He shrugs again. “Haven’t decided.”
I’m nearly frothing at the mouth with unfiltered rage until I freeze, a sudden realization dawning on me. Cam’s hiding himself on purpose. The closed eyes. The scrambling up our tree. He’s only pretending to be above all this.
I hop back onto the marble riser.
“I’ll just go get another flyer,” I announce with false bravado. “And then I’m getting another copy of that book, and you’d better believe that I’m going to dig up the treasure myself. Completely without you.”
Cam goes stiff on the branch. He pushes himself onto his elbows and twists to look at me. “Guess I’d better find it first, then.”
It’s true that, in this moment, he has everything and I have nothing. The book, his. The flyer, now also his. The odds are hopelessly in his favor.
But it’s also true that right now, for whatever reason, Cam looks completely and uncharacteristically terrified. Which means that even with a score of two to zero, I have a fighting chance of winning this thing for real.
“Good luck with that,” I say, walking back through the columns.
The words come out like a warning.
Chapter Nine
From the second I step out from the Portals of the Past, it’s like a stopwatch instantly goes off in my head.
If I had an ounce of athleticism, I would be running back toward my house. As it is, I’m already gassed from chasing Cam this far into the park in the first place.
He stashed the flyer, I tell myself for the umpteenth time. He stashed it somewhere on the way here, and so far he hasn’t scrambled out of his tree and raced past me to get to it. He’s playing it cool. I can play it cool too. There’s time. It’s not a sprint.
The mental stopwatch keeps ticking.
My phone buzzes in my pocket. I take it out and look at the screen. Texts are coming in from Julia and Sunny.
Julia: Heeeeeey, how did it go with Cam? Everything okay
Sunny:Did you get the book or not.
I wince and click out of the thread. There’s this strange feeling in my belly, a total clash between what’s happening in my personal world and what’s happening all around me. People keep playing baseball and stretching out under the sun. Dogs are pulling leashes taut as their owners laugh and fish out treats from their pockets. It doesn’t make any sense for everyone to be this calm.
I steal a glance behind me every so often, but there’s no sign of Cam. I try to think about where he put the flyer on his way over.
I’m actually really good at finding things, in a general sense. The trick, I’ve learned, is to be logical. If you’re missing an AirPod and you start to look in every place an AirPod could possibly be, you’re in grave danger of having to search forever. Instead, you have to be strategic.When do I last remember taking the AirPod out? Where are my usual listening spots?And then, instead of doing a half-assed job tearing your whole house apart, you home in on the two or three most likely places for it to be and search meticulously.
I try this technique with the flyer. Of course, the entire path from Cam’s porch to the Portals is full of places a flyercouldbe. But where would Cam specifically think to put it?
I lost him at the intersection on Judah and Nineteenth. Maybe he dipped into a shop and bribed an employee to hold on to the flyer for an hour. Maybe he found a bulletin board and tacked up Harvey’s birthday announcement,camouflaging it among all the other notices for book clubs, CrossFit gyms, and pet sitter ads.
No. I shake my head. Both those options are way too dangerous—if you let go of the flyer once, you could lose it completely. And maybe Cam doesn’t want me to do this treasure hunt, but I don’t think he wants to destroy it either. That hunt was everything to him a few years ago. Which means…
I pause on the sidewalk. “Damn it,” I mutter.
It’s with him.
It has to be with him. He must’ve rolled it up and stuck it into a knothole in the tree trunk. Actually, knowing Cam, he probably just stuck it straight into his waistband. If I had really wanted to get the flyer back, I would have had to climb the tree and goose him.
Just the idea of doing that sends a tingly, unpleasant shock wave over my whole body. I take out my phone and pull up the group thread before I lose the nerve.
Me:No book. Flyer’s gone. Cam swiped it and took off.
Sunny immediately starts typing.
Sunny:WTF?!?!?! REPORT HIM!
