was a big, fat lie. Reduced to eleven-year-old vulnerability, I wanted everyone to take my side.
After Gabriella left and party time approached, I called Helen.
“I’m coming over,” Helen said. “We’re gonna have a slumber party.”
Chapter Eleven
HELEN
HELEN WENT INTO EMERGENCY MODE AT THE SOUND OF Cami’s voice. Her friend was about to crash, and she wanted to do all in her power to soften the landing.
Helen knew Cami would be better off for crashing. Knowing Cami the way she did, though, she expected Cami to fight it. That was just delaying the inevitable, but she knew better than to say that to Cami. Words like that may as well be a triple dog dare.
As she drove to the farm—after hitting the grocery for comfort food—she wished there was a way to make Cami believe how much better life would get. Because it would, Helen knew. She’d been in Cami’s shoes.
She should’ve told Cami that before now, but it wouldn’t have been valuable until this moment. Just like Cami waiting for the moment Helen needed to know about her former life of starvation. A few years ago, one of Holly’s best friends was battling an eating disorder and Helen told Cami, “I don’t get it. I want to smack this girl and say, ‘Just eat. How hard can it be?’ ”
Cami said, “Actually, it can be really hard.”
That was a turning point in their friendship. Helen remembered Cami saying, “Okay, when I tell people this I see the ‘oh, she’s crazy’ light go on in their eyes. Believe me, I know it’s crazy.” Helen thought Cami was so brave that day, advising her on how to help Holly’s friend, taking her chances that Helen wouldn’t think she was a freak. She’d given Helen a gift that day, dusting off a skeleton from her past—a fragile skeleton at that—and entrusting Helen with its care.
Helen had always wanted to give Cami something back. Tonight might be the night she could.
Of course Cami wasn’t in the house. Helen unloaded the groceries, then wandered down to the barn just in time to see the devil horse lurch toward the hay Cami’d just given him. Helen gasped at the obvious stagger. “Damn,” she said. “Lucifer is lame.”
Cami didn’t even turn around when she said, “You can’t call him that.”
Cami’s forearms dangled over the fence, so Helen checked out the wound from Saturday—the purple-and-green bruises, the actual teeth marks now nearly black.
Cami turned to her and Helen saw betrayal glittering in her friend’s eyes. “I felt sorry for Bobby,” Cami said. “I would’ve done anything for him. I feel like such an idiot.”
“Oh, sweetie. You’re no idiot.” Helen hugged her. She wanted to encourage Cami to keep talking, to keep letting it out, but before she could, Cami switched topics, as if afraid.
Cami gestured to the devil horse. “If one of us held his halter, the other could lift that leg.”
Helen saw that she was serious, then shook her head. “You’re insane. You never change,” she said, but didn’t try to argue. She just opened the gate when Cami handed her a lead rope. Helen would prefer not to be the one near the horse’s mouth, but knew Cami was the one with the skills necessary to diagnose that foot.
The horse ground his teeth as they approached, a hideous, skin-contracting sound. “It sounds like he’s sharpening them,” Helen joked.
“Tie his mouth shut,” Cami said. She was probably trying to joke, too, but Helen wasn’t sure if Cami was brave or crazy to risk another bite so soon. Helen wrapped the chain of the lead rope over the horse’s nose and pulled it tight, ready to apply painful pressure if needed.
Cami tried to pick up the hoof in question, but the devil horse resisted. Helen held his nose still while Cami leaned into his shoulder to sway him off balance. He finally gave in and lifted the hoof. Helen immediately felt the weight as he then leaned into the lead rope.
“I can feel the heat through the dirt packed in his hoof,” Cami said. “Shit. I can’t believe I didn’t bring a hoof pick!”
Helen felt like she held up the horse’s entire body weight as she watched Cami scrape out what dirt she could with her fingernails. “He might have an abscess,” Cami said. “Yep, I think right at the base of his frog.” Helen wondered, as she always did, why on earth that V-shaped mark on the bottom of a horse’s hoof was called a frog. She might’ve