What Happens Now

  DEDICATION

  FOR JAY AND SUE,

  AS TIME GOES BY

  CONTENTS

  Dedication

  Prologue

  The First Summer Chapter 1

  The Second Summer Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Acknowledgments

  Back Ads

  About the Author

  Books by Jennifer Castle

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  PROLOGUE

  In the end, there were two Camden Armstrongs. One I watched for a whole summer of relentless craving. The other was the one I fell in love with.

  During that first summer with that first Camden, I breathed wonder instead of oxygen. Wonder about what he carried on his broad but skinny shoulders, what made them square off on certain days and what made them sometimes sag. What it might feel like to sweep those nearly black bangs away from his face and get a peek at what was really going on there.

  Once you start this type of wondering about someone, they’ve got you for sure. They own you in a way you can’t control. (As if you even wanted to.)

  This was also the Camden who, when I closed my eyes alone at night, kissed me against a swing set at the lake playground. He’d hold me in the water while I floated on my back, his palms perfectly spanning the cutout of my bathing suit as if it were made to order for him. Sometimes this Camden-in-my-mind took me on drives to the Lenape Creek so we could dangle our legs off the wooden footbridge. Or he’d do something exquisitely regular, like buying me a road stand ice cream, and we’d eat it sitting on the hood of his car.

  Good God. Those imaginary nights. It’s kind of amazing, how nostalgic you can feel for memories that never actually happened.

  As for the other Camden?

  I can tell you this much:

  I know what it is to want something so badly, you feel like your cells aren’t properly bonded together without it. At any moment you might just crumble apart.

  I also know what it’s like to get that something.

  And honestly, I’m still not sure which is worse.

  THE FIRST SUMMER

  (OR, THIS THING THAT HAPPENED THAT I STILL DON’T REALLY UNDERSTAND)

  1

  My best friend, Kendall Parisi, waved her arms over a patch of rubbly grass near the edge of our town’s tiny swimming lake.

  “I hereby declare this to be our spot for the summer,” she said.

  It was Memorial Day weekend, and that meant the lake was finally open for the season. The lake had a name name that nobody used, a retired reservoir with a halfhearted beach, the water cloudy but cool. I’d grown up thinking we were lucky and special for having it, and still believed.

  “And I declare it to be a good spot,” I said just as seriously, dropping my bag on it. Staking our claim.

  The spot was under a tree, but not one of the more popular trees. Yes, there was actually popularity among the trees here. Some things about the lake were a little ridiculous, but that was part of why we loved it.

  “I wish we could mark this with a flag,” said Kendall, unpacking a rolled-up towel.

  “Or urine,” I said.

  “You’re gross.”

  I smiled wickedly and spread out my blanket on the spot, now officially our spot, and everything could begin.

  We were almost done with my horrible sophomore year of high school, and the promise of summer sat on the tips of our tongues. It tasted like mint, and sunscreen, and that pleasantly disgusting sweetener in diet iced tea.

  I’d be spending most of the next three months babysitting my six-year-old half sister, Danielle, while my mom finished nursing school. Kendall was going to work at Scoop-N-Putt, the ice cream/mini-golf place on Route 299, but she promised we’d still get to hang out at the lake most days. There was also my newly earned driver’s license all weighty in my wallet, a key card to a whole extra level of the world.

  The perfection of these plans was something I could lay down and bask in. I pulled off my sandals, stretched out on the blanket, and closed my eyes. I felt the long sleeves of my rashguard top ride up, which meant they were no longer covering the three long, expertly straight lines on my left forearm.

  It had been four months since that frigid night I’d cut myself on purpose. For the record, I hadn’t been trying to die but rather, to live; to find a way to breathe again. Four months was enough time to turn the scars brown, but not enough to fully understand them, and definitely not enough for me to let others get a look. I tugged my sleeves back toward my wrists.

  Kendall wound up her long auburn hair in a bun and collapsed next to me. I could see-without-seeing that my friend was scanning the beach behind her mirrored sunglasses. “Ari, check it out,” she said after a few moments. “Maisie just walked in with Andrew. They must have made up after that fight at the prom.”

  I lifted my head enough to seem like I was, indeed, checking it out. “Mmm.”

  It was important to Kendall to know the Five Ws of journalism about people—the who, what, where, when, and why—and whether they applied to her, too. She used to write field guides to native North American wildlife as a hobby. Now she did this.

  Kendall had been my best friend since sixth grade. My only close friend, you could say, if you wanted to be mean and specific about it. But she’d been all I needed when it came to the big things. She taught me how to put in a tampon—the normal way, not like the school nurse had shown us in health class, with one leg up like you were tying a shoe (yuck). When we started high school, Kendall joined the newspaper and urged me to check out Mock Trial. So, you know, we’d have some kind of life.

  After I cut myself, Kendall visited me on every one of the five days I stayed home from school. I hadn’t been able to explain to her why I did what I did, or why I hadn’t asked her for help. She pretended she didn’t want to know. Things changed between us, after that.

  I lay down again and shut my eyes. Secretly, I wanted to be reading my book, a vintage Silver Arrow novel I’d just bought online. I’d made the mistake of putting it in my bag and now the thought of it kept tugging at me. But Kendall didn’t get Silver Arrow—she didn’t get any sci-fi, especially not a TV series that aired before we were even born—and I wanted us to have a good time together.

  We were both at the lake on opening day, as we’d always been and were supposed to be. As if it were etched on a Dead Sea scroll somewhere.

  One type of antidepressants had made me sick but the second was working. I knew it was working because the sun right here on my face felt like every good thing that had happened to me plus all the other good things that hadn’t happened yet but would absolutely, definitely happen soon for sure.

  Summer.

  After a minute, Kendall whispered, “Who the hell is that?”

  I sighed, opened one eye, and looked sideways toward the beach. It took me a bit to lock in on who she was talking about, but then I saw the boy.

  He was tall, dark-haired. Our age. Stepping gingerly around people while clutching one of those striped Navajo blankets to his chest.

  That’s all it takes, sometimes. He doesn’t have to be saving kittens from a tree or making shirtless jump shots, or dr
opping some brilliant comment in American History class. But one moment, this person is not in the world for you. The next moment, he is. It’s exactly that simple. And also, irreversible.

  He was with a blond woman who wore what appeared to be a gigantic scarf tied in eight different places. As we watched, he guided her to a sliver of shade on the opposite edge of the beach, then spread out the blanket and took a tote bag out of her hands without her asking.

  “Do you know?” asked Kendall, wrinkling her nose and all her freckles with it.

  “Uh-uh,” I said casually, then caught my breath and hoped Kendall didn’t notice.

  He was not from our high school, we were sure of that; there were only sixty-some-odd guys in each grade and most of them we’d known since forever. A summer renter, maybe? Or from another town.

  The boy—actually, at this point, I was already thinking of him as The Boy—offered a tube of sunscreen to the woman, who shook her head. We heard him say, “Mom! Cancer!” as he shoved it toward her again. She smiled at him then and plucked the sunscreen out of his hand. He smiled back. Even from where we sat, I could see each one of his carefully carved features participating in that smile. And dimples, for God’s sake.

  Then he turned away and slipped out of his button-down shirt.

  His shoulders were wide and solid, but the rest of him was skinny, as if some body parts were losing a contest with others. I couldn’t quite identify the color of his skin, but I could tell it was more dark than fair. More night than day.

  We watched him, both Kendall and I, alert as cats as he walked across the dock to the rickety diving board at the far end. (If we’d had the right kind of ears, they would have been pricked up.) He stepped slowly to the edge, then turned to do a backward somersault into the lake, lopsided and not very good at all. The splash looked like it hurt.

  And I was already halfway gone.

  A week later, Kendall and I were sitting low on the beach, our feet in the water, sand seeping into the edges of our bathing suits. I’d found a bumpy rock embedded in the sand and couldn’t stop rubbing my big toe back and forth over it. My little sister, Danielle, waded nearby in her mismatched bikini—a top covered in cherries, blue-and-white-striped bottoms. She made it look like a fashion statement rather than what it really was: the result of a messy room where you could never find the proper other half to anything.

  “You guys! Watch me!” called Danielle. She started to spin in circles, still holding her plastic bucket. Faster, then faster again. Until she staggered and fell hard into the water.

  “Is she okay?” Kendall asked.

  “She makes herself dizzy on purpose,” I replied with a shrug. “Your question is more complicated than it sounds.”

  Danielle righted herself and started spinning again.

  “Excuse me,” said someone nearby.

  We turned to see The Boy standing ankle-deep in the water. Looking at us.

  He’s shorter up close, was the first thing I thought. But still, wow.

  “Hey,” Kendall said to him, Oscar-winning cool and casual.

  “That rope out there,” he pointed to the line dotted with red-and-white buoys that looked almost exactly like my antidepressant pills. It marked the far edge of the swimming area. “What happens if you go on the other side of it?”

  “The lifeguard yells at you,” said Kendall.

  “That’s all?” asked The Boy, raising his eyebrows.

  “He uses a loud, scary voice,” I added.

  “There’s no giant lake squid that comes up from the deep and swallows you whole?”

  Kendall and I shook our heads. Dani stepped out of her spin to stop and listen.

  “No patrol boat chases you down, scoops you up in a net, throws you in Lake Jail?”

  “Not that we’ve seen,” I said, laughing a bit.

  “Huh,” was all he said, scanning the off-limits area of the lake, something lighting up behind his expression. He then dove into the water and sprinted out to the boundary rope.

  Kendall, Dani, and I fell silent, all watching him swim a trail of white froth through the dark water. When he got to the rope, I expected him to dip underneath it into the forbidden zone. But he turned for the raft tied to the corner of the rope and hoisted himself up the ladder.

  “I’ve got to get some intel on Sunscreen Guy,” said Kendall after a few moments.

