Ordinarily, he’d like that, but nothing was ordinary anymore. He didn’t want to be at home, and he didn’t want to be at school. He didn’t want to be anywhere.
He shifted his backpack from one shoulder to the other and headed up the walk. The wind plucked at his jacket and hair.
“Cameron?”
He kept walking, though he knew that voice.
“Cameron, I just want to say, I’m so sorry for what happened,” said Becky Pilchuk, hurrying to fall in step with him.
Becky Pilchuk. Just his luck. He glanced around to see if anyone noticed him walking with her. On the chalkboard in the boys’ locker room, where he and his friends rated the girls in their class according to relative hotness, she was in the bottom ten percent. It was a game the guys played, and it would be incredibly insulting to the girls if they knew about it.
“I tried to see you after the funeral service, but I couldn’t find you,” Becky said.
“I didn’t feel like being found,” he said. He’d felt like breaking something. In fact, he’d done so. Right there at the church, he’d wandered outside to the parking lot. They were loading his parents into the hearses and it was completely gross. His father had Travis, Sean and a bunch of golfers as pallbearers. His mother had the husbands of her friends from the Special Olympics committee and the garden club and whatever the hell else his mother was into. It was too much, thinking of them sealed up inside those gleaming boxes, so Cameron had ducked away when no one was looking. He ran until his breath came in strangled sobs and wound up at the rear of the church, looking at the colored windows framed in soaring arches. At the top of the arch was a roundel. He knew it was called that because they’d studied Gothic architecture in World History. The roundel depicted a dove hovering over a flame—the Holy Spirit.
Cameron had picked up a smooth, rounded stone. He wound up and threw it as hard as he could, and the stone smashed through the window with a satisfying clatter. He wasn’t worried that the noise would alert anyone, because the recessional music blared from speakers and everyone had left to go to the stupid cemetery to bury his parents in the ground. In no hurry, he’d sauntered away to rejoin the others in the stretch limo with air freshener that smelled like overripe bananas.
He tried not to look at Becky, but couldn’t help himself. She held a sort of weird fascination for him and had ever since she’d moved here last fall. She had all the components of the uber-geek—the brains, the eyeglasses, the complete cluelessness about the way she dressed—yet he had this really strange reaction to her. His heart sped up and he felt all nervous. And when she mentioned his parents, his throat and eyes hurt, like he was going to start bawling at the drop of a hat.
“Well,” she said, her voice wavering uncertainly, “if you ever feel like talking about it, I—I’m willing to listen.”
For a wild moment, he had the urge to tell her about the church window and about the fact that ruining things had a curious way of beckoning to him. He wasn’t sure why that was. Breaking something or messing it up didn’t help a thing. It was pretty lame, because all it meant was that somebody had to fix whatever he broke. Big deal. If he told Becky, then she’d know he was wacko for sure. “I doubt I’ll want to talk about anything. It completely sucks. That’s all I have to say.”
“Okay, sorry,” she said. “Anyway, I’d better go. I have a paper I need to turn in before first bell.” A tinsel-wrapped smile flickered and disappeared. “So I’ll see you around, okay?”
He didn’t answer, but watched her go, plucking a crisp white report from her notebook as she soldiered toward the front door of the school. When she had nearly reached the building, a gust of wind snatched the paper and blew it high overhead.
She gave chase, but the paper wafted a few yards away, where a group of jocks were pushing and shoving. One of them spotted the paper and slammed his foot down on it. Becky rushed in, grabbing it. She pulled too hard and the page tore.
The jocks laughed, giving each other high fives while Becky clutched the paper, red-faced, and scurried away. As she crossed in front of