Darling, I may have to work late, so I might not be here when you get back. I hope you had a great time in North Korea and disabled lots of nuclear weapons. With all my love, Josh
(But that's just a draft.)
I stared at an empty pack of chewing gum—the teeth-whitening kind—and I tried to remember if his teeth had been extra white or just regular white. Regular white, I thought, so I chucked the pack into a stack beside Liz and dug back into the pile again, not knowing what I hoped to pull out.
I found an envelope, small and square, with beautiful calligraphy on the front. It was addressed to The Abrams Family. I'd never seen anything in my life addressed to The Morgan Family. We never got invited to parties. Sure, I remembered a time or two when Mom and Dad dressed up and left me with a sitter, but even then I knew she had a teeny tiny microfilm recorder in her rhinestone broach and his cuff links contained cables that could shoot out for fifty yards and let a person rappel down the side of a building if he really wanted to. (When you think about it, it's not that surprising we didn't get invited out much.)
I was just starting to imagine what it would be like to be the other kind of family, when I heard an ominous, "Uh-oh."
I turned to look at Liz, who was holding a piece of paper toward Bex.
She has to go through Bex first, I realized in terror. Josh only has six months to live! He's taking drugs that will prepare him for a sex change operation! His entire family is moving to Alaska!
It was worse.
"Cam," Bex said, her voice bracing me for the worst, "Liz found something you should probably see."
"It's probably nothing," Liz added, forcing a smile as Bex held out a folded piece of pink paper. Someone had written "JOSH" on it in blue ink with a flowery, ornate kind of penmanship that no one at the Gallagher Academy ever seemed able to master—after all, if you've got organic chemistry, advanced encryption, and conversational Swahili homework every night, you're not going to spend a lot of time learning how to dot your i's with little hearts.
"Read it to me," I said.
"No…." Liz started. "It's probably—"
"Liz!" I snapped.
But Bex had already started. "'Dear Josh. It was great seeing you at the carnival. I had fun, too. We should do it again sometime. Love, DeeDee.'"
Bex had done her best to make the note sound blah, adding lots of unnecessary pauses and dull inflections, but there wasn't any denying that this DeeDee person meant business. After all, I didn't write notes on pink paper with fancy writing. I didn't even own pink paper. Edible paper— yes, but pretty pink paper—no way! So there it was, proof in black-and-white (or … well…pink-and-blue, but you get what I mean), that I was officially out of my league. That I really was nobody.
Liz must have read my expression, because she jumped to say, "This doesn't mean anything, Cam. It's in the trash!" She turned to Bex. "That's got to mean something, right?"
And that's when I couldn't ignore it anymore: the universal truth that, despite our elite education and genius IQs, we didn't know boys. DeeDee, with her pink paper and ability to make the big, puffy J's, might have known the significance of a boy like Josh putting her perfect pink note in the trash, but we sure didn't. The boy of my dreams may have been as close as the town of Roseville—just two miles, eighty security cameras, and a big honking stone fence away, but he and I would never speak the same language (which is totally ironic, since "boy" was the one language my school had never tried to teach me).
"That's okay, Liz," I said softly. "We knew it was a long shot. It's—"
"Wait!" I felt Bex's hand lash out and grab my wrist. "Tell me what you told him again." She read my blank expression. "That night?" she prompted. "When you told him you were homeschooled."
"He asked if I was homeschooled, and I said yes."
"And what reason did you give?"
"For …" I started, but my voice trailed off as I looked at the stack of papers that she had laid out between us. "Religious reasons."
There was a program for the Roseville Free Will Baptist Assembly, a flyer for the United Methodist Church of Roseville, and a handful of others. Either Josh was collecting church bulletins for some kind of bizarre scavenger hunt, or he'd been busy traipsing to Sunday schools and Tuesday-night teen socials for an entirely different reason.
"He's looking for you, Cam," Bex said, beaming as if she'd just made the first step in cracking the ultimate code.
Silence washed over us. My heart pounded in my chest. Bex and Liz were staring at me, but I couldn't pull my gaze away from what we'd found—from the hope that was spread out across our floor.
I guess that's why none of us noticed the door opening. I guess that's why we jumped when we heard Macey McHenry say, "So, what's his name?"
Chapter Twelve
"I don't know what you're talking about," I shot back, way too quickly for the lie to be any good. Here's the thing about lying: a part of you has to mean it—even if it is a tiny, sinister shred that only lives in the blackest, darkest parts of your mind. You have to want it to be true.
I guess I didn't.
"Oh, come on," Macey said with a roll of her eyes. "It's been, what? Two weeks?" I was shocked. Macey cocked her head and asked, "You been to second base yet?"