  “I’ve just been calling him The Boy.”

  “See? We can’t go on like this. I’ll talk to Mabel.”

  Mabel had been running the lake’s snack shack since the 1980s. Mabel absorbed details about people like osmosis.

  As Kendall headed off on her mission, I went waist-deep into the water to meet Danielle. She wrapped her arms and legs around me, buoyant and effortlessly huggable. Her cold wet against my warm dry. That moment of shock, until we became the same temperature.

  “Will you throw me out like garbage?” she whispered in my ear.

  I lifted Danielle away from my body. “You’re no good anymore!” It was part of the game. “I’m chucking you out with the trash!”

  Then I tossed her as far as I could into the water. She shrieked with joy.

  “Again!” she said when she came back up for air. “This time, let’s pretend you’re putting me in the recycling bin. It’s blue and it’s prettier. Now, go!” So I went. Again, and again, and again. Dani was the best distraction ever.

  Ten minutes later, Kendall swam out to meet us, and even with her mirrored sunglasses I could tell she had a mischievous glint in her eye.

  “Camden,” Kendall said simply, paddling a circle around me.

  “What?”

  “It’s weird, but that’s his name. Camden.”

  “All you got was a name?”

  “He goes to Dashwood.”

  “Oh.”

  Dashwood was a private alternative school on the edge of town, halfway up a mountain, surrounded by forest. Nobody I knew had even seen the place. Most people called it “Crunchwood” because there were few teachers and no classes. Students did what they wanted, when they wanted to do it. The rumor was they didn’t even need to wear shoes if they weren’t in the mood.

  Kendall lowered her sunglasses so she could give me a look. “We think he’s cute, right?”

  I grimaced. “Cute’s not the right word.” I hated that word and anyway, it didn’t belong on the same plane of existence as this boy. Camden.

  “International Sex God?” Kendall offered with arched eyebrows, pulling out an old phrase from our private best-friend language.

  “Perhaps,” I said, giving in to the smile.

  “I won’t tell Lukas,” added Kendall.

  “Lukas is just a friend.”

  “Who you made out with.”

  “That was before.” I didn’t need to elaborate. Before meant, before January. Before my night at home alone with a Lady Bic razor and a bag of frozen peas.

  Kendall looked pained, then covered it up and said, “So? He still likes you. He’s not scared away.”

  “He will be, eventually.”

  She kicked me under the water. I splashed her back.

  “Why are you always so hard on yourself?” asked Kendall, but I knew she didn’t really want an answer. “I thought we agreed, that’s something that would make you happy. To have someone. You’re close. I wish I were that close.”

  “I don’t need ‘someone.’ I have my whole family. And lucky for them, they have me.”

  My mom was working hard to finish nursing school. My stepdad, Richard, was gone most days, running his art supply store. There were meals to prepare and a self-regenerating to-do list stuck to the fridge with alphabet magnets. Also, the small matter of a real live child who needed to be, you know, fed and clothed and supervised. I filled the gaps. Sometimes it felt like there were more gaps than whatever it was that went between the gaps.

  Let’s keep her busy, I’d heard my mother tell Richard once. She didn’t want me to have time to retreat into myself, apparently
a place full of dark corners and hazardous material.

  Kendall was my friend and wanted to help, too. What was happy anyway? A dumb-sounding word, if you really broke it down. Happy was something you didn’t think too much about because if you did, you knew you weren’t.

  I turned to look out at the raft where Camden sat by himself, staring off into the sky. I was always confronting the sky with questions, but that didn’t seem to be the case with him. It was more like he and the sky were collaborators. Like maybe he had the whole edgeless thing on his side.

  How would that even feel? I couldn’t imagine. But, oh, to find out.

  Soon, summer began in earnest, so hot and green and wet, it was hard to remember what any other season felt like. I saw Camden at the lake a couple of times a week, but it was always from afar and we never spoke. He usually came alone, which totally fascinated me—who had the nerve to come to the lake alone?—but sometimes he did come with friends: a rickety-tall boy and a petite girl with long, straight, jet-black hair. They’d disappear down a trail into the woods for a while before coming back out to strip down to their bathing suits and do yelping cannonballs off the dock.

  I knew the lifeguards liked to drink or smoke stuff in those woods after the beach closed at night. Were Camden and his friends bold enough to do it during the day? And if I myself didn’t smoke anything and had even washed cars as a fund-raiser for Students Against Drunk Driving, why did the thought of Camden doing these things make my kneecaps feel unattached from my legs?

  “We’re hardwired for the naughty ones,” sighed Kendall once, as we spotted Camden and his compadres come out of the woods. “It really sucks.”

  Here’s one thing I learned watching Camden during those weeks: a person’s body can move and not ever touch you, but still have a physical impact on yours. He leaned against the diving board railing as he waited his turn, and it was like I was that railing. The motion of his hand as he ran it through his wet hair while talking—long fingers scattering beads of water—or the angles of his elbows as he stretched out on the sand: these things could make the hair on my arms stand up.