dig, and all the while, the little girl is huddled somewhere nearby, rocking, crying, trying to catch her breath, missing her white house with the black shutters, missing her parents…
Mommy…
Daddy…
Show them to me, Cam calls silently. I need their names, or at least to see their faces. Something. Some detail. Some clue as to who they are; who you are.
But the child is too distraught for coherent thought; her mind fraught only with frantic, fragmented images. Every breath she takes sounds increasingly strangled, as if she’s struggling for air.
Mom!
Daddy!
I need you!
The terrible sound of her breathing is becoming more labored with every inhalation. Cam senses that she’s running out of time.
Who else, sweetie? Who else is there? Mommy, Daddy, Grandma…just give me a name. A street. A town…Please.
Please keep breathing. Please hang in there.
Dammit. Cam would give anything to actually make herself heard this time…
This time?
She’s felt this way every time.
But, of course, it’s never happened.
In all those years, she could only helplessly observe unsettling scenes like the one now unfolding in her mind’s eye. She was no more able to interfere in the action than a viewer of a movie can alter the plot.
Perhaps it’s human nature to try anyway. To attempt the impossible and permeate the translucent one-way veil that separates Cam’s world from this troubled stranger’s.
Give me a name, please, a sister, a brother, a pet…anything. Anything more specific than Mommy…Daddy…
The vision is fading already.
“No,” Cam whispers, “please…wait…”
But the image of the child has already dissolved.
Lingering in Cam’s head is an awful, shuddering gasp for air.
Moments pass.
Another gasp.
Then a terrible, deadly silence.
Tess has been in love with Heath Pickering, a senior, from the first time she saw him at the beginning of her freshman year.
She noticed him immediately, passing by her every day in the hall after homeroom. He stood out from the other guys, who always wear what Tess has come to consider the public school “uniform”: jeans, sneakers, and a T-shirt—long-sleeved or short-sleeved, depending on the time of year.
Not Heath. He wears jeans, yeah, but he wears them with boots or sandals, depending on the weather, and usually with shirts that have collars and buttons. Not dress shirts, like Dad’s, but casual shirts, untucked. A few times, he’s had T-shirts on, and once one of them had a familiar L.B.I. logo on the front.
L.B.I.—Long Beach Island.
Tess has a couple of those T-shirts herself. She started wearing them to school more often, hoping Heath might notice, but if he has, he hasn’t said anything.
Well, it’s not like the two of them are the only kids at school with L.B.I. T-shirts. Plenty of people around here head down there for the summer. Tess can only hope Heath might turn out to be one of them.
She’s noticed he’s always got some kind of necklace on. Not a gold chain, or anything like that. More like something a surfer would wear.
Someone said Heath moved here not that long ago from California, so Tess finds it easy—and exciting—to picture him expertly riding the waves, tanned and naked from the waist up. She frequently daydreams about it.
Heath’s brows and lashes are darker than his hair, which is blond and kind of shaggy. He’s got big brown puppy dog eyes—kind eyes, Tess has noticed. Yeah, she can tell he’s a really nice guy. The type of guy who would make a great boyfriend.
She imagines that all the time—Heath coming over to her and introducing himself, saying he thinks she’s really cute for a freshman—no, just that she’s really cute, period, because in her fantasy, he has no clue she’s a freshman.
Anyway, he says he’s been noticing her. Then he asks her out.
Lately, she’s been taking her daydreams a step further: she imagines what it would be like if she marries Heath someday.
“Tess Pickering.” Sounds good. She likes to whisper it out loud, when she’s alone in her room at night.
Sometimes she even writes it down, practicing her future signature.
She does that now: Tess Hastings Pickering. Analyzing it, she decides, as always, that there are just too many ings. But she’d probably get used to that. Or she could drop her maiden name, like Mom did when she married—
Stop it. Don’t even go there.
Lately, Tess tries not to ruin rosy thoughts about her imaginary future relationship with Heath by thinking about Mom and Dad.
After all, her parents first met when they were in school. College, not high school…but still. Only a few years older than Tess and Heath. Well, Heath, anyway.
Look what happened to Mom and Dad.
But that wouldn’t happen to Heath and me.
Nope. When they get together, they’ll stay together forever.
Tess Ava Hastings Pickering.
Time is running out, though. The school year is almost over. It’s been months since she did some detective work and memorized Heath’s schedule so she could detour into his path between classes all day long.
She always tries to lock eyes with him when they pass each other in the hall, but he doesn’t seem to notice her. Sometimes she thinks she should just crash into him so he can’t help but notice her…only then he might think she’s just some stupid freshman klutz, and not his future wife.
Tess Hastings-Pickering.
Yeah. Maybe she’ll hyphenate.
Her friends aren’t even going to take their husbands’ names when they get married. Lily, whose mother has had four different last names in her life, thinks it’s a stupid, demeaning custom. Morrow said she and her husband will just make up a new name for themselves, so that it’s fair to both of them.
Tess thinks that if you’re married to someone, you should have their name.
What if you get divorced? Is Mom going to go back to being Camden Neary again?
Tess hopes not. But if her parents get divorced, what her mother chooses to call herself will probably be the least of her problems.
Don’t think about divorce. Think about Heath, or homework, even.
Julius Caesar.
Heath.
He plays on the school baseball team. Tess almost died the first time she saw him a few weeks ago in his uniform, those snug white pants and a cap pulled low and sexy over his eyes.
She decided right then that she had to do something soon.
Otherwise school will be out, and she’ll go away for the summer, and he’ll find a new girlfriend. He used to have one, in the city, but they reportedly broke up last fall, right before Tess discovered him. His single status can’t last, though. Tess has to make her move soon—or get one of her friends to make it for her.
Tess Ava Picker—
Oops. The tip of her overly sharpened pencil just snapped.
She shudders. To her, the scraping of the splintered wooden hollow of broken lead across paper is like fingernails on a chalkboard.