Camo Girl (4 page)

She would smile. She would ask me if he's good-looking. Maybe she would worry a little less.
I almost made a new friend, Mom.

Almost doesn't count.

S
trange things happen in a house of
women. Last week, for instance, Grammie climbed up onto the roof to put new tiles on a patchy spot, and there is nothing funnier than a ninety-five pound, sixty-four-year-old woman flapping around up on the eaves like a bird. The whole time, loudly declaring there's no good reason to pay a man to come and do something just because he's a man when she could do it herself perfectly well. I was like, “Go, Grammie!” on the inside, but mostly I was just lying in the grass, laughing at the sight of her.

Another time Mom burned our dinner on the stove because she was in a mood and not really paying attention to what she was doing. Grammie and I sat at the dining room table, smelling it, and playing rock/paper/scissors over who
had to go in and help her. In the end neither of us went in; we just kept increasing the number of matches. Best of three, five, seven, nine. We made it to best of thirteen before Mom came to the table carrying a five-pound bar of chocolate and a half-gallon tub of honey vanilla-crunch ice cream. Grammie and I looked at each other and shrugged. Mom sat down, and we proceeded to eat it all.

There are some times when Mom gets cranky like that, and I think we're coming up on one now, because she's rubbing her belly and watching afternoon soaps, plus she's wearing Daddy's old socks, which is what she always does when she's sad or out of sorts.

“I'm back!” Grammie's voice echoes in the hallway. “Hop to, kiddos!”

Mom and I do not move. We will, of course, but we have to work up to it.

Grammie sweeps in, hands on her hips. “I did the buying, you do the lugging.” She drops into her recliner, shoes off and stocking toes to the ceiling before Mom and I even get all four feet on the ground.

“We're going,” I say. Mom heads for the kitchen, which means I get the lovely task of bringing in all the groceries. But if these are the dues that earn me lasagna bake, I'm in.

“How attached are we to this soapy business?” Grammie mutters, fingering her remote control as I pass.

I pat my stomach and shrug. Grammie rolls her eyes and puffs out her cheeks. I know this look. When I got my first monthly a few months ago, Grammie rolled her eyes to the sky just that way. “Lordy Lou. Here we go.” Then she took me out for ice cream. “Eat up, it's the end of the world as you know it. And the beginning.”

I run to the car. Three trips out and back and all the bags are in. Mom's slicing veggies in the kitchen, and Grammie's pretending to doze in her chair. I crawl under the dining room table with my school books and get started on my homework. When the days are rough at the edges, it's best to stay quiet and out of everybody's way.

After a while Grammie's snores echo through the house. So much for pretending. I wonder what Grammie'd be doing right now if she wasn't here with us. She used to have her own house, a few miles away where we would go to visit on Sundays. She sold it to help pay Daddy's hospital bills. I heard her say on the phone once that when I'm old enough to mind myself, she's going to move to her own apartment. Something closer to the Las Vegas Strip, so she doesn't have to take the bus all the way in to the casino every week.

I keep that a secret from Mom, though. I'm not sure if it'd make her happy, or make her worry.

The smell of lasagna bake soon gets my mouth watering.
Mom calls me to set the table, then yells, “Splenda, dinner's ready.”

Grammie pads into the kitchen. “No need to break my eardrums over it, Keisha. I'm here.”

They exchange a Look.

I think, deep down, they like each other. It's just that when we're all together, they remind each other of Daddy. At times like this, his not being here gets really big in the air.

Mom's Look wins. Grammie waves a hand to be done with it and peels off toward the table.

Mom says Grammie's a hard nut to crack. I guess it's true because I once saw a soup can fall out of the cupboard onto her head, and she didn't even say “ow.” She just grumbled about having to bend down and pick it up off the floor where it landed.

Sighing, Mom reaches over and strokes my hair. She frowns, sliding her fingers deeper. She extracts something from my curls, a long silver sliver that looks like a dull needle.

“Ella, why is there a piece of lead in your hair?”

