“Hmm?” Cammie asks with faux innocence.
“There’s something else going on here. You wouldn’t give up the truth so easily if that’s all there was to it.”
Cammie flicks her tiny projectile and it pings off my chest. She snickers, then folds her arms across her torso and meets my gaze with an unimpressed smirk. “You sound paranoid.”
Despite this attempt at bravado, her cheeks get pinker and pinker under her freckles. I’m momentarily sidetracked wondering if she has sunscreen she can reapply, if I should suggest it or if she would snap something at me about thinking I’m her dermatologist. Might be worth it anyway.
“Maybe, but I think I’m right.” I shrug, matching her defensive posture even though for me, it’s more of an effort to hide the growing pit stains on my shirt. “There’s also the whole undercover agent act when Constantini left his office—why did you need copies of everything in that file? Did you not trust he’d give you enough names or something? I haven’t figured out what that was about, but I think you’re looking for more than just a list of people Dr. Alex hung out with twenty years ago.”
Her whole body goes rigid, and I know I’ve hit on something in the neighborhood of the truth. But then her expression hardens and she leans forward, elbows on the table.
“Why do you act like you know anything about me anymore?” she demands. “Even if I was up to something more, it’d be none of your business, Weston. Why would I tell you any of the alleged secrets I have when we’re not even friends?”
Before I can think better of it, I blurt out, “Yeah, so you keep telling me. I know good and well we’re not friends—you’re the one who decided that, and I’ve spent three years respecting your choice, even though it’s sucked every single day.”
For a moment, Cammie appears stunned speechless. Herstrawberry-red lips part, her blue eyes wide and unblinking as they study my face, like there’s some hidden meaning behind my words written there.
What do I even have to gain from being this honest with her? Most likely, she’s not going to suddenly view everything that happened with us in a different light, so I’ve just made myself look sad and weak for no reason. But what else is new?
Cammie blinks rapidly and gives her head a shake, as if coming back to herself. Then, just as quickly, she stands and starts walking away. My heart rate picks up, my feet moving before I’ve consciously decided to follow her. I don’t particularly want to go on a wild ex-best-friend chase around the city, but she might not give me a choice.
“I can’t do this right now,” she mutters, barely loud enough for me to hear over her shoulder. Frustration replaces some of my nerves.
“Can’t do what, talk to me?”
“Yeah, West. It’s just, like, not the time. I have other things to focus on.”
“I know, I know, big party plans,” I lob back sarcastically. “Doesn’t it feel a little ironic, dredging up all these characters from twenty years ago, while you act like our three years of distance after one stupid fight are too much to ever come back from? Blasts from the past are super fun, as long as they’re not your own.”
Cammie groans. We’ve reached an intersection of two busy pedestrian streets and she looks both ways before turning right, seemingly at random.
“It’s called boundaries, West,” she retorts. “I’m allowed to make them and allowed to enforce them, especially when the last time I let someone in, he”—she stabs a finger in the air to count off my offenses—“kissed me, broke my heart, then disappeared from my life, like I’d never meant anything to him.”
My gaze narrows in on her red hair, woven into a braid that hangs over one shoulder and sways with each step she takes. On her eyes, blazing blue fire under a sheen of wetness she’s trying to blink away. This is the closest we’ve come to actually confronting what happened between us a few years ago, and I don’t want to waste the chance to address it. But I also feel like my head is spinning as I try to process her take on everything, how it aligns—or doesn’t—with my own.
“Cam, you told me not to—”
“Can we just…just not, right now?” she cuts me off, rubbing a hand over her furrowed brow in what looks like both anguish and exhaustion. “There’s no reason for us to go through all this again. No need to force some beautiful reconciliation, when we can get through one summer, then return to our own lives, which were proceeding just fine without each other.”
She picks up her pace, so I can’t gauge from her expression how much she believes those words. But they hurt just the same.
All at once, I feel the anxieties of the day boiling over, breath harder to force into and out of my lungs. The sounds of the city press in, cars honking, engines revving, voices and people everywhere, an indistinguishable mass of life and activity and heat and smells, and the sun beating down relentlessly. It’s toomuch. I want to be able to catch up to Cammie, offer a coherent reply, keep pursuing a way to sort all of this out. But I can’t do it. All I can manage is a shake of my head that she won’t even see with her back to me, half a block ahead. Then, for the first time all day, I turn and walk away from her.
Chapter Seven
Cammie
I never thought there’d comea day when I would rather be indoors on my computer than outside in the trenches of a dig site, but life is full of surprises.
“Camilla,” Ilaria calls out in her annoyingly lovely accent. “Could you brush a little more dirt on yourself ? One cheek, maybe. Like this young woman over here, see?”
My gaze follows where she’s pointing and I find the young woman in question looking less than enthused about being my example for “aesthetically pleasing dirty person.” But she turns her head and resumes what she was doing—a.k.a. actual field work as a real participant in the field school. Not just walking in circles around the villa, running a hand over a wall here, a doorway there, looking pensive and wistful. Like I’ve been conscripted to do, with those exact adjectives, for what Ilaria calls “B-roll” of la Bambina immersing herself in the place thatmade her…or something similarly woo-woo and contrived. This other girl is absolutely judging me, and she has every right. I’d be judging me, too.
Everything about my being here feels fake. Every silly direction I follow from Ilaria or others on her crew chafes at me. I didn’t expect to feel so unenthused about my small part in this film. It’s like I’m in a simulation of the summer I’d wanted—on a dig site that’s special to me, surrounded by people doing the work I’ve always aspired to do, but I’m still just the real Dr. Lovett’s kid, playing dress-up in Mom’s archaeologist clothes.
It definitely doesn’t help matters that I’m dealing with an emotional hangover from yesterday. I didn’t make it more than a couple blocks before I noticed that West had abandoned me. Some bodyguard he turned out to be. After retracing my steps for a few minutes with no sign of him, I was more concerned that he’d been the one snatched off the sidewalk, and I’d be the one never forgiving myself. Without his number in my phone—thanks to Past Cammie for wiping everything West Jacobs from my digital archives—or any idea of what else to do, I decided to take the train back to Villa Russo and hope he’d already be there. My stomach was in knots the entire way, my braid all disheveled from my nervously messing with it, and it had hit me—was this how it always felt to be West? The possibility was eye-opening.
I’d sweat through every piece of clothing on me by the time I made it back to my floor and speed-walked straight to West’s door. Only, as I lifted my fist to knock, I heard his muffled voice on the other side. I nearly collapsed to the floor withrelief, and I told myself it was for my own sake, or our parents’, now that we both made it back okay and our guardians didn’t have to worry, let alone ever learn the truth of what we were up to.
