I sigh and turn toward Sunny. We meet each other halfway down the hall.
“Don’t be pissed,” Sunny says once I reach her. “We work better as a team without him.”
“Do we?” I ask, my voice tinged with sharpness. I nod toward the stairwell. “The three of you already had your minds made up about him before the meeting even started. Am I right?”
Sunny levels her gaze at mine. “Yes, you’re right. But not just because of what Julia and Gabriel said downstairs.”
“Why, then?”
“Because ofyou,” Sunny says. “It’s obvious Cam likes you, or that you like him. It’s a power he has over you, Ivy. It’s going to cloud your thinking.”
Just as I am about to retort that Cam absolutely doesnothave any power over me and that he is definitelynotclouding my thinking, my mind suddenly gets cloudy. I think this is atrick phrase, really. It’s like telling a person that they’re blushing. There’s no way to refute it, because the accusation itself seems to spark the action into existence.
DoesCam like me? I don’t want to let this question become real in my brain. I want to leash it, to hold it directly in the conversation between me and Sunny. I’ve followed that path before, picked up all the little what-if breadcrumbs. But no, it doesn’t make sense. Two years ago, I basically threw my whole heart at Cam, and he—well—he taste-tested it and decided it wasn’t for him.
“Do you like him that way?” Sunny asks, clearly impatient for an answer.
There is no right way to respond to this question.
“I…can’t,” I say finally. I clear my throat. “I mean, I don’t.”
“Mm.” Sunny nods to herself. She hugs the tops of her arms rather than giving her usual formidable stance. Her thumb wags back and forth over her shirtsleeve, and I begin following the movement with my eyes like a clock’s pendulum.
“Well, I think he’s wrong for you,” she murmurs. She stares at the floor between us, then cuts her eyes up at me through her lashes. “And he’s not the only one who cares about you, you know.”
“Wait.” I step toward Sunny. “What does that mean?”
“What doyouthink it means?” Sunny says knowingly. She swallows, her cheeks going deeply red, then turns and flees back down the stairwell.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Sunny’s right. My mind is officially cloudy.
It feels like the San Francisco sky, with every thought thick and crowded and constantly racing.
Sunny likes me, I think as I get on the train the next morning, heading not west toward school but east. I stare out the window at the crest of Strawberry Hill, then the final eastern swath of Golden Gate Park. I stare into the deep black of the Sunset Tunnel.
Sunny likes me.
On paper, this is very good news. Sunny is smart and funny, not to mention extremely hot. I have personally felt my knees get weak whenever I’ve seen her whip out her round reading glasses during yearbook meetings to take a close look at photo layouts. I should have followed her back down the stairs yesterday. I should be texting her something cute and flirtatious right now.
Instead, I get off the Judah train and walk the several blocks to the main library. I slink into the reference section.And the whole time I’m paging through reference books, looking for entries about Harvey Milk and the gay rights movement in the 1970s, I’m not thinking about what to text Sunny or when I should see her. I’m thinking about Cam walking around the corner. I don’t understand it. My mind is totally overcrowded. There are too many good ideas I should be following and even more bad ideas I want to follow instead.
Cam brushes through the front doors of the library just before noon. He strides across the foyer and looms over my notebook.
“Now who’s the early bird?” Cam says, smiling.
The corners of his mouth make two tiny dimples—one in either cheek.
“Found some stuff,” I say, not quite looking up.
Cam sits down next to me at one of the reading tables between the shelves. He leans over far enough that his Old Spice deodorant floods my senses. I want to hate it, I want to hate it, I want to hate it.
My lungs breathe in deep, traitors that they are.
“What did you find?” Cam asks.
“Well…” I flip back to my first page of notes. I’m not nearly as neat and organized as Julia, but as long as I’m translating my own chicken scratch, it’s fine. “Remember what the octopus monument said? About the unity of the empire?”
