Cameron Adamski · @MiniCannibal
22nd Sep 2014 from TwitLonger
Movement One
Another weekend came and went. Had they always passed with the same speed? Days in the asylum and the days of summer blurred together, some magical quality of a life unmeasured by the hands of a clock making it impossible to distinguish the day of the week, or one day from the next.
All these days and days and days added up. Cam had been in school for nearly a month now. Time had taken flight.
It seems most unfortunate that Cam hadn’t discovered the true joy of television watching before school. With so many hours spent in his bedroom with Nate, plenty quite innocently enough, he might have filled some of that time with the stories onscreen rather than those in a book. Reading was something terribly special to him and his bedmate, and something he took a great deal of joy in, but there was a sense of community that came from the shows that his peers watched more or less as a hive mind. Simon watched Lost. Kyle, a quiet boy who had taken to joining Cam and his friends for lunch, watched Game of Thrones. Both talked eagerly about the characters and each new episode. Going against the grain, Grace refused to tell Cam one word about what she liked. Instead she returned the next day with season one of Sherlock on DVD and insisted that Cam watch for himself. To her, fandom was an art.
“I will—we can watch the first one together when you come over.” Cam hadn’t been brave enough to pry, but he hadn’t had to. After a few days Grace had proposed two days of the following week, and they’d picked one at random.
The DVD seemed to worry Nate, though, as did much of Cam’s changing lifestyle. It seemed both boys were worried about the other drifting away. This could have created a wedge between them, molded from insecurity, but Cam didn’t need the empathy that he was learning to exercise by watching Will here. For perhaps the first time ever he went out alone, a few blocks from the school in the wrong direction from home. There, with some money he had earned walking and cleaning up after the dogs as well as James’ increasingly generous gifts, he bought a hardcover copy of A Study in Scarlet and left it on Nate’s pillow when it was his turn to shower.
Aside from reading with Nate, Cam spent a large chunk of Friday afternoon practicing on his saxophone what had now become recognizable as a series of notes. Grace hadn’t followed through on her threat to letter his fingers if he kept getting them wrong, which was probably for the best. It was the combination of fingers that had him confused still. This, like typing, baffled him. It was one skill no one had ever thought to assess him on during his home schooling, and whenever he was required to work in the computer lab it was painfully obvious. With both his phone and computer keyboard he was a hunt-and-peck typist. Perhaps if someone had sat him down and explained the buttons each finger was meant to push—“This is the j, h, n, and u finger,”—he might have found it easier. Something within the wiring of his brain favored this system, trying and failing to apply it to the sax. “This is the G, E flat, and C finger.” But most notes took more than one finger, on different, unmarked keys, and though he was beginning to memorize these patterns, in the heat of the moment his mind went a terrifying blank and he found himself frozen, unused fingers outstretched, face and mind empty.
The notes on the piano were easier. Will didn’t seem to mind if he stuck scraps of sticky note to each key with a letter on it, picking out simple tunes much the way he typed, with a single finger.
After that, papers discarded in the trash, he sat and watched James and Hannibal cook a while with Jacob and Abigail. Something that the weekends had to offer was a measure of peace. Even if Jacob seemed a little more gaunt, a little less well. Even if James and Hannibal sometimes shared looks while cooking that made Cam feel like they were privy to some secret that he never would be, always on the outside looking in. These moments were rare and infrequent, and bothered him far less than what began to happen at school one day without explanation.
They were staring.
Not actively, and not all of them. In such a case he certainly would have demanded to know what was going on. It was just a little, here and there, enough to make him think that he could be imaging it.
Not the laughter. Once or twice, he /knew/ it was aimed at him.
“So…how do they do it?” Austin asked two mornings after the phenomenon had begun. They were just leaving class, the three of them, and the look Simon shot Austin was pure venom. When he saw it, the blond boy muttered a quick, “Sorry,” and left it at that.
“Do what? Who?” They both just shook their heads when Cam tried to press the issue. He was distracted soon enough by the sight of Grace and Phoenix, head to head, in an argument that looked moments away from breaking out into shouting. They turned their separate ways before the boys were close enough to hear what they were saying. Grace came there way, face pale but cheeks flushed.
“I’m sorry.”
“…um? What?”
“I didn’t mean to tell him.” For once it was Grace looking utterly overwhelmed by worry, not Cam. Realization seemed to dawn on first Austin, then Simon, but Cam gave a little shake of his head.
Simon turned to watch Phoenix stalking back to his friends. “…it was a secret, then, huh?”
“/What/ was?” Cam’s frustration caught the attention of the boy sitting closest to their group, who looked over then away with a deliberateness that only a fourteen-year-old would consider stealthy.
Think of someone who changed your life. Now think back to how you met… Do you remember? Cam didn’t yet know his bully, and would not remember Tristan Rucker as the boy he’d overheard discussing weekend plans in the bathroom. The boy who would come to petrify him in the weeks to come wasn’t even on his radar; the group of friends let him within hearing distance as if he didn’t exist.
“That you live with homos.” Austin finally explained, in a tone that was neither condemning nor very kind.
Grace looked as if she were wishing that the ground would swallow her up and eat her. Cam’s education in profanity had finally come to a useful level, and the odd combination of embarrassment and anger was back.
Before he could speak, Grace was pleading with him. “I /had/ to tell my parents. To ask about going over to your house. Not /because/ they’re gay, but so they’d know whose house I was at…and they wanted to know your ‘mother and father’s’ names…I just had to tell them, and Phoenix was in the room and he has no /brain/…”
/He told everyone…?/ Only vaguely was Cam able to grasp the motives behind this. The need to gossip, for a lot of his peers, involved some level of self-importance. Taking that private piece of Cam’s life, prying it from the calm interior of his mind and setting it out for display, made Phoenix Underwood feel powerful, not just to a degree but mostly because of how naked it made Cameron feel.
He decided very quickly that he didn’t like being naked in front of his peers.
“It /wasn’t/ a secret.” This Cam directed at Simon, almost as an afterthought, staring after Phoenix. Slowly his anger was building, with no sign of release. When he looked down, he saw that his hands were shaking slightly. Shoving them into his pockets stilled this. “But it wasn’t for everyone to go over and talk about. /But/. But it wasn’t your fault, Grace.” He gave her the best smile he could muster. “…it wasn’t what you were trying to do.”
“…so, how do they do it?”
“/Austin/.” Beating Cam to it, Grace was finally able to tear her eyes off the ground to glower.
It would have been better if Cam had gotten his chance. He could have used the practice standing up for himself.