Total pages in book: 104
Estimated words: 98264 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 491(@200wpm)___ 393(@250wpm)___ 328(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 98264 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 491(@200wpm)___ 393(@250wpm)___ 328(@300wpm)
Awful. Terrible. Soul-crushing.
I had to swallow twice before I could answer. “Good. Everything’s good now.”
She smiled huge. “See? I told you it’d be okay.” She slung an arm around my shoulders and pulled me in for a brief hug.
I was too numb for it to warm me.
“Holy hell, this place is amazing,” Ramsey said, shining his flashlight around the creek. “I don’t think I’ve ever been back this far on the Leonards’ property before. Is it deep enough to swim down at the other end?”
Oh, no. No freaking way. I wasn’t good enough for Camden Cole. Fine. That I should have expected. But as much as I wanted to light that place on fire and never look back, I was nowhere near ready to let Ramsey and Thea take over our spot.
“No,” I lied. Memories of Camden cannonballing into the water flashed on the back of my lids, causing another nail to pierce through my heart. “It’s terrible here. There’s snakes and bugs. I’m pretty sure I saw some leeches in the water the other day.”
“Gross,” Thea said.
“Yeah. Stick with your tree.” Slinging my bag over my shoulder, I marched away from them—and every single memory of Camden I’d never be able to forget.
When school started on Monday, I did my best to pack all things Camden into a neat, little drawer in my head and locked it. He’d hurt me. So what? I should have been used to it by then.
It was time to put on a happy face and get back to my most important job of all: hiding from the world.
I woke up every morning.
Went to school all day.
I smiled more that first week than I had in years.
All of them fake.
All of them painful.
And all of them to mask how I was secretly withering away.
Regardless, I smiled on cue. Laughed when I heard a joke. I even skipped home when I got off the bus to put the final stroke on my masterpiece of deception. I was so good at playing the part that not even Ramsey and Thea realized I was only one breath away from suffocating.
A few times I'd slip up and ask someone around town if they knew where the Coles’ house was. No one did. Besides, what would I say if I went there? They probably didn’t even know I was alive.
And for what it was worth, I wasn’t.
It took two weeks and a chance run-in with Mr. Leonard before I returned to the creek. He’d cornered me at the grocery store and asked why I hadn’t been delivering him any worms. Fishing season was coming to a close, but there were still a few days warm enough for him and his boys to hit the lake.
There was nothing between those rocky banks that didn’t remind me of Camden, including the five dollars a day that was no longer in my pocket. I didn’t even have our ten-dollar bill because I’d hidden it under the insert in his shoe the last day I’d seen him. I couldn’t be sure if I was bitter enough to actually spend it or not, but I resented not having the choice.
Thea agreed to buy me the worms from Lewis Tractor Repair, Bait, and Booze each day so I didn’t get caught, and by that weekend, I was gainfully employed again.
My first day back at the creek was rough. I kept waiting for him to pop up. Any time I’d hear a rustle of the leaves or a breeze blew through the grass, an unwelcome pang of hope would spike my pulse.
I did everything I could to erase Camden from the creek. I swept away the piles of stripped leaf stems he’d left scattered around, and I switched to a different bank on the other side, where the memories of him weren’t as strong. I buried a new worm-holding area in the dirt using a metal box I’d found in the garage and threw away the bug spray he’d left hidden between two rocks. I would have rather had a beetle build a colony inside my ear than ever use anything of Camden Cole’s again.
I wasn’t always strong. A girl could only pretend that her heart wasn’t breaking for so long. One afternoon, in a moment of weakness, I wrote him a note and included my address and Thea’s phone number. I stuffed it into a Ziploc bag, tucking it into our old plastic worm-holding area where I knew he’d find it if he ever came back.
He never did though, but then again, hope had never been my friend.
By the end of October, Mr. Leonard had hung up his fishing rod for the year, but Ramsey and I had saved up enough money to get through the holidays.
Winter came with cold temperatures and even a few flurries of snow. I’d almost gotten to the point where I hardly thought about Camden at all. His drawer in my head was still there, and every now and then, it would slide open, bombarding me with an avalanche of conflicting emotions. Like a teacher calling roll call, all the familiar feelings were accounted for. Anger. Present. Resentment. Present. Betrayal. Present.