“Whatwhat?”
“What are you smiling about?”
I make a vague circle with my hands. “Um…everything? Just now? This is real.”
“It was always real,” Cam says.
The ground gives way a little. I feel a hole inside me open, a little window to Cam next to me on the bed, smiling at the corners of his eyes and looking so deeply into mine that my bones turn soft. This is the way Cam speaks. He pulls on sincerity like a cloak, using some stupid, vague term and acting like it means everything I want it to mean. Only, when I try it back, when I reach out to him, he runs away so fast that I blink and he’s a dot in the distance.
Nothing was real, I want to say.You wouldn’t have left me if it were real.
My eyes land on a building ahead to focus on. “I mean, the hunt was always real,” I say. “But solving it didn’t feel so real then. Not like it does now.”
“That’s true.” Cam nods. “It does feel different now.”
We walk the next block in silence.
“I think it’s cool we found the fountain especially,” I say after a while.
Cam laughs. “You’re only saying that becauseIfound the bridge andyoufound the fountain.”
“That’s not true! The bridge is cool too. I just think the fountain’s neat because it’s hidden. We had to walk right up to it to recognize it. Like”—I open Gabriel’s photo of the scroll on my phone and zoom into a corner—“at some point, we might come across a statue of a bear, a snake, and an octopusin a wrestling match. But until then? It’s a totally random part of the drawing.”
Cam stops walking. “What did you just say?”
“I’m saying, the pictures look really random unless—”
“No! About the octopus!”
I take a step back. “Okay, why are you acting like I’ve committed some serious crime in mentioning the octopus?”
“I didn’t know it was an octopus!” Cam cries out. He looks over my shoulder at the drawing on my phone screen. “I thought it was a bear fighting a pack of snakes!”
Two older businessmen on the opposite side of the street throw us apprehensive glares. I give them a very unconvincing smile in return and close the space between me and Cam.
“I think you’re freaking people out,” I murmur.
He looks from the phone to me, a crazed glint in his eyes. “I know this octopus!” he says.
Before I can react, he pulls one of my hands into his and begins running down the sidewalk.
We run for such a long time that I begin to think that, actually, probably only elite runners could run this far, and maybe I should have been on the cross-country team, maybe even some Olympic-level team. Then we get to a crosswalk intersection and I realize we’ve only run a single block, and I would never in this lifetime have made the cross-country team. But, really, screw the cross-country team anyway, because they’re all just show-offs.
Then the walk sign turns green and we repeat the whole thing again.
Finally, Cam pulls me off the sidewalk.
“Here!” he yells.
He brings us over to a high stone column standing in the middle of a triangular plaza. At the top of the column is a small statue of an angel, arms outstretched as she holds a book overhead. At the bottom of the column is a large statue of a boy waving a pickaxe in one hand and an American flag in the other. I read the inscription below the boy.
“The Unity of Our Empire Hangs on the Decision of This Day” —W. H. Seward
On the Admission of California, U.S. Senate,1850
“Okay…” I say slowly. “What does it mean?”
“Who cares?” Cam answers. He’s already circling to the other side of the column. I roll my eyes.
