“Hey, you.” She sounds happy to hear from him.
“I’m going on a little adventure today. Wanna come?” Cameron explains his plan.
Avery’s sigh seeps through his phone speaker. “Can’t, I’m on duty at the shop. But we should do something later this week.”
“Sure. Later this week.”
“I mean it,” she says earnestly. “We’ll go paddling. I’ll check my schedule.”
He says goodbye to Avery and sets his phone on the bumper of the camper, where his feet are propped, as he sits in one of Ethan’s lawn chairs. It was gross and rainy when he first got here, but now the weather is perfect. All of the colors seem impossibly vivid, from the wide blue sky to the thick green trees. Nothing like the oppressively hot, dusty oven that Modesto becomes in the summertime. He outstretches his right hand, examining his fingers, then flexes and throws a shadow jab upward at the cloudless summer sky.
Life is finally going his way.
For one thing, Avery. He’s never caught the attention of a girl quite like Avery before, and somehow her strange evasiveness only adds to her appeal.
For another thing: he’s about to do a face-to-face with his maybe dad.
And for a third thing: He’s held an actual job for weeks now. He doesn’t even hate it. Who knew? Chopping up fish guts. And cleaning! Not glamorous, but the solitude suits him, especially in the evening. Half the time, he’s the only one at the aquarium when he cleans. On those nights, he smacks the vending machine until it drops something, a package of cookies or stale snack cakes that nobody wants to buy anyway, pops in his earbuds, and zones out while he washes the floors. The other half of the time, the weird lady is there. Tova. She keeps showing up, even though she’s supposed to be on medical leave. Cameron promised he wouldn’t rat her out. He doesn’t mind having her around. Her obsession with that octopus is bizarre, and he hasn’t made much progress making friends with Marcellus, but her company is weirdly enjoyable.
Behind him, a screen door bangs. A second later, Ethan appears around the back side of the camper. A faded Led Zeppelin T-shirt a little tight across his torso. He squints at Cameron. “Lovely mornin’， innit?”
“Yeah. And guess what?” Cameron recounts his Simon Brinks discovery and subsequent conversation with Avery. Ethan nods.
“Well, let’s go, then. We’ll take my truck.”
Cameron tilts his head. “What?”
“Your ears full of porridge, laddie? I said we’ll take my truck!”
“You want to come with me?”
“A’course I do! You think I’d let you smack that wanker around alone?” He beams. “Sounds like a right good time, if you ask me.”
“Okay,” says Cameron slowly. “We’ll go together.”
“Gorgeous up that way, anyway, ’specially this time of year. We’ll make it an adventure, yeah? I’ll be your tour guide.”
Tour guide?
“In fact,” Ethan continues, “there’s a great little spot for fish ’n’ chips off the highway on the way up.”
Fish and chips? Who cares about fish and chips? “Fine. But first we go find Brinks.”
Ethan chuckles. “Extortion first, fish and chips after.”
CAMERON STILL CAN’T seem to wrap his head around the shape of the sea here. It’s like a monster with hundreds of long fingers is gripping the edge of the continent, tendrils of deep blue cutting channels through the dark green countryside in every unexpected way. He finds himself constantly surprised by the presence of the water on the left side of the car, then around a curve and on the right side, then over one bridge after another （how many times can a person cross the same body of water?） as Ethan drives along a never-ending two-lane road, the shoulder speckled by bait shops and gas stations and shabby-looking little restaurants that don’t inspire confidence in the fish-and-chips plan.
“Won’t be too much longer now,” Ethan shouts, in direct defiance of the tiny map on his dash-mounted phone, which states their arrival time an hour from now. He’s got his brawny elbow slung like a freckled sausage on the rim of the open window, having insisted on keeping the windows down, on account of it being “such a lovely day for a drive.” The fifty-mile-an-hour wind and Ethan’s accent make it hard to hear.
Clutching the class ring in his damp palm, he sketches out the logistics of his impending confrontation in his mind for the thousandth time.
Here’s one way it can go. And maybe this is the ideal way. Simon Brinks will be shocked to see him. His mouth will drop open as he recognizes Cameron immediately. Although he might be the kind of douchebag who will try to deny it, Cameron’s got the photographic evidence in his pocket. And then Brinks fesses up to everything.