But Camp’s father shook his head. “I’ve got to get back to the city,” he said, apologetic. “But we’ll see each other soon.”
Once he was gone, Ellery and Camp stood on the sidewalk in silence for a moment, their breath visible in the chilly night air. “You didn’t know he was here?” Ellery finally asked.
“No, Ellery,” Camp said, in a voice Ellery had never heard him use before. The shuttle was coming, the headlightscutting through the darkness.Budget talks,his father had said; never mind that it was Saturday night. “I think it’s pretty obvious I didn’t know he was here.”
They didn’t talk the whole ride back to campus, but outside the Honors House, Camp nudged her back into the shadows until she was pressed against the exterior wall and kissed her so hard and for so long that her mouth started to ache and her back began to feel raw where it was scraping against the brick through her coat. “Hey,” she said finally, pushing him gently off her. The tip of her nose was stinging with the cold. “I’m not having fun anymore.”
“Oh,” Camp said—pulling back, blinking dazedly. He looked like he hadn’t even been there while it was happening. Like he’d been somewhere else entirely in his mind. “Fuck. I’m sorry, Ellery. I’m really sorry.”
“No,” she said. She’d never heard him swear before; he always said it was gauche and unimaginative whenever she and Danny did it. “You’re good. It’s fine.”
Upstairs Danny was lying in bed watching a show on his laptop, the volume down too low for Ellery to hear. “How was the movie?” he asked when they came in.
“It was fine,” Camp said, at the same time as Ellery said, “It was shit.”
Danny looked back and forth between them for a moment, like he was trying to figure out which one of them to believe and not finding either one of them especially trustworthy. When Ellery put her hand on his forehead, it was burning up with fever, the heat radiating off him like an old-fashioned bed warmer. She gave him three Tylenol and went to the bathroom to wet a washcloth at the faucet; by the time she got back to the boys’ room, though, Danny was coughing too much to talk. “Easy,” Camp said, laying a hand on his back. “You’re all right.”
“He needs to go to Health Services,” Ellery said.
“It’s eleven o’clock on a Saturday,” Camp pointed out. “Health Services is closed.”
All at once, Ellery wanted to cry. “What are you supposed to do if you need to go to the doctor when the health center is closed?” she asked.
Camp shrugged. “Go to the ER, I guess.”
“I’m not going to the ER,” Danny piped up, losing the end of it in another coughing fit. It lasted a long time, Danny struggling to his feet and bracing one hand on the headboard, trying to catch his breath. Ellery squeezed her hands into fists.
“This is ridiculous,” she announced when it was finally over. “He needs to go to the doctor.”
“He just said he doesn’t want to,” Camp argued, and that was when Danny passed out.
Danny had pneumonia; in the end, he was in the hospital for four days while they waited for his lungs to clear. Every morning before her first class, Ellery went out to the woods and took a picture of his tree for him, and every morning he sent her a thumbs-up in return.
“I thought only old people got pneumonia,” Camp said. He and Ellery were sitting in the dining hall, both of them poking at their food.
“I think only old peopledieof pneumonia,” Ellery told him. He hadn’t kissed her since the other night, though he kept bringing her things: a bag of Sour Patch Kids, a leather-bound notebook from the campus bookstore. The first draft of his creative project, a complete history of Preston College as told by the ghost of the maple syrup farmer from whom the land had originally been purchased. It felt like he was atoningfor something, though Ellery wasn’t entirely sure what. “But anyone can get it.”
On Thursday Ellery took the shuttle into town after her last class, then walked the fifteen minutes along the service road to the hospital. Her cheeks were pink by the time she arrived, her glasses fogging in the sudden heat of the hospital lobby. When she got to Danny’s room, he was asleep. Camp was passed out, too: He’d scooted the plastic chair as close as it would get to the edge of the bed, then pillowed his head on his folded arms on the mattress. In sleep, the tips of Danny’s fingers brushed Camp’s hair.
Ellery watched them for a moment, chewing on her glove and feeling like she’d felt her first few weeks at Preston, like she was on the outside of something that everyone had figured out except for her. But that was silly, wasn’t it? Here were her two favorite people. All she needed to do was walk through the door.
She stood there for another moment, then turned around and went back to the center of town to wait for the shuttle. It took a long time for it to come.
Danny came back to campus pale and exhausted looking, having lost seven pounds he didn’t necessarily have to spare in the first place. “You look like Edward Scissorhands,” Camp said, and Danny laughed.
They got back to normal; they settled back in. Spring break was the first week of March, but the first week of March was still the dead of winter in Vermont. Ellery ached for sunshine, for California, but she found she was unwilling to leave Camp and Danny: Since the hospital, it felt like something bad might happen if she wasn’t there to supervise. It felt like they might not be there when she got back.
“We could go to Boston,” she suggested instead, nudging Camp with one slipper. “I think we know someone who lives there.”
“My house?” Camp asked, and Ellery thought she saw a flash of white-hot panic cross his face in the moment before he blinked it away. “We could go to my house!” he agreed, like possibly it had been his idea in the first place. “Yeah. Of course we can go to my house.”
So. They went to Camp’s house. His family lived on Commonwealth Avenue, four floors of brownstone with an orangerie and an in-ground pool in the basement, the tile a deep, haunted-looking green. “Stop goggling,” she murmured to Danny as they stood in the foyer, the winding staircase soaring above them.
“You stop,” Danny muttered back. “I’m not.”
“How did you not tell me it was like this?” Ellery asked him. “Haven’t you ever been here before?”
“When would I have been here without you?” Danny asked. Ellery wasn’t sure. It felt ancient to her, the relationship between Danny and Camp, something that had begun in another lifetime; it was easy to forget they’d only met three weeks before that night in the basement of Honors House.
