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Cameron has a system now, for looking. The trick is he gives himself one extra second. It’s not much, not anything, really, except maybe a pressure release valve. He has a system now and that’s good. It’s progress.
He goes back and forth on whether he’s trying to get caught. He goes back and forth on everything, after all. Computing or engineering? Northwestern or IU? Risky Business or Top Gun? Yes, I’m coming out today, or no, I’m staying in. Come sit in my desk chair and fuck with my radio. Or don’t.
A brief list of places Cameron has been looking lately:
Collarbone. Freckle on collarbone. Hips, where t-shirt rides up. Subtly flexed shoulders. Eyelashes. New pair of baggy-legged jeans.
Ferris does not notice. Or Ferris has always noticed, and Ferris is just being nice. Or Ferris is doing something shitty. Maybe that’s it. Maybe then Cameron could let go, right, if Ferris all along were the shitty one, and Cameron could go on to a better life, and tell someone, someday, in bed, in an apartment downtown, or maybe New York or Santa Cruz, I used to know this guy named Ferris. And when he was done, they’d see him a little clearer.
He wants to know one way or another what to do. He wants, very badly, for the decision to be taken out of his hands. He wants, sometimes, to drink until he blacks out, let his body make the decision for him, sober up and kill himself, whatever. There is something Ferris-y to him about suicide. He has a joke with Sloane about it - they say ditch (meaning dead in a ditch, meaning he’ll be found dead in a ditch one day) whenever Ferris misses the mark by 5 percent. When he couldn’t get them into the bar next to Wrigley Field. He had stalked up the street to find something else to pry at and Sloane had said it, and Cameron had thought how this was the first time she’d ever talked to him about Ferris, and thought how many times in your life does that happen, spoke to spoke.
Now they say it all the time. He likes Sloane, which surprises him, because he was prepared not to. Sloane is smarter than Ferris. She actually reads. She has an opinion on Gabriel Garcia Marquez.
Once at a party she kisses him. He’s not expecting it. He never is, really, whenever anyone -
But they are in a corner, and she’s holding Ferris’s camcorder, not recording, just holding it up, looking through the viewfinder. He’s been holding his own all night - when it’s just the two of them everything is a little sharper, a little meaner. It’s like, when he’s gone, they can talk about the real world.
“Cameron Frye, how would you rate this party, out of five?” She says. She’s affecting a trans-atlantic sort of thing, Rosalind Russell in His Girl Friday, and he smiles.
“Well, Ms. Petersen, I’m gonna have to go two,” he says, looking straight down the barrel.
“That’s a very serious allegation,” she says. “Can you defend it?”
“Out of beer. Out of chips. Somebody threw up in -“ he points, and she swivels the camera to face the same direction. “That urn.”
“Can it be?” says Sloane, and she points the camera down into the basin. It’s an ugly thing, puke-green already, and shaped like the mermaid on a ship’s prow.
“Oh, Jesus, that’s disgusting,” she says in her normal voice.
“Yeah. It was when you were in the bathroom.”
She lets the camera drop until it’s hanging loosely at her side.
“And you tried to spare me. How chivalrous.”
“Chivalrous! Ha.”
They are close together. They’re always close together. He wants to maybe ask her: if she knows, if she minds. If it feels the same for her.
He usually likes telling his secrets to other people - like, for example, Sloane already knows about the time when Ferris’s dad caught them both masturbating in sleeping bags in sixth grade, and then Ferris lied, and said he was teaching Cameron how, and how that had been even more embarrassing, somehow.
“Did you finish?” she said, after she heard the story, and Ferris lit up with how exactly the right question that was, and Cameron felt a little bit absolved.
This, of course, is different. In a sense, they’re adversaries, and he is afraid she wouldn’t understand his system. He’s afraid that even his little allowances would be too much for her, and, again, he likes her. Almost as much as he likes Ferris, which is to say, almost as much as he likes anyone.
In the present, at the party, she beckons him down to her as if she is going to whisper a secret in his ear, and then, when their faces almost meet, she kisses him on the side of the mouth.
Cameron starts a little, not enough, he thinks, for her to notice, but she pulls back, face tilted up at his.
“No?” she says. She’s smiling this big, easy, wonderful smile, the kind of smile that says we’re gonna be fine, pal, and that’s why he kisses her back.
They kiss for a minute or two, before he feels himself starting to notice the way his hands are moving, the way his neck is craning. Notice himself again.
She breaks it with a giggle.
“What’s funny?” Cameron says, in a soft voice.
“No, nothing. Sorry. It was nice. We sort of talked about it. Ferris and I. I mean, I said I thought you were cute, and he said-“ she laughs again, and now Cameron feels adrift and getting further away by the second.
“He said, why don’t you try it?”
“Right,” says Cameron, and those questions get loud in his head, and mixed in there is a how could you that he saves for special occasions. How could you, Ferris. How the fuck could you. “I think I’m gonna go.”
On the drive home, he lets himself play out the scenario where she goes home and calls Ferris and tells Ferris everything, tells him Cameron got kind of weird about everything, kind of moody. And Ferris knows. Knew all along, sent this test in Ferris fashion, because the man can never do anything without this extra layer of theater, and Cameron, obviously, passed, and so now there’s Ferris on his front porch. Maybe falling on his knees, grabbing Cameron by the hips. Maybe it’s raining. Maybe all along, I should’ve seen what I had, Cameron.
