like all children, will learn it is yet another parental lie with minimum justification. Or maybe I'm wrong and they are up there looking down on us. Maybe that is what Cara will conclude someday.
At midnight I finally allowed my mind to go where it wanted to, my sister, Camille, Gil Perez, that awful, magical summer. I flashed back to camp. I thought about Camille. I thought about that night. And for the first time in several years, I let myself think about Lucy.
A sad smile crossed my face. Lucy Silverstein had been my first real girlfriend. We'd had it so good, a fairy-tale summer romance, until that night. We never had the chance to break up, we were, instead, ripped apart by bloody murders. We were torn away while still enmeshed in each other, at a point where our love, as silly and immature as it was supposed to have been, was still rising and growing.
Lucy was the past. I had given myself an ultimatum and shut her out. But the heart doesn't really know from ultimatums. Over the years, I have tried to see what Lucy is up to, harmlessly Googling her name and stuff, though I doubt I would ever have the courage to contact her. I never found anything. My bet is, after all that happened, she'd wisely changed her name. Lucy was probably married now, like I had been. She was probably happy. I hoped so.
I pushed that all away. Right now I needed to think about Gil Perez. I closed my eyes and went back. I thought about him at camp, how we horsed around, how I used to fun-punch him in the arm, the way he'd say, "Wimp! I didn't even feel that "
I could see him now, with the skinny torso, his shorts too baggy before that was a fashionable look, the smile that needed major orthodontia, the...
My eyes opened. Something felt wrong.
I headed into the basement. I found the cardboard box right away. Jane had been good about marking everything. I saw her extra neat handwriting on the side of the box. It made me pause. Handwriting is so damn personal. My fingertips drifted over it. I touched her lettering and pictured her with the big Magic Marker in her hand, the top in her mouth as she wrote boldly: photographs-Copeland's.
I had made many mistakes in my life. But Jane... it was my one great break. Her good transformed me, made me better and stronger in every way. Yes, I loved her and there was passion, but more than that, she had the ability to make me my best. I was neurotic and insecure, the financial-aid kid at a school with very few of them, and there she was, this nearly perfect creature who saw something in me. How? How could I be so awful and worthless if a creature this magnificent loved me?
Jane was my rock. And then she got sick. My rock crumbled. And so did I.
I found the photographs from that long-ago summer. There were none of Lucy. I had wisely thrown them all away years ago. Lucy and I had our songs too - Cat Stevens, James Taylor, stuff that was syrupy enough to be gag worthy. I have trouble listening to them. Still. To this day. I make sure that they are nowhere near my iPod. If they come on the radio, I switch stations at a dizzying speed.
I sifted through a stack of pictures from that summer. Most of them were of my sister. I pushed through them until I found one that was taken three days before she died. Doug Billingham was in the picture, her boyfriend. A rich kid. Mom had approved, of course. The camp was an odd social mix of privileged and poor. Inside that camp, the upper and lower classes mingled on about as level a playing field as you could find. That was how the hippie who ran the camp, Lucys fun-loving hippie dad, Ira, wanted it.
Margot Green, another rich kid, was smack in the middle. She always was. She had been the camp hottie and knew it. She was blond and busty and worked it constantly. She always dated older guys, until Gil anyway, and to the mere mortals around her, Margots life was like something on TV, a melodrama we all watched with fascination. I looked at her now and pictured her throat slit. I closed my eyes for a second.
Gil Perez was in the