The End of the World (18 page)

At first I thought the guy was a pervert only interested in the half-naked woman in the parking lot, but now I’m not so sure. I’ve seen him watching me in the daytime when I leave for work. In the afternoon when I return home. At sunset during my walk last night. If my memory is right, I’ve spotted him watching me six times in the past two days—way too often for it to be merely a coincidence. And other than the pepper spray I bought at the corner drug store and slipped into my bag yesterday morning, I have no idea what to do about it except keep my eyes open and my hand fisted around this bottle.

In the meantime, I have laundry to do.

My living room is littered with all the clothes I’ve worn in the past week, a new habit that needs to be broken before it becomes permanent. The second I moved here three months ago, I unloaded my boxed-up possessions and discarded my rigid responsibilities right along with the empty cardboard. Everything went into the trash, most notably my old way of life. The girl responsible for chores. The girl responsible for small humans. The girl who lived under the weight of perverted expectations. All of it was eliminated. Some of it needs to return.

I blink at the wall, suddenly aware that I’m standing in the middle of the room holding an armful of shirts and pants and underwear that I don’t remember picking up. I grudgingly retrieve a basket and toss them inside. I might not like this particular chore, but I like wearing smelly clothes even less.

After adding laundry soap and a box of dryer sheets to the pile, I head down to the second story—the landlord’s idea of a central location. I have to walk down three hallways, past six apartments and a vending machine full of snacks I’m pretty certain haven’t been changed in this decade, and under a passageway that houses the air conditioning and every wire keeping this place supplied with power. An obnoxious hum sounds overhead and the
drip drip
of condensation manages to smack me in the face every time I walk under it. I try to wait a couple extra seconds and then move fast. Surprisingly, it works; water lands on my basket instead of my head.

I’m the only one in the room—both a blessing and a curse as far as I’m concerned. A blessing because small talk with neighbors isn’t something I look forward to. But of course life isn’t that kind to me.

Just as I’m scooping up a load of whites and adding them to the already filling machine, the door behind me opens. I never know what to do in this situation—whether to turn around and give a polite acknowledgement or continue on as though I haven’t notice the addition of another person in the room.

In this case, it’s the rough clearing of a male throat that makes my heart fall into my feet. My stalker is here to kill me. A tremor works its way down my spine at the same time a curse quietly bursts from my tongue.

Somehow I close the machine and remain calm. Unable to take the tension for long, I slowly turn around.

Ready for a confrontation.

Bracing for a fight.

On edge and wanting to flee at the slightest provocation.

But then I’m face to face with him. Blue eyes to blue eyes. Open mouth to open mouth. My neck tilting up to see him, because that’s how tall he’s grown.

Nothing stops the shock.

Even less stops the tears.

Cameron

L
it up by
the overhead fluorescent lights, we study each other across the room. She’s even more beautiful up close, but with her hair pulled back and her wide-eyed expression, it’s still the same innocent beauty I remember noticing as a kid. Untarnished beauty, or so I thought at the time. Now I know better. Which makes all of it worse.

“What are you doing here?”

Not the words I dreamed of hearing in the million times I played out this scene in my mind, but it’s what I have to work with.

“I moved in three days ago. I’m nineteen now and…well, you know the rest of the story.”

She doesn’t bother to wipe the tears from her eyes.

“Out of temporary housing?”

“Yes, as of last week.”

“And you just happened to pick this place? The one apartment building in all of Tulsa that I also live in?”

“Yes, I just happened to pick this place. Right after I saw you leaving the restaurant last Tuesday night. Right after I went back the next day and talked Christy the waitress into giving me your address. Don’t be mad at her. I wasn’t going to leave without it. We both know I’m stubborn like that. Call it all a lucky coincidence or the worst decision I’ve ever made. I guess that part’s up to you.”

“You saw me at the restaurant?”

I nod. Of course her mind stayed stuck on that one small fact. “I saw you at the restaurant. Ruined a perfectly good date, by the way.”

Her mouth twitches on what might have been a smile. It disappears as she looks around the ramshackle laundry room. “I’m not exactly living the dream.”

“I’m not exactly living it either.”

Something changes in her eyes, like she’s recalling something that’s just now come back to her.

“You’re my stalker.”

I frown, unsure I heard her right. The words come from nowhere and don’t make any sense.

“Your what?”

“My stalker.”

Her voice wobbles on the last word, and just like that her defenses crumble.
Her stalker
. I’m her stalker. And then I remember all the times over the last three days that I’ve watched her and waited for her and looked for her and she’s seen all of those things. She’s seen me by the window looking through open slits in the bent mini blinds. She’s seen me every time. And for a girl who’s been through more than anyone her age should go through in a lifetime, it scared her.

“Shaye, I’m sorry. It never once occurred to me that you could see me watching you.” I shift from one foot to another, unsure what to do and feeling more alone than I felt the day Todd dropped me off at Shaye’s doorstep. “I just had to know if it was you. I haven’t seen you since the day you left and the last four years have been awful and when I saw you at work I almost died right there by the water pitcher. I just wanted to know you were real. That you were real and—”

And I can’t speak another word because emotion closes my throat at the same time the girl I’ve missed more than air for over forty-eight months rushes into my arms. She’s crying and I’m crying and the washer is spinning at the same rapid pace as my mind and the overhead flickering light is keeping time with our heartbeats. I squeeze tighter and close my eyes and try really hard to breathe.

She’s real. She’s honest-to-goodness real.