This does not happen. On Monday, when Ferris has recovered from his cold, it is forgotten. And Sloane maybe thinks this is a favor she’s doing him, making it all go away. Which feels like pity, which makes him want to spend all day in his room, so he does. And Ferris comes over, and they go swimming, no Sloane, and Cameron lets himself linger on that freckle, and it’s like nothing happened. Which sucks.
She calls instead of him on Friday night, asks if he wants to go to the drive-in, and he says yes. He knows this is Ferris - Ferris, who wants them to get along - putting her up to it, but he says yes anyway, even when he has to be closed into the trunk to save $2.50, and Sloane gets to ride up front because it’s the same price for couples as it is for one car, and then halfway through the movie, Ferris’s hand starts to move up Sloane’s thigh, and Cameron thinks, they wouldn’t.
She is wearing shorts that flare out and stop halfway down her thighs, and a shirt that leaves a thin strip of her midriff showing, parallel with the orange stripes that run across it, and there is something in the way he is touching her that makes Cameron want to do anything at all, anything in the world to make it stop, maybe have a heart attack, or sacrifice a goat to summon a lightning strike, and then she looks at him over her shoulder.
He really, really wishes there was anything approaching smug on her face. He wishes she were selfish, or stupid, or vapid, or ugly, because, if she were, he could make Ferris see it.
Instead, she’s got big eyes, and a little half smile, and she reaches a hand back for him, and he takes it. Small, cold, manicured. He traces a circle in her palm, and she lets out a tiny little puff of breath that he’s certain is for him.
Ferris is touching her, and Cameron is touching her, and Cameron for once is not looking at Ferris, and so he has no idea if Ferris is looking at him. He knows this might break the world. He cannot decide if it will be worth it.
Too much time has passed touching only Sloane’s palm, like a seventh grader on a first date. The moment is coming when he will have to decide. He can’t - can’t, won’t - he opens the car door and steps out onto the dewey grass, closing it behind him from muscle memory but not looking back to see if they startle at the noise.
It would make sense to walk to concessions, or the restroom. Instead he starts to walk perpendicular to Ferris’s sedan and into the waist-high bush that surrounds the parking lot. He mostly wants to put some distance between him and everything. He wants to be in the dark.
A long time passes, away from the car radios, where he can’t hear the movie, can barely see the movie. Then there’s a rustling, and it’s Sloane, coming after him. Enough time has passed that whatever they were going to do, with him or without, they’ve already done it.
“Cameron, hey. What are you doing.”
She says it flat, not really a question.
“What am I doing? What are you doing?”
“I don’t know,” she says. “It’s - you’re always around. And I like having you around. And Ferris-“
Cameron gives her a look that he really thinks will say everything, which is to say, Cameron really, really tries to take the mask off.
“Are you-“ she turns and looks over her shoulder, then back to him. “What, is someone coming? Security? You look like you just saw a lion.”
Fine. Whatever.
“I’m not some,” Cameron says. “Some toy for you to play with.”
“I know,” Sloane says, defensive. “I’m sorry. Look, if that’s all it is, truly, no hard feelings. I just…wanted to see.”
She comes a little closer to him. They’re deep enough into the little copse of woods that, facing the right direction, the drive-in might as well not exist. And there are ten thousand things he wants, and honestly, four thousand of those things keep Sloane right here, don’t even do away with her, and he really does think that she’s funnier than Ferris, that living in the real world does something for a person. He might almost say he loves her.
“Are you jealous? Of him?” she says.
“What do you want from me?” he says back, the rabbinical response.
“I don’t know.”
“Do you want to fuck me? Are you not happy? Are you one of those girls that just has to sleep around?”
“Fuck you, Cameron,” she says.
“Sure. Not like I’m doing anything tomorrow. I’ll just sit around in my boxers and wait for you. Then you can collect the whole set.”
“Where is this coming from?” She’s as upset as he’s ever heard her.
“I don’t know.”
“Liar,” she says. “You used to hate me. I’d come around and you’d disappear. Then you changed your mind. Was it Ferris? Did he make you pretend to like me?”
Cameron doesn’t know what to say to that. He wonders, not for the first time, about Ferris alone in the car. Whose idea any of this is.
“I don’t like knowing that you talk about me,” he says lamely.
“Come on. You two must talk about me.”
“Not much,” says Cameron. “Sometimes.”
“Oh,” she says, and then they’re both quiet.
He has no idea whether or not he wants to kiss her or fuck her or fuck them both or whatever stupid white flag she is trying to offer him. He wants to give her this secret of his, maybe lighten his load a little, maybe weigh her down. She is good and kind and she would carry it with the right amount of dignity. Maybe she’d even disappear.
Instead, he says, “That’s not true. I don’t know why I said that. Ferris talks about you all the time. He’s crazy about you.”
“Cameron…”
“Really,” Cameron says, and smiles, to show her that he is brave.
The funny thing about spoke-to-spoke is that it’s a shorter distance by far.
“Let’s go back. He’s gonna wonder. If we’re much longer. He might think.”
The funny thing about Sloane Petersen is that maybe she kind of gets it.
“Yeah,” says Cameron. He wonders if there was ever a time when Sloane rationed her seconds like he does. When she knew how Ferris looked with sunset playing on the angles of his face, and she’d count out one-two-three-four and then look somewhere else. Or maybe she’s always been able to take as much as she wanted.
She picks her way carefully out of the forest, and he waits a beat, then another. Deciding if he will follow.
He is never getting out of this labyrinth.