Seriously? She was getting in trouble for coughing?
Cam gave Lilith two light thumps on the back, the way her mother did to Bruce when he was having one of his fits. Then he bent down, picked up the diaper, raised an eyebrow at Lilith, and stuffed it inside Chloe’s purse.
“She might need that later,” he said, and smiled at Lilith as he walked to the other side of the room.
Trumbull wasn’t a big school, but it was big enough for Lilith to be surprised that Cam was also in her poetry class. She was even more surprised when Mr. Davidson sat him in the empty seat next to her, since Kimi Grace was out sick.
“Hey,” Cam had said when he slid into the seat.
Lilith pretended she hadn’t heard him.
Ten minutes into class, as Mr. Davidson was reading a love sonnet by the Italian poet Petrarch, Cam leaned over and dropped a note onto her desk.
Lilith looked at the note, then at Cam, then glanced to her right, certain it was meant for someone else. But Paige wasn’t reaching out to take the note from her, and Cam was smirking, nodding at the face of the note on which he’d written in neat black script, Lilith.
She opened it and felt a strange rush, the kind she felt when she dipped into a really good book or heard a great song for the first time.
In ten minutes of class, Teach has faced his blackboard an impressive total of eight minutes and forty-eight seconds. By my calculations, you and I could absolutely sneak out the next time he turns around and not be missed until we’re already at Rattlesnake Creek. Wink twice if you’re game.
Lilith did not even know where to start with this. Wink twice? More like drop dead three times, she wanted to tell him. When she looked up he was wearing a strange, tranquil expression, as if they were the kind of friends who did stuff like this all the time, as if they were any kind of friends. The weird thing was, Lilith skipped class all the time—she’d done it twice yesterday, in homeroom and biology. But she never did it for a fun reason. Escape was always her only option, a survival mechanism. Cam seemed to think he knew who she was and how she lived her life, and that annoyed her. She didn’t want him to think about her at all.
No, she scrawled back, right over the words of Cam’s note. She crumpled it up and pitched it at him the next time Mr. Davidson turned around.
The rest of her day was long and dreary, but at least she got a break from Cam. She didn’t see him at lunch or in the hallways or in any of her other classes. Lilith reasoned that if she had to have two classes with him, it was best to have them back-to-back first thing in the morning and get the squirrelly sensation he made her feel out of the way. Why was he so casual with her? He seemed to think she enjoyed his presence. Something about him filled her with rage.
When the final bell rang, when she most wanted to be slinking behind the carob branches to play her guitar alone at Rattlesnake Creek, Lilith trudged to detention.
The detention room was spare—only a few desks and one poster on the wall that featured a kitten clinging to a tree branch. For what felt like the three thousandth time, Lilith read the words printed beneath its calico tail:
YOU ONLY LIVE ONCE, BUT IF YOU DO IT RIGHT, ONCE IS ENOUGH.
The way to survive detention was to go into a trance. Lilith stared at the kitten poster until it took on an otherworldly quality. The kitten looked terrified, hanging there with its claws puncturing the branch. Was it supposed to embody “living right”? Not even the decor in this school made sense.
“Room sweep!” Coach Burroughs announced as he burst through the door. He checked in every fifteen minutes, like clockwork. The assistant basketball coach wore his silver hair in a greased-back pompadour, like an aging Elvis impersonator. The kids called him Crotch Burroughs, in honor of his borderline indecent shorts.
Even though Lilith was the only one in detention today, Burroughs paced as though disciplining a room full of invisible delinquents. When he got to Lilith, he slapped a stapled packet on her desk. “Your makeup biology test, Highness. It’s different from the one you skipped out on yesterday.”
The same or different, it didn’t matter—Lilith was going to fail this one, too. She wondered why she was never called into a counselor’s office, why no one seemed interested in how her appalling grades were threatening her college prospects.
When the door opened and Cam walked in, Lilith actually smacked her forehead.
“Are you kidding me?” she muttered under her breath when he handed Burroughs a yellow detention slip.
Burroughs nodded at Cam, sent him to a desk across the room, and said, “You got an assignment to keep you occupied?”