“That’s not what it’s like at all, actually,” Ellery said.
“Then what?” Susie asked, looking at her curiously. “Are youtheirpet?”
“Fuck off, Susie.”
“I’m just asking,” Susie said, sounding wounded. “If it’s not like that, then whatisit like?”
Ellery opened her mouth, then closed it again. Maybe she couldn’t explain it, exactly, but there was no point in trying for the benefit of a person like Susie, who watched TikToks on the toilet and read only romance novels. “You wouldn’t understand it,” she said finally, then went back upstairs to sleep at Danny and Camp’s.
The three of them stayed on campus for Thanksgiving, eating Chinese delivery and leftover C-store candy and a tin of flavored holiday popcorn one of Camp and Danny’s neighbors had left behind. The shuttle wasn’t running, so they walked the three miles into town to go to the grocery store, playing word games to pass the time. Danny took himself for long runs through the woods every afternoon, ostensibly to shave four seconds off his relay time, but really so that Ellery and Camp could fool around; when Ellery reached for the buttonon Camp’s khakis, though, he reached down and threaded his fingers through hers. “We’re not in a hurry, right?” he asked. His cheeks were flushed very pink. “We don’t, like. Need to rush.”
Ellery blinked, trying to decide if she felt rejected or not. She’d had sex with two boys so far: her senior year boyfriend, who was currently pledging a fraternity at Cal State and, judging from his posts on social media, had lost his ever-loving mind, and a way-older counselor at the camp where she’d worked summers during high school, an experience that had been mostly thrilling and decently pleasurable at the time, but about which she had kind of a different perspective two years out. She wondered if it had something to do with Camp’s money, if the abundance of resources made him less hungry somehow. Either way: It felt civilized to wait. It felt adult.
“No hurry,” she agreed, straightening up and reaching for the popcorn. Danny would be back any minute.
Winter in Vermont hit Ellery like a salt truck made entirely of snow and ice. It felt like her skin must be more sensitive to the elements than other people’s, like her lungs weren’t built to take in the thin, cold air. She took to her bed, piling quilts on top of herself like Laura Ingalls; Danny and Camp had to cajole her out of her room with hot tea and the crumbly chocolate-chip cookies from the dining hall, like they were trying to lure a bear from its den.
She took her finals and went home to Pasadena, where she spent winter break lying under the orange tree in her parents’ backyard and texting Danny and Camp. “Are you working on anything?” her mom kept asking, which was her version ofHave you eatenorAre you feeling all right. Ellery’smother was a fiber artist; beauty and the making of it was how she understood and moved through the world. She’d gotten Ellery a new set of Prismacolor colored pencils for Christmas, all 150 shades.
“Yeah,” Ellery promised, though even as the word was coming out of her mouth, it occurred to her that she didn’t remember the last time she’d so much as opened her sketchbook. She went inside and dug it out of her suitcase to check and found the bird she’d been drawing at the meeting where she’d met Danny and Camp, way back at the beginning of the semester. She went over it with her new colored pencils, but it still didn’t look quite right. The beak was funny, fake looking. The wings were still bad. When she’d gotten home a couple of weeks ago, she’d been shocked to see all the stuff she’d made before she left for Preston, paintings and collages and a huge wire mobile hanging from the ceiling of her bedroom. She’d actually been pretty prolific, though she couldn’t exactly remember it. She’d actually been decently good.
Her phone dinged on the table beside her as she was staring at the sparrow, considering starting over.What are you doing?Camp had texted.
Ellery flipped her sketchbook shut.Nothing, she replied.Missing you.
When she got back to campus, she found Camp sitting on her bed wearing his glasses and a frayed cashmere sweater, reading the newspaper. “That was endless,” he said, and kissed her hello.
“It was,” Ellery agreed, although in the end, it had actually gone a little faster than she’d thought it might. She’d cried a little when her parents had left her at the airport, had thoughtagain, for one traitorous moment, of transferring back home. “How did you get in here?”
“I’m magic,” Camp replied, and pulled out a deck of cards.
Danny got sick at the tail end of January. A cold at first, then chills and a fever, a cough so violent it made Ellery flinch. In her experience, when you were sick, your mother brought you tea and soup on a tray in front of the television, but Danny’s mother wasn’t there, so she got a can of Campbell’s chicken noodle from the C-store and heated it in the microwave in her and Susie’s room, dug a lone plastic spoon out of her desk.
“Chicken soup smells like BO,” Susie observed.
Ellery ignored her, running a brush through her hair—she and Camp were supposed to go get Thai food and see a movie at the second-run theater in town—before kicking the door shut and carrying the bowl carefully upstairs to the boys’ room, her palms red and burning with the heat of it. “We can just hang here,” Camp was saying when she let herself in.
“Don’t be stupid,” Danny replied, his voice muffled—or he started to say that, anyway, but the end of it got cut off in a wheeze. He was lying in bed in his pajamas, the hood of his sweatshirt pulled so tight only his eyes were showing.
Ellery frowned, setting the soup on the desk. “We’re going to stay,” she decided.
“You’re not!” Danny said, and he sounded kind of irritated now. “Get out, goodbye.” Then, more nicely: “Thank you for the soup.”
So. They went—sitting side by side in the theater, sharing a bowl of spicy noodles in the empty café—though Ellery kept thinking uneasily of Danny, and she could tell that Camp was, too.
They were standing at the bus stop waiting for the shuttle back to campus when, behind them, the door to the one white-tablecloth restaurant in town opened, a man and a woman stepping out into the darkness. All at once Camp straightened up like a deer in the woods. “Dad?” he called uncertainly.
The man—tall and thin, graying hair and an overcoat—turned around to look at them, his narrow face ashen. “Campbell.”
“Hi,” Camp said—his father approaching as the woman stayed behind, slipping unobtrusively back into the warmth of the restaurant like maybe she’d never come out at all. “What are you doing here?”
“I had meetings on campus,” his dad said. They didn’t hug. “Budget talks.”
“Oh.” Camp nodded. His entire body had changed, all knees and jutting elbows. It was like Ellery was seeing a hologram or a Magic Eye. “All right.” Then, like he’d just remembered she was there: “Uh. This is Ellery. Ellery, this is my dad.”
“Nice to meet you, Ellery,” Camp’s father said, though he wasn’t looking at her like it was nice to meet her, particularly. He wasn’t really looking at her at all. “Well. Campbell. I’ve got to—” He gestured vaguely. “You take care of yourself, all right?”
“We could have breakfast tomorrow?” Camp tried. “If you’ve got ...?”
