When Lauren woke, Camila was gone.
The bed lay empty, the blankets pulled into place. The pajamas Lauren had lent Camila were folded neatly and resting on the floor by the closet.
Lauren stared into the empty room, surprised. She had been looking forward to Camila’s company, playing some CDs on the stereo or showing Camila the video game with all the sparkly things and little characters that Lauren had bought because it looked like something Camila would find amusing.
Lauren had never thought that Camila might leave while she was asleep. Could Camila really be that anxious to get back to the decaying building she lived in? What was there for her? An expensive watch that was probably stolen, a collection of things others had seen fit to throw away, a sweatshirt, a friend named Michael who had yet to be proven human.
Frowning, Lauren shut the guest room door quietly behind her, walking down the hall towards the kitchen. Sadly, Camila was not there either, though several things that had once been in the trash were now sitting innocently on the kitchen counter. A bent spoon, a cracked porcelain flower holder that had belonged to Lauren’s grandmother, an apple core.
“What the hell is with the apple cores?” Lauren asked the silence. Her only response was more silence.
She picked up the half eaten apple, throwing it up into the air and catching it in her palm again. Lauren was oddly reluctant to throw any of the things she considered garbage back into the trashcan. If they were worth something to Camila…
Lauren sighed and set the apple core by the window to dry out, dropped the spoon into the dishwasher, and hung the useless flower holder back on its nail on the wall.
When she opened the back door to the porch, bowls of cat food in hand, Lauren was surprised to find Elvis sitting there with six other cats, all watching her impatiently.
“Where’s Camila?” Lauren asked the black cat. Elvis watched her with knowing eyes. The harder Lauren looked at him the more she thought Elvis might be raising a superior eyebrow the way Camila did when she thought Lauren was being especially dumb.
Lauren winced and set down the cat food in hopes of distracting the cat. “Shut up.”
——-
Lauren waited anxiously that night but Camila never came.
She couldn’t force herself to stop waiting though, to give up and go to bed. What if Camila showed up to go through her trash the minute Lauren turned her back? What if she came and Lauren missed her? What if she didn’t ring the doorbell, didn’t alert Lauren of her presence, and Lauren slept through her visit and Camila walked home in the dark and got hit by a car and died on the asphalt and Lauren never knew about it and she just kept waiting but Camila never came because Camila was gone just like everyone else?
It was possible.
So Lauren waited, and waited, and finally she folded her arms on the windowsill and fell asleep.
When she woke again Camila was still not there. It was light out, the sun shining too bright through the window and into Lauren’s eyes. Lauren glared at the hated sun, wincing. She jerked the curtains closed, threw herself down onto the carpet and promptly went back to sleep.
Maybe Camila would be there the next time she woke up.
——-
It wasn’t fair, losing Camila twice like that. Lauren was fond of routine and Camila’s routine was that she came to see Lauren every day. Lauren liked that routine. She was used to it, comfortable with it. Every night after work she waited and every night after work Camila came to dig through her trash. That was the deal and Lauren liked it.
It was uncomfortable to think that nothing was for sure, that she hadn’t been promised anything and that at any moment Camila could just – disappear.
The next day, Lauren spent most of her time glaring at Cocoa’s customers, but that was nothing new, and Normani sighed a lot, but that wasn’t new either.
As much as she thought about it, Lauren couldn’t figure out why Camila hadn’t come back. She couldn’t figure out what she’d done to scare Camila off. Lauren hoped she’d scared Camila off, anyway, because she didn’t want to think of any other reason why Camila would have disappeared. Not with the neighborhood she lived in, not with the dangerous streets she walked every day, so damn trusting.
Lauren was sure Camila hadn’t said anything about leaving. Some of the things Camila said were still largely incomprehensible to Lauren, but it had been getting easier to understand Camila as time went by. She had her own language – Camilish, Camilanese. Lauren was proud to be learning it, wondered if anyone else spoke the language that was Camila’s words, all mixed up and straight out of her head.
Finally, on the second lonely night after Camila had disappeared, Lauren gave in to the suffocating need to see Camila again and got into her car, flashlight in hand. She drove towards the slums in the dull darkness that was Los Angeles at night, tapping a nervous finger against the dashboard as she drove.
The building Camila stayed in was not hard to find. Its crumbling bricks and shattered windows were ingrained in the dark corners of Lauren’s mind no matter how much she would have liked to forget them.
The streetlight was flickering but easy enough to see by. Lauren found the hole in the fence and pushed her way through it. She winced as a sharpened point of the twisted metal scraped against her bare arm, stinging. It was really painful and Lauren regretted leaving her jacket at home. When she stopped a moment to rub at the injury, she noticed her fingers coming away wet. Lauren gagged and rubbed her hand off on her tight jeans. She continued forward quickly, finding the broken window in the back of the building and managing to lift herself through it without further injury. It wasn’t easy and Lauren wondered how Camila did it every day, if she had scars marring her skin from the twisted metal of the fence or the sharp shards of glass still left in the window frame.
“Camila?” Lauren called into the empty first floor of the building. She flipped on the flashlight, illuminating the floor as she moved carefully forward, cautious of rusty nails. She wondered if Camila had ever stepped on one.
Lauren placed a testing foot on the first step of the staircase she knew led up to the room Camila slept in. It creaked and she winced, testing her weight on the thing and determining it stable enough to take another step.
If Camila could do it, so could Lauren.
“I know you’re here,” Lauren called when she’d managed to make her way up the stairs to the room Camila stayed in. She pushed the door open and cringed as it creaked on rusty, unstable hinges. “I know you’re here,” she called louder and wished it were true.
Camila wasn’t there.
The room was empty except for beaten furniture. No stray cats wandered past as Lauren walked cautiously over to the sleeping bag in the corner. She stared hard at the dark material, illuminating it with her flashlight, but Lauren had no way of knowing if Camila had slept there tonight, if Camila had slept there any night.
Camila’s collection of sparkly things in the trunk by the sleeping pallet caught the light, reflecting harshly back. The watch was still there, lying innocently between a piece of tinfoil and a stick of gum still in its wrapper. Lauren was still unsure of why tinfoil would mean anything to Camila, but all the same she accepted that it did in fact mean something to her and maybe that was all that mattered.
When Lauren moved the flashlight to examine the rest of the room it looked the same except this time it didn’t have Camila in it. The room seemed more dull as a result, plain and broken. The only difference, besides Camila’s absence was the closet – the closet in which a pink and black sweatshirt was no longer hanging.
Lauren snorted softly and felt a fond smile pulling at her lips.
She thought about waiting in the empty building beneath the precarious roof but it seemed more likely to Lauren that Camila would show up at her own home before she showed up here. Lauren would rather Camila showed up at her home than here.
With a final look around the empty room Lauren turned her back on the lifeless place.
Outside it was getting cold and Lauren could hear the siren to an ambulance somewhere not so far away. She stood on the cracked cement in front of the decaying building and wondered if the stars knew where Camila had gone.
She tilted her head back, staring up into the sky. The stars didn’t speak to Lauren the same way they spoke to Camila though, and when Lauren looked up to them all she saw was darkness.
“I’d like her back now,” Lauren said to the black sky anyway.
——-
The house was quiet. The world was quiet.
Lauren had never longed for conversation so much before.
Not even conversation, really. Just, Camila’s voice, Camila talