; it was easy to forget they’d only met three weeks before that night in the basement of Honors House.
Camp’s mother was a bird-faced woman in wool pants and a turtleneck, her hair so blond it made her look like a movie vampire. “There you are!” she said, wrapping her wraithlike arms around him and squeezing. “And your friends!”
“Campbell,” his father said with a nod. “It’s been too long.”
“Not that long,” Camp reminded him, then turned to his mother. “Dad and I ran into each other up at school,” he said evenly. “Did he tell you?”
“Lunch is ready,” Camp’s father announced before his mother could answer, ushering them off toward the dining room. Then, catching Camp by the shoulder: “Campbell.”
Camp followed him into a study off the front hallway, the door clicking neatly shut behind them, as Ellery and Danny sat obediently down. Ellery could hear raised voices, the words muffled through the walls. “Should we go in there?” Ellery asked at last, poking at her plate of chicken salad.
“Are you insane?” Danny murmured back. Camp’s mother hadn’t joined them at the table; even their whispers seemed to echo in the cavernous room. “And do what, exactly? This is his family.”
“We’re his family,” Ellery said stubbornly, then gasped at the unmistakable crack of a slap across a face.
The door to the study opened a moment later, Camp’s smooth cheek flaming red. “Sorry about that,” he said calmly, sitting down at the table. “How’s lunch?”
“It’s good,” Ellery promised, glancing uncertainly at Danny. “Camp—”
“So hey, I’ve got some stuff to handle here this afternoon,” Camp interrupted. He sounded like a hired tour guide, like they were foreigners who’d come to take in the sights. “You guys good to entertain yourselves for a while?”
Ellery blinked. “Sure,” she said slowly. She didn’t want to leave Camp here, but she didn’t know how to say that out loud. “We can do that.”
“Yeah,” Danny said. “Of course.”
She and Danny walked a block over to Newbury Street, wandering into a bookstore there. “Have your parents ever hit you?” she asked Danny, looking at the shelves instead of looking at him.
Danny shrugged. “I mean, sure,” he admitted. He wasn’t looking at her, either. “As a kid sometimes. Spanking, or whatever. But not like that. Have yours?”
“No,” Ellery said. Ellery’s parents had spent her entire childhood practicing something her mother had read about in a book called Unparenting, which basically meant saying yes to everything and letting Ellery figure out her boundaries on her own.
Sometimes, like when the girls in her class wanted to watch an R-rated movie back in middle school and their parents wouldn’t let them, it had worked in her favor.
Other times, like when her mom let her keep the random cat she’d found lurking under their porch and it had a million babies in the washing machine before sinking its teeth into Ellery’s calf so deeply she got cellulitis and had to miss two weeks of school, it worked less elegantly.
There was no hitting in Unparenting, though in retrospect she supposed one could argue the thing with the cat was its own kind of violence.
Still, Ellery knew that if she was being honest with herself, it wasn’t the same at all.
“He’s different here, though, right?” she asked. It felt important to know she wasn’t imagining it. “Camp?”
“Of course he is,” Danny said immediately, then shook his head. “I feel like we shouldn’t be talking about this,” he told her. “Don’t you feel like we shouldn’t be talking about it?”
“Who else is going to talk about it, if not the two of us?” Ellery asked, but Danny was engrossed in the science books and didn’t hear her, or maybe he was just pretending not to.
Ellery stood beside him for a while, paging through a guide of backyard birds of North America.
Eventually, he reached out and took her hand.
They went back to the house as dusk was falling over the Public Garden and had dinner with Camp and his parents, the walls of the dining room paneled with dark wood polished to a glossy sheen.
Ellery was aware that she was talking too much, that she was putting on some kind of bizarre show that nobody even wanted to watch, but she couldn’t stop herself.
Camp, for his part, said almost nothing at all.