It's a refill stick for a mechanical pencil. I snatch it out of her hand. “I was looking for that.” I swallow it in my hand, squeezing so hard it snaps in two, pricking me. In my darkest dreams, I'll use it to poke tiny holes in Jonathan Hoffman's jugular.

Z
and i escape the next day without
much torment. It's not just me—everyone is distracted by Bailey James's presence among us. He's brought a whole heap of cool to Caldera Junior High. His smile is a light show you can't look away from.

Twice I catch him looking my way. Our eyes meet, which should be nothing, but it's something.

It's something.

At lunch Bailey sits at the table with Jonathan Hoffman. He doesn't try again to talk to me. I'm ready in my mind, though, just in case. He'll come over and say hi. I'll say hi back. Then I'll brush the end of one braid over my shoulder, all casual.
What's going on?

What happens after that depends on what he says in
response. But no matter what, I'll have a great comeback, something witty, so he'll laugh and I'll get to see his smile up close. Or maybe I'll be super cool and glamorous, a movie heroine. I'll be like,
Is that so?
or
That's to be expected,
while shooting him a sultry gaze.

On second thought, I don't know what sultry really looks like.

“Ellie-nor.”

“Hmmm?”

“Ellie-nor.”

“What?” I draw my attention back to Z. He's sitting right next to me, looking at me, rubbing his hands in smooth circles over the tabletop.

“Will milady offer the knight her leftover fare?” He speaks quietly, unevenly.

Lunch is almost over, and my tray is half full. I push it toward him, wondering why he didn't just go ahead and pick some food off my plate. I obviously wouldn't have noticed.

The end-of-lunch bell rings. Z stacks my picked-at tray on top of his empty one, because chivalry is the code of knighthood. Usually, both trays are empty. Always. We don't throw away food.

I'm about to ask Z why he didn't finish, when Jonathan, Brandon, and Bailey go by with their trays. Bailey looks at me and smiles. That makes three.

Then they're past us, thumping their trays on the side of the trash cans and tossing them in the service window.

Z stands expectantly, holding our trays.

“I could look sultry,” I inform him.

He stares at me for a moment but says nothing, then walks to the window and deposits our trays. Thrusts them down a little too hard, if you ask me.

Z sticks close to my hip as we step out into the hallway, dodging the crowd flow as the seventh-graders thunder into the cafeteria for their lunch period. He holds the hem of my T-shirt as we make our way back to class.

I
press up against the lockers after final bell,
waiting for Z to situate things in his backpack and get his lock secured just so. He tucks away his boxes, one by one. We'll go play chess now. These last moments in the crowd are all that stand between it being just the two of us for a while.

Millie and her friends glide by without a glance in my direction. I try to act like I didn't even see them, though, in case they're actually looking at me.

It's not always so easy to go unnoticed. Jonathan Hoffman fires finger machine guns at me. He blows the “smoke” off his fingertips, then puts one hand to his brow, squinting as if he can't tell for sure whether he hit me—I'm so hard to see with my camo face. The depths of his cleverness continue to astound me. Not. I shoot him my most withering look.

Behind him, Bailey James walks alongside Jonathan's buddies. I wonder if he saw and if he thought it was funny. So much for us ever talking.

The hallway flood slowly eases, and we are among the last few kids at the lockers. Z fumbles with his backpack zipper, then finally looks up, ready.

“Milady,” he says, with a nod.

“Sir,” I respond automatically, but my mind is pretty much following Bailey down the hallway.

I don't want to always be the freak. I didn't used to be. It happens in tiny stages. One day things are normal. The next, they're on their way to not. Someone shows up in a desert camouflage T-shirt, and Jonathan Hoffman realizes it looks a lot like my face. Millie stops coming over every day. Then she stops coming over at all. Last year we would have been walking out the door together, the three of us. I don't know exactly what happened. I don't know exactly what changed.

I don't like what we've become, these fake friends who don't always notice each other.

“Milady,” Z repeats.

“Yeah.”

We walk toward Mrs. Smithe's classroom together. I don't look back. I'm done with the rest of them. Z is my friend. We are apart. No one else knows what it's like to
lose something like what we have lost. And he's always been there for me, even on my very worst day. . . .

I slipped outside to wait. People had been coming by the house day and night to hug us and bring casseroles. Our family was all up in the house, which isn't very big for so many people.

My shoes dangled from my fingertips because, all things considered, barefoot is better. I put my toes in the grass, because I knew better than to lie down in my new black funeral dress. It had a row of pretty red roses across the middle. The shoes, black patent leather with a red bow and a two-inch heel. I'd never been allowed to wear high heels, but the day before, Mom just nodded when I picked them out. They weren't very comfortable.

The screen door screeched open. “It's time to go,” Grammie said. “Get those fancy new shoes on, and let's hit the road.”

Instead, I let the shoes drop onto the porch, and ran.

I knew the path well, which was good because I couldn't see real well right then. The tears that stung my eyes blocked out everything. I climbed the rope ladder to the tree house. Piles of cushions and picnic blankets caught me as I flung myself inside.

It didn't matter how many times they told you it was going to happen. It's still the worst thing ever.

I didn't know how long I'd been there when he came. I heard his little footsteps
shush
ing through the grass. The rope ladder swung and the wood creaked, just so. I closed my eyes.

He crawled up next to me. The fabric of his suit brushed against my bare feet.

When I finally looked, he lay there with his face next to mine, brow wrinkled, unsmiling. “Hey.”

“Hey.”

“I guess you know they're looking for you,” he said quietly.

I pinched my eyes shut again. “I'm not going.”

“Okay,” he said, very serious. “Want me to send in the stunt Ella?”

I didn't know where it came from. The smile. “Yes, please.”

Mom called out my name. Right from the backyard, but she sounded so far away.

“I can't go,” I told him. “I really can't.”

He studied our fingertips, lying side by side, then pressed them together. “So, what if we stay here, and we send someone else in our places.”

“What are you talking about?” I knew I had to go. There was no way out; I was just trying to act like there might be.

“Yeah.” He sat up, getting excited. “You can be a superhero or a princess or . . .”

“Superhero princess?” I said, liking the sound of that.

He clapped his hands. “Yeah, yeah. You be . . . Princess Eleanor. I'll be a knight. Sir—”

“Zachariah,” I filled in, out of nowhere.

He smiled, halfway bowing toward me. “At your service, milady.”

I sat up, smoothing my braids with my fingers.

“Now, let me rescue you from this terrible tower.”

With stealth and speed, we scaled the rope ladder, jumped the “moat,” and galloped through the yard, as if on horseback. Mom was so relieved to see me that she didn't notice our whispered messages back and forth.

Our alter-identities lasted all day. Our little secret. Whenever anyone spoke to us, we would say something cryptic but in character, like “Indeed, good sir,” or we'd invite them to the “banquet.” Z was all into reading the King Arthur legends, and he knew so much about knights and ladies and how they talked and acted.

And when it was hard to pretend, we sat quietly and tried anyway. Z made up funny medieval stories about the old people at the service and did a hilarious bit of miming where he pretended to be stalking Mr. Pattison's really bad wig like it was a wild animal. It did rather seem to have a life of its own.

Part of the time I was too sad to laugh out loud, but
I laughed in my head. Z held my hand while Millie's father and then my uncle stood up and talked about Dad.

I will never forget that.

Z took my sad day, the saddest day ever, and turned it a little bit magic. He knows how to do that. Sometimes, every once in a while, I get to see the world through his eyes. It's a much better place. That's why he tries to live there.

After chess, we walk home. At the corner where we split, I say, “Headed to the library?”

“No,” Z says, then stands, waiting.

“Oh. Do you want to come over and play?”

Usually, these are complicated decisions for him. Escape vs. companionship, duking it out in his mind. He tilts his head. Maybe there's an actual boxing ring, and he watches, waits, to see who'll come out on top on any given day. Today we need each other too much.