“Sure, but it was important. Stories matter. Representation matters. Besides, it’s better than reading Romeo and Juliet freshman year. Enough about rich white kids already.”
I laugh. Liam is one of very few Black students in our school, and I’m caught off guard by his candor.
“Fair point,” I say. “Didn’t care for the romance?”
“That wasn’t romance. That was idiocy. I don’t know who said ‘all is fair in love and war,’ but I’m calling bull. When you love someone, you don’t treat them like that. You don’t end up dead.”
I know we are talking about a book, but in my mind I hear the crack of the door hitting the wall last night. I see that same wall this morning, perfect, as though the plaster never broke. I remember how my eyes slipped past it as I hung up frames, like they were unwilling to accept the way our strange house erases his violence for him.
I’ve stopped walking, and when Liam notices, he stops, too. The air around me feels cold. I can’t remember what was funny or cute or charming about our conversation.
“Can I have my book back?” I ask, my tone cool and crisp, as controlled as I can make it. I can’t help it. The alternative to cold is crying, and I don’t want to fall apart. Not here.
“Um, yeah, of course, Leighton,” Liam says, handing my book back. “Is this about earlier? Cuz I’m really sorry . . .”
“I just forgot a notebook. I’ll see you in class,” I mutter, and I’m gone, walking down the hallway as fast as I can without getting called out for running. I try to ignore the burning throat and stinging eyes so they’ll go away. Just act normal.
Normal.
Normal.
There.
The word has lost all meaning.
Chapter Five
IF THERE WAS EVER ANOTHER VERSION of Campbell Grace Barnes, I missed it. As far back as I can recall, she’s been the serious one. I’m a reader, sure, but Cammy is a thinker. She thinks while she brushes her hair, her fingers ruthlessly detangling knots in the shiny, straight red strands. She thinks while she eats her cereal, one hand holding a spoon, the other one tapping against the table. A staccato beat to accompany her thoughts. She thinks when he yells, and when he throws things.
Most of the time, I have no clue what Campbell is thinking. I know her better than I know anyone, but her mind is the Mariana Trench, and there are depths I’ll never see. And that’s okay. She can contain the secrets of the universe and keep every last one to herself for all I care, as long as she’s still a kid sometimes. That’s all I want. And it’s there when she leaves on her bicycle.
Campbell loves Mom, Juniper, me, and her bike, and I’m not sure the bike would come fourth if she ranked us. She covets it. Every day after school, she is in the house only long enough to ditch her backpack, and then she’s off, riding down Frederick Street, turning left at the corner. She goes to a richer neighborhood—one that almost passes for suburbia, though the houses still have a ton of space between them. She rides with her friends, zipping in and out of streets, ignoring helmet laws. Campbell on her bike is not thinking. And that is good for her.
On our fourth day of school, Campbell has already been gone a half hour when there is a knock at our door. I spring from the kitchen table, where I had been stress-reading some college brochures and wondering if I’d ever set foot on one of those ivy-covered campuses.
Mrs. Stieg is standing on our front porch. Mrs. Stieg is probably in her mid-seventies, and I don’t know how long she’s been a widow, but I never knew her husband. She is sweet and gray and grandmotherly. She likes to wave at us from her front porch when we walk to the bus stop. Mrs. Stieg likes roses, and they grow in abundance around her home every summer. Mrs. Stieg likes to ignore knocks at her door in the middle of the night.
“Can I help you?” I ask. I’m wondering where I get this compulsion to be polite to someone who couldn’t bother to help me call the police. I miss what she says. Something about Campbell.
“Sorry?”
“My garden on the far side of my house. Your sister and her boys rode through it yesterday and ruined my Mister Lincolns.”
Her boys. Campbell’s bike-riding friends happen to be mostly boys. Mrs. Stieg likes to strongly imply her disapproval.
“Mister Lincoln?” I repeat.
“My roses. They destroyed a patch of roses.”
“Oh. I’m sorry, Mrs. Stieg. That doesn’t sound like Cammy.”
Yes it does.
“I didn’t think so, dear. It’s those boys she spends her afternoons with. Shouldn’t a girl her age have girlfriends?”
“I think a girl her age should just have friends, actually.”
My rebuttal earns a stern look.
“I’m sorry for the flowers. Can we help fix them? I’ll bring Campbell over first thing tomorrow, and we will clean up any mess.”
Mrs. Stieg considers the peace offering, which I’m still not sure she deserves after the other night. I try to forgive it. Maybe she wasn’t sure what she heard. Maybe she was scared.
“Very well. Seven a.m. You girls should bring some gloves.”
We arrive at 7:15 the next day, holding gardening gloves we dug out of the garage and large coffee tumblers. Campbell isn’t usually a coffee drinker, but an early Saturday playing with thorns warrants some caffeine.
When I confronted her about the garden mishap last night, she said it was an accident. Her friends biked home with her, and they were all going down the hill too fast to stop, so they crashed into a flower bush. She tugged up her shorts, showing me the thorn scrapes.
“Why would I bike into thorns on purpose, Leighton. It hurt.”
I relented, unconvinced. Campbell was out on the roof when I went for help. She would have seen Mrs. Stieg’s light turn on and then off again. If any thirteen-year-old in the world believed in vigilante justice, it would be Campbell Grace.
Whether the damage was done on purpose or not, we’ll be spending the morning cleaning it up. We get our instructions from Mrs. Stieg and dive into the scramble of branches and wrecked flowers.
“You guys really demolished this thing,” I say, tugging on a stubborn piece. Mrs. Stieg wants us to remove all the broken branches, and then she will see if the thing is salvageable. If it isn’t, we owe her a bush. “Did you just run through it once?”
Campbell doesn’t hear me—or at least, she pretends not to. She has her arms buried in the bush, and there are little lines of blood where the thorns have already gotten her.
“Why don’t you go home and put on long sleeves? You’re going to get shredded up.”
“I’m fine.”
“Whatever,” I snap back. This is her mess. I’m just trying to help.
We work silently from then on, sweat and blood mixing on our arms and legs where the thorns nick us.
Why roses? Of all the flowers someone could obsess over, why choose one with a built-in defense system? It would be like trying to domesticate a garden full of Campbells—a constant battle, and one likely to draw blood.
We finally finish pulling apart the broken bush around nine and go get Mrs. Stieg for her evaluation. The bush does not look good. It is missing huge patches of branches. But she studies what is left, pushing and pulling at it. Testing its roots.