A Twist of Hate (12 page)

              Michael had imagined limitless possibilities for Camden’s tree house. He spoke of it so often at home, Mr. Littlefield decided to build his son a tree house of his own.

              To Michael’s dismay, no expert craftsmen from Mastery Treehouses came to execute a custom design while he and his friends played board games and drank lemonade on a shaded deck. To Michael’s utter horror, Mr. Littlefield planned to do the work himself.

              Camden, who’d been a frozen lump as his own tree house went up, became Mr. Littlefield’s devoted apprentice in the design and construction of the tree house that would perch in the sturdy elm in Michael’s backyard. Camden had sat with Michael and Mr. Littlefield to design it. He accompanied them to Morse Lumber to order building materials. Mr. Littlefield had bought each boy a tool belt of his own. Camden had worn his every day, even on rainy days when they couldn’t work.

              Camden had wasted a month of Saturdays and Sundays pounding nails, sawing wood, and sanding planks, even if Michael was bike riding, trading baseball cards, or alone in his rec room playing video games.

              Michael recalled the one time he’d ever seen Camden in his own tree house. Several years after the tree house had been built, the sycamore had been struck by lightning. They had gone up hoping to see some kind of damage only to find the well-built tree house intact, sturdy as ever, and oddly beautiful. Time had given its green oak walls a silvery-grey hue that contrasted sharply with the dried feces and feathers left by generations of birds.

              Michael took in the four walls of his own tiny treehouse, still clueless as to why Camden had always preferred it to his own. It wasn’t much more complex than a shoebox. Not much bigger, either.

              “Idiot.”

              Michael drained his beer and tossed the can into a corner where it clattered into a pile of empties. He eased into one of his favorite fantasies, one involving Camden’s estranged mother.

              Strawberry-blonde beauty Maureen “Mo” Dougherty returns, not to her perfect son and perfect husband in their perfect seven-bedroom Colonial, but to the Littlefield’s four-bedroom mock Tudor. She confesses the most egregious of sins, that she switched Baby Mikey and Baby Cammy in the hospital nursery. She claims her real son, reunites with Patrick Dougherty, and the three of them sail into the sunset on the world’s biggest yacht bound for their own private island.

              The fantasy never included a motivation for the switch, nor accounted for the fact that Camden was the spit and image of Patrick Dougherty.

              “It’s so unfair,” Michael whined.

             
Camden doesn’t give a shit about anything important,
Michael thought bitterly. Tall, handsome Camden, with his perfect grades and rich father who allowed him to do whatever he wanted. Camden, who never threw up his beer or lost at poker. Camden, who bronzed in the sun,
was
the sun around which every girl orbited. Especially that black bitch Siobhan Curran.

              “Damn him,” Michael softly sneered.

              Camden wasn’t as rich as “Billionaire Boy” Christopher Daley III, but the Doughertys were closer to it than the Littlefields. Their house, the biggest in White Fir Court, boasted twin tennis courts and a heated pool housed in glass with a retractable roof. It would have been perfect for parties, yet Camden hadn’t ever had one.

              Every summer Mr. Dougherty took Camden with him to law conferences all over the country. While his father spent hours and hours with his colleagues in meetings and attending dinners, Camden wasted his time photographing buildings that as far as Michael was concerned, had too many eye prints on them already. At sixteen, Camden had been given a new BMW that he seemed embarrassed to drive.

              There had been no shiny, expensive new import waiting in the Littlefield’s driveway when Michael turned sixteen and passed his driver’s test on his third attempt. On the contrary, Mr. Littlefield had agreed to match dollar for dollar whatever Michael earned toward the purchase of a car.

              Michael threatened to quit school and leave home to live with his grandfather, Virrell Littlefield, a threat that never failed to move his mother toward his way. She circumvented her husband’s dictate and dipped into her inheritance to purchase a two-year-old Audi for Michael. His parents didn’t speak to each other for a week. Not that Michael noticed—he had been too busy tallying miles on his new used car.

              “Losers,” Michael sneered, staring at the darkened windows hiding his sleeping parents.

              He hated having to parent his parents. Mr. Littlefield, the son of a mechanic and a housewife, had put himself through college and law school working graveyard shifts as a stock boy. Mrs. Littlefield, the daughter of a dockworker and a hotel maid, grew up so poor she never had two pennies to place in the pockets of her loafers. Upon her father’s death only months after her mother passed away, she learned that he had been tighter than Silas Marner, that he had hoarded every extra dollar and dime in a safe deposit box. His fortune went to her, but his ghost haunted the Littlefields in his mother’s reluctance to spend a penny on anything they couldn’t wear or eat.

              Quiet and nervous, Mrs. Littlefield stood up to her husband on Michael’s behalf only under extreme duress. Michael was an expert at applying duress. She never would have joined the Prescott Mothers Club if Michael hadn’t threatened to quit school. She would run errands in the off-the-rack monstrosities she wore around the house, and fill the pantry with off brands from discount stores if not for Michael’s incessant fussing and complaining.

              The Littlefields pursued membership at Twin Lakes only because Michael tormented his mother into coddling sponsorships from their neighbors. Each rejection provoked fights with his father and led to crying jags from his mother that lasted days. Michael figured it would all be worth it once Twin Lakes got its act together and invited the Littlefields to join.

              Michael’s life looked like that of most of the other important Prescott families. His father, luckily, had chosen the best suburb and what would become its best gated community after joining one of St. Louis’s best law firms. It rankled Michael that their house was among the smallest, but everything else—their cars, their vacations, their hobbies—every piece was correct because Michael worked damn hard making his parents into what he wanted them to be. Beneath the thin veneer of wealth and suburban class, Michael knew Chrissie was right—he was one generation removed from the South Side, poverty-level hoosiers from whom his parents descended.

              He opened the heavy leather pouch at his side.

              Prescott was his ticket to the life he wanted. The life he deserved and should have always had. Satisfactory grades at Prescott were better than straight As at just about any other school. Although the Ivy League colleges he had applied to rejected him, he had a good chance of getting into a perfectly respectable state school. He was on his way. Prescott would be a dim memory in a few short months.

              Mr. Cleese had come to the house to speak to his parents—the teacher’s car was in Michael’s usual parking spot.

              Rather than going inside, Michael had driven east until he came to the Riverfront, then took Washington Street west, toward home. He’d hoped to catch a “sister” on the The Stroll. He’d have to pay to do to her what he wanted to do to Siobhan Curran, but it was worth it, if it relieved the tension knotting his insides.

              Though the spring night was chilly, there were a few girls strolling. But none met his specific criteria. Even more frustrated, he’d used his fake ID to buy beer before going home. His parents had been waiting for him.

              In addition to the drama teacher’s visit, the headmaster had called the Littlefields at spoken with them at length. His parents were furious with him. So what. Michael had seen them worse. Michael had done worse. With Mr. Littlefield unable to get out of court, the prospect of facing Cyril Edwards, Prescott’s grandfatherly headmaster, terrified Mrs. Littlefield. Michael, more agitated than anxious, figured he’d save his worry for eight more hours, until he knew what Mr. Edward planned to do.

                The scene at home had been bad, though. His dad had come after him with his chest inflated, like a big bullfrog. His mom’s face was swollen and red from crying. Michael had reached his limit by the time they got around to punishing him. They babbled about taking his car keys, his cell phone, and grounding him indefinitely. With his father on his heels, he had run up to his room and retrieved the leather pouch he kept deep in his closet. Still bitching, Mr. Littlefield had tracked him to his car, where he got his beer. For the first time ever, Michael admired the design of his tree house after he outran his father, scurried up the tree house ladder, and pulled it up after him, stranding his bellowing father on the ground.

              Michael thought about how funny it all would have been if it had been happening to someone else.

              He had explained everything to his parents, from Orientation, when she’d shown up as haughty as Cleopatra, to the humiliating class debate to his ousting from the play, and still they blamed him. His own parents took that black bitch’s side.

              Fuming, he tried to focus on Camden’s treehouse. The beer swilling through his brain left his vision hazy while clarifying one thing: Camden was on her side too.

              Mike gingerly touched his nose. He was fairly certain it was broken. With one punch, Camden had knocked him right out of his life.

              Michael unzipped the leather pouch and pulled a gun from its padded interior. The solid weight of the .380 pistol and the sleekness of its cool barrel felt as good in his hand as the curve of a cold beer. It soothed the sting of the cat scratches on the palm of his left hand.

              His dad had berated him while his mother fretted over the long, red scratches on his hands and forearms. She thought he had been experimenting with self-mutilation, or even worse, contemplating suicide. “I’m not the one I want dead, you idiot!” he had yelled at her.

              He aimed the gun at Camden’s treehouse. “Bang,” he whispered. He pointed it at his parents’ bedroom windows, squinting one eye shut to aim better. “Bang, bang.”

              His head swimming, he slumped against the crumbling doorframe. Like an anchor, the weight of the gun brought his hand to the warped floorboards. Everyone was against him. His parents. His school. His girl. His friends. “What friends?” he laughed.

              He had no friends, not really. There was Larry Odenkirk and Dan McNamara, but Larry was an idiot and Dan was a junior. They were good for a few goofs and giggles, but they weren’t real friends. They had put a melvin above him, when they started taking Felix Nayland to their parties, just because of who Felix was dating. Larry and Dan weren’t true friends, not like Camden. Not that Camden had been much of a friend lately.

              That stupid play consumed Camden’s time and attention more completely than anything else ever had. Michael’s beer-addled brain grappled with a grim truth: he hadn’t lost Camden to the play. He had lost him to
her
.

              Seemingly on its own, the gun rose and fired itself at Camden’s tree house, three booming shots in rapid succession.

              The darkness came to life.

              Lights flicked on in his parents’ bedroom. The pedigreed Great Danes living next door barked frantically. Windows lit up all over the cul-de-sac. Michael rolled deep into the treehouse and crouched against the wall. He hugged the gun to his chest, smothering manic laughter in the crook of his arm.

***

              Camden’s eyes popped opened in the darkness, the emptiness of Siobhan’s vast bed pulling him from slumber. He sat up, wondering where she was. A thread of light beneath the bathroom door revealed her whereabouts. The light went out, the door opened, and Siobhan exited—minus the T-shirt and bikini briefs she’d worn to bed.

              His mouth went dry. He blinked. The closer she got, the more he thought he should look away. There had to be some sort of divine retribution for looking, uninvited, upon such beauty. He couldn’t look away any more than he could change the rhythm of his heartbeat.

              She slipped beneath the covers, her cool skin gliding against the warmth of his own. He rubbed his eyes with the heels of his palms, sure he was erasing a dream. But she was still there, still as achingly lovely, still as soft against him. Reality surpassed the stuff of dreams when she curled her leg over his.

              “I was watching you sleep,” she whispered. “The moonlight turned my headboard into a prism, and it painted you in bold blues, reds, and golds. You couldn’t have looked more like an archangel unless you had wings folded beneath you. You looked the way I see you in my dreams. You put your head next to mine and cupped my face.” She touched his cheek. He took her hand and kissed her fingertips. “You’re here. My dream made real.”

              No awkward or bashful fumbling marred their coupling. His tender reverence for her fringed on worship. Her touch electrified him from scalp to sole. They learned the fascinating details and responses of one another, exploring leisurely, as if they had the rest of time instead of one night.