She lets herself into my room, her eyes peering up at my walls as if to inspect each poster, fissure, and shelf. “Isn’t that how you felt?” she throws back over her shoulder. “You and Bobby couldn’t wait to tear off halfway across the country after we graduated.” She gives it a second thought. “Hmm, I guess I did feel the same. I couldn’t even stay on the same continent.”
“I bet Europe’s beautiful.”
Camille stops at the window and glances back at me. “It is. Well, Germany is. Can’t say much about the rest, except for a short weekend in France. Y’know, the countries there are a lot smaller than I expected. I doubt there’s a country over there that’s bigger than Texas. You could visit five countries in a day if you tried.”
I lean my ass against the desk at my back, then cross my feet at the ankles. “You didn’t come back last summer.”
“Well, I didn’t have a dead uncle last summer.”
The blunt way in which she says that is so Camille. Yet for as much as I’m used to her dry nature, the words still sucker punch me in the gut. I had almost forgotten why she’s here. “I’m … I’m sorry for your loss,” I make myself say, albeit awkwardly.
Camille pokes a finger through my curtains. “Your mother is coming back inside,” she notes, not acknowledging my sentiment. Then she eyes me coyly. “If I say hi to her, she’ll probably invite me to stay for lunch and interrogate me, don’t you think?”
She’s always shrugged away her feelings like that. It’s one of the reasons I probably clicked so well with her back in the day.
I glance down at my phone and the mile-long text Bobby was in the middle of writing me earlier. I read it, then smirk, realizing the point of all of Bobby’s seemingly random questions.
At least one of us will get what we want this summer.
“Yeah,” I decide, giving her a nod while pocketing my phone. “That sounds about right.”
An hour later, Camille is proved right: Once Nadine is yanked out of her downward spiral of fury, she finally realizes Camille is under our roof for the first time in two years, and like a rubber band, the woman snaps right back into her happy place. At once, she insists that Camille stay for lunch, orders Jacky-Ann to throw together a nice meal for us, then sits herself right by Camille to pick her brain the whole time about what she’s been up to.
I’d figured that Camille might harbor a pinch of regret for inviting this fate onto herself. But from the smart look in her catlike eyes, she doesn’t seem to mind my nosy mama’s question barrage. In fact, she acts like it was part of her plan all along.
I guess I shouldn’t be surprised. That’s Camille for you.
It’s just a quarter to five when my mama decides she has a headache and heads out to check on some of our recently-hired ranch hands. After helping Jacky-Ann clean up the table and all the dishes—which we insist on doing, despite Jacky-Ann trying to shoo us away and leave the work to her—Camille and I sit up in my room on the edge of my bed with a bunch of dusty yearbooks and old school crap scattered around us, even on the floor at our feet. We sift through the memories and make fun of our worst teachers.
Then she pulls out a photo that was tucked away between two pages of our senior yearbook. She frowns at it, then eyes me. “You ever regret not taking an actual date to your prom?”
I yank the pic from her fingers and give it a look. It’s me and Bobby in our fancy totally-not-matching tuxes, our arms around each other’s backs, flashing big dorky smiles at the camera.
“Bobby was my actual date,” I throw back.
“But what if some other girl had asked you? Jazzy was a total twat and shouldn’t have dumped you for Anthony Myers—of all people—but what if, say, Bekkah Linny asked you? Or Lindsay? Or Laurie? Natty? Tiff? There were, like, a legion of options.”
I give her a look. “Bobby’s my mate. He’s my guy. Sure, maybe I had other girls I could have asked, but Bobby didn’t have that luxury as a lonely-ass gay dude here in Spruce. And he’s my best friend. My pal. I wasn’t gonna ditch him on a night like that.”
“So, like, what? It was some ‘bros before hoes’ thing?”
“Nah.”
“So it was a ‘Bobby before anyone else’ thing?”
“Why’s it gotta be any kind of thing? I wanted to take Bobby. I took him. I don’t regret it a second.” I give the photo another look, then catch myself half-smiling at it, some memory resurfacing. “I still remember the look on his face when I got on a knee and asked him in front of the whole soccer team. It was like I was proposing to the motherfucker.” I let out a laugh, remembering the gawking faces of all his teammates—and Bobby himself. “Shit, I love that guy like a brother, with all my heart.”