*

Shaye

The front of
his shirt is wet, and it’s my fault. But I can’t let go, because I am one-hundred percent certain if I let go he’ll disappear. Evaporate into whatever space he just materialized from. I’ve heard people say cheesy lines like that in movies:
I’m afraid it’s all a dream
, and
if I open my eyes you’ll be gone
. Turns out those lines are true.

His arms crush me to him and I can’t find room to breathe, but I don’t care. Breathing is overrated, anyway. Cameron found me. Despite my efforts to be invisible and my determination to stay hidden; he found me.

I’ve been lying to myself all along.

“I’m doing laundry.” The muffled words are spoken into his wet collar before I think to consider just how stupid they sound. Not
I can’t believe you’re here
or
I’ve missed you so much
or even
Look how tall you are
. I’d rather talk about laundry, as if the continued rotation of the earth is dependent on my Purex-drenched pair of socks.

Cameron laughs into my hair, and my self-loathing fizzles a little. “I kind of figured that, seeing that I smell detergent and this washing machine is making strange noises. Magic is a real thing and all, but I didn’t figure someone would waste their time using it to clean underwear.”

My hands are still gripping his back. “That’s not exactly true. Cinderella’s fairy godmother used it all the time. How do you think those mice learned to talk and the birds learned to sew? Come on, Cameron. Everyone knows this.”

“Guys don’t know it. I never watched that stupid movie.”

“That movie wasn’t stupid. I can’t believe you haven’t seen it. It’s almost un-American.”

“Want me to start quizzing you on Power Rangers? Now there’s a show with good American values.”

“Says the guy who wants to live in Europe.”

And with that, his arms loosen around my waist. He doesn’t let go completely, just creates enough space between us to look down at my face. “That was a phase I outgrew by my sixteenth birthday. I’m kind of happy in Oklahoma, if you want to know the truth. As happy as I can be, anyway.”

“I’m not,” I say, wishing with everything in me that I could stuff the words back inside and swallow them whole. For one brief second I forgot that Cameron knows everything behind the meaning in those two words, and this isn’t the time for an overview of the past. I’m not naive enough to believe that day will ever come.

“We need to fix that, then. But first let’s finish your laundry.” Cameron lets go then, his arms falling to his side as he takes a step back. The disappointment I feel bothers me a little—this is Cameron, my
friend
Cameron who is well over two years younger than me despite his muscular arms and unshaven face and hair long enough to touch his collar and complete lack of boyishness that has me feeling more than a little nervous.

Suddenly our age difference doesn’t seem so significant anymore.

I turn away from him and force myself to remember his immature way of counting everything in sight. It used to drive me crazy. Such a stupid, annoying compulsion.

Even that doesn’t work.

He’s a man now. Nothing stupid about him.

Cameron opens the washing machine that stopped spinning somewhere around the time I began sobbing on his shirt. Just as he reaches inside, he stops and pulls his hand back.

“You’d better do this. I know I haven’t seen you in a while, but something tells me I might find a pair of purple underwear in here and I’m not sure I could handle the disgustingness of it all.”

I smirk. “Purple with hearts, as a matter of fact. And I’m not sure disgustingness is a real word.”

“It should be,” he says, sliding himself up on an adjacent dryer to watch me. His legs hang loose against the door, and my insides go warm at the long-ago memory of this scene being played out once again. “And starting now, I’ve decided that it is a word and I’ll make it my mission to use it in a sentence at least once a day.”

I just stare at him, trying hard to look annoyed but certain I’m managing silly and ridiculous. “Only you would say something that dumb.”

“And only I could pull it off.” He hops down and holds out his hand. “Now hand me some laundry. But only the towels.”

I fling two rags at him, laughing at the wet mark they leave on his shirt.

Shaye

“A
nd after that?
Have you heard anything about them since?”

We’re sitting in my apartment and have been for the last two hours—me on the floor with my arms wrapped around my knees and Cameron sitting on my sofa, a worn one I found practically free at a Goodwill outlet one town over—and he’s filling me in on life after I left. Back then, my only thought was to flee the house before Cameron got hurt. Or worse. Other than that quick note I left about Maria, it wasn’t until the next day that I really considered the children. After four years of taking care of them every single day, it took nearly twenty-four hours before I bothered to think about the consequences of leaving them behind.

The emotional fallout that ensued flattened me for days.

Cameron looks away, but not before I see the flinch of pain that pales his features. He sniffs, clears his throat. Both actions alarm me a little.

“We stayed there for a while, but eventually Maria wound up in a home somewhere outside Oklahoma City and Alan was adopted by a childless couple in Chouteau. But I’m not completely sure about Pete. He was still there when I left, but I haven’t heard anything about him since.”

And this breaks my heart all over again. Pete, six years old by the time I left, now a ten-year-old boy who never wanted anything more than peanut butter sandwiches, cheese crackers, and the occasional hug. The quiet boy who didn’t do anything to deserve his crappy life except get born into the wrong family and handed over to an even worse one. Pete was alone. Probably a long-forgotten victim of a broken system. Alone and without the only ally he had for four of his first six years.

I try to drag myself out of the gloom and imagine him happy. It doesn’t work.

“And what about Carl and Tami? What about them?” It’s the question I’ve avoided asking this entire conversation, like a medical diagnosis that—based on his answer—may or may not change everything I’ve allowed myself to believe the last few years. That justice found them. But here, now, in the three seconds that pass since I asked the question, everything flips. Now, part of me wants to know that I’m wrong. That none of those things actually happened because if they
have
happened, it means everyone knows the pathetic story of me.