Cameron Adamski · @MiniCannibal
15th Sep 2014 from TwitLonger
Prelude
/Think of someone who changed your life./
/Now think back to how you met…/
/Do you remember?/
Maybe it utterly defeated the purpose of an instrument for home, but Cam was sorely tempted the Monday after his birthday to bring his present to school.
The gift from his dads had been a huge success. Even after an exhausting day at the beach with Nate he’s lugged the case upstairs under the pretense of practicing in the morning. He’d propped the lid of the case open so that he could see the moonlight on the gleaming gold metal, and acted like Will might have with a new puppy. He hated touching it for fear of smudging the surface, and even when he overcame that he buffed the fingerprints away with great care.
Closer inspection found that the engraving down the side and on the bell was not an abstract pattern, but a Chinese dragon curving down its length. A quick check online proved that Cam wasn’t born in the year of the dragon—he missed it by less than eight months—he must have been conceived during it, so he took great pleasure in the idea that the dragon was somehow symbolic of him.
But most importantly, it was beautiful, and he told everyone.
“That’s gay.” Austin, a boy in his Algebra class snorted, at the same time Simon said, “You can’t even play it yet and your parents bought you one? Sick. Are you rich?”
Simon was the Asian boy who had seemed more or less friendly on Cam’s first day. Since then Cam had learned his name, that he was on the soccer team, and that he was half Korean but had only ever lived in Mexico and the USA. Cam would have liked him more if he didn’t hang around with Austin. The boys had been best friends since Simon’s family had returned to the States three years ago, and were apparently attached at the hip. Cam didn’t like the way Austin’s clothes smelled, cigarettes and a lack of washing, or his casual use of the word gay. He voiced neither objection to anyone, even family, except for Grace.
“It’s understandable, though. With your dads.” She half-shrugged her shoulders while wiping a rag down her trombone’s slide. “He probably doesn’t mean anything by it, though. People say ‘that’s retarded’ and don’t really mean it, either. It’s just the way of the world.”
Cam grunted, not looking up from the sheets clenched in his hands. /C flat F flat B natural…quarter notes half notes eighth notes—wait. HALF notes quarter notes eighth notes/. “…it’s ‘face’ going bottom-to-top, right?”
“Uh-huh.” Grace poked the page. “But you’re still getting sharps and flats mixed up here—” She waited while he corrected his mistakes, scrubbing savagely at the paper with his eraser. “Pretty into this all of a sudden. You could barely manage to hold a pitch let alone carry a tune. Did Mr. Abel threaten your grade?”
“I got a new sax…my dads, for my birthday.” The whole reason behind the incident with Austin had been momentarily forgotten. “And they might be coming to the concert in the fall.”
“/Brand/ new? That’s awesome. Totally, completely awesome. Can’t wait to see it! And of course they’ll be there! That gift—they can’t wait to see you play.” She ignored the sideways look Phoenix was giving them, tossing the rag over. “All parents are like that for your first concert, honestly. Well, the ones who care. Once ours found out all my brother and I play is honk honk honk? They still come, but that enthusiasm’s gone. Enjoy the first chance to show off, then.” Seeing the almost disappointed look on his face, she laughed. “It could be worse! Imagine if you were a tuba player. A saxophone’s a more interesting instrument to listen to solo, anyway. But they’ll love it regardless, Cam.”
It was sometimes hard to tell whether Grace was joking or not. Cam had decided that that was due to his social ineptitude rather than any form of ambiguity on her part. Once she laughed he knew what he was dealing with. This easy camaraderie would have continued if the clarinet player who’d taken the bathroom pass hadn’t returned; Cam excused himself and headed out the door, dangling the sign by the string that it hung from.
Sometimes Cam was reminded of the BSHCI when at school. These odd moments where he was outside and most everyone else was in class often caused that tingle of de ja vue. Yard narks leaned against walls or sat on benches, sunglasses seeming to stare suspiciously even when he lifted the pass on the string for them to see. It felt like a jailbreak, or an unsupervised wandering down those institutional halls.
What /didn’t/ remind Cam of the asylum were the bathrooms. He thought it was especially creepy that boys and girls alike seemed to arrive in pairs or small groups, often chatting in a place where he would have preferred to hear only the low growl of the fan in the ceiling. The other boys (and girls, he assumed) seemed to ignore strangers out of some obscure courtesy that didn’t extend to stopping their conversation. That was perhaps the strangest aspect, though it afforded Cam a look into the more normal lives of his peers. The other two occupants of the bathroom, other seventh graders who Cam vaguely remembered from PE, were deep in conversation about Airsoft and someone’s house.
“He’s a jerkoff—” Cam mentally added that phrase to the ever-growing list of insults as he washed his hands, seemingly invisible to the other two. “He’s been telling us that for weeks. Get a ride over to my house instead. My mom doesn’t care as long as we don’t shoot towards the buildings.”
The conversation continued, the boys drowned out as Cam grabbed a paper towel to scrub his hands dry and wandered back to class. Having a friend over. The concept seemed strange. Especially with the boy-girl dynamic he wasn’t sure how to proceed, even if he was straight as a rainbow and deeply in love. Grace started up her almost non-stop chatter the second he had returned the pass and sat down beside her, but he didn’t quite hear where she’d started.
“…Grace?”
“—won’t really /need/ bass clef—what?”
“Um.” He struggled to adopted the casual tone the other boy had had, as if he had invited someone over every day for the last ten years, instead of never. “Do you think, maybe, you might come over to my house? You could see the saxophone…and meet my family…it’s not that far.” A little heat rose around his collar. “I mean, I walk every day, if you don’t want to—”
“Sure.” She had to repeat herself, a little more loudly, to interrupt his rambling. To her credit, she held in the laugh. “I’d just have to talk to my mom, okay?”
“Okay.” He smiled, a little giddy with relief. Most people wouldn’t be so relieved to have set up an introduction between cannibalistic murderers and their friend, or the more personal secrets that Cam was actually privy to. He just wasn’t aware that in order to step into the real world—full of hanging out and social skills—that he was opening the door to all his family’s secrets.