Camp’s mother was a bird-faced woman in wool pants and a turtleneck, her hair so blond it made her look like a movie vampire. “There you are!” she said, wrapping her wraithlike arms around him and squeezing. “And your friends!”
“Campbell,” his father said with a nod. “It’s been too long.”
“Not that long,” Camp reminded him, then turned to his mother. “Dad and I ran into each other up at school,” he said evenly. “Did he tell you?”
“Lunch is ready,” Camp’s father announced before his mother could answer, ushering them off toward the dining room. Then, catching Camp by the shoulder: “Campbell.”
Camp followed him into a study off the front hallway, the door clicking neatly shut behind them, as Ellery and Danny sat obediently down. Ellery could hear raised voices, the words muffled through the walls. “Should we go in there?” Ellery asked at last, poking at her plate of chicken salad.
“Are you insane?” Danny murmured back. Camp’s mother hadn’t joined them at the table; even their whispers seemed to echo in the cavernous room. “And do what, exactly? This is his family.”
“We’rehis family,” Ellery said stubbornly, then gasped at the unmistakable crack of a slap across a face.
The door to the study opened a moment later, Camp’s smooth cheek flaming red. “Sorry about that,” he said calmly, sitting down at the table. “How’s lunch?”
“It’s good,” Ellery promised, glancing uncertainly at Danny. “Camp—”
“So hey, I’ve got some stuff to handle here this afternoon,” Camp interrupted. He sounded like a hired tour guide, like they were foreigners who’d come to take in the sights. “You guys good to entertain yourselves for a while?”
Ellery blinked. “Sure,” she said slowly. She didn’t want to leave Camp here, but she didn’t know how to say that out loud. “We can do that.”
“Yeah,” Danny said. “Of course.”
She and Danny walked a block over to Newbury Street, wandering into a bookstore there. “Have your parents ever hit you?” she asked Danny, looking at the shelves instead of looking at him.
Danny shrugged. “I mean, sure,” he admitted. He wasn’t looking at her, either. “As a kid sometimes. Spanking, or whatever. But not like that. Have yours?”
“No,” Ellery said. Ellery’s parents had spent her entire childhood practicing something her mother had read about in a book calledUnparenting, which basically meant saying yes to everything and letting Ellery figure out her boundaries on her own. Sometimes, like when the girls in her class wanted to watch an R-rated movie back in middle school and their parents wouldn’t let them, it had worked in her favor. Other times, like when her mom let her keep the random cat she’d found lurking under their porch and it had a million babies in the washing machine before sinking its teeth into Ellery’s calf so deeply she got cellulitis and had to miss two weeks of school, it worked less elegantly. There was no hitting inUnparenting, though in retrospect she supposed one could argue the thing with the cat was its own kind of violence. Still, Ellery knew that if she was being honest with herself, it wasn’t the same at all.
“He’s different here, though, right?” she asked. It felt important to know she wasn’t imagining it. “Camp?”
“Of course he is,” Danny said immediately, then shook his head. “I feel like we shouldn’t be talking about this,” he told her. “Don’t you feel like we shouldn’t be talking about it?”
“Who else is going to talk about it, if not the two of us?” Ellery asked, but Danny was engrossed in the science books and didn’t hear her, or maybe he was just pretending not to. Ellery stood beside him for a while, paging through a guide of backyard birds of North America. Eventually, he reached out and took her hand.
They went back to the house as dusk was falling over the Public Garden and had dinner with Camp and his parents, the walls of the dining room paneled with dark wood polishedto a glossy sheen. Ellery was aware that she was talking too much, that she was putting on some kind of bizarre show that nobody even wanted to watch, but she couldn’t stop herself. Camp, for his part, said almost nothing at all.
Before she had gotten here, she had assumed that Camp’s parents would be the kind of people who didn’t care where anyone slept, but, in fact, the housekeeper, Justine, had shown her to one of the great many guest rooms, which had a high bed with a very firm mattress. Ellery lay awake for a long time before climbing down and easing the door open, creeping down the hall in her bare feet. She felt like she was in the movieClue, which she and Camp and Danny had watched at the Student Center the week of Halloween. She couldn’t imagine what would happen if someone caught her, if she’d be bludgeoned with a candlestick or strangled with a rope. She kept thinking of the sound it had made when Camp’s father hit him, the neat snap of it like a whip.
She wasn’t sure which room was Camp’s. She tried to feel his energy through the walls, like how sometimes, back at school, she would know if he was going to be waiting for her before she even walked into Honors House. The first door she opened led to a staircase, the second, to another empty room. She kept knocking, planning to say she’d lost track of where she was supposed to be sleeping if anyone asked, but at last she found the room that belonged to Camp. He was lying in bed with the lights off, his eyes glittering like a cat’s in the dark.
“Hi,” she said, hovering uncertainly in the doorway. “Can I come in?”
“Of course,” Camp said, lifting the blankets so she could slide in beside him. “I was wondering if you might show up.”
“You could have come to me,” she pointed out.
Camp kissed her instead of answering, his mouth cool and toothpaste tasting. Again Ellery reached down between them—wanting to do something for him, wanting to get as close as she could—but again he peeled her hand gently but firmly off his body, lacing his fingers through hers.
“Camp,” she said. She was starting to know something, she thought. She’d been starting to know it for a while.
“I’m sorry,” he murmured—sitting up in bed, scrubbing both hands through his hair so it stood up even more crazily than usual, a corona around his face. “I’m not being fair to you. None of this is fair to you.”
Ellery put a hand on his back, felt his heart beating there. “How about you let me worry about what’s fair to me,” she said, and that was when Danny knocked on the door.
“Yo,” he said, poking his head in; then, seeing Ellery: “Shit, I’m sorry.”
“No, no,” Ellery said, waving him in before Camp could reply. “You’re fine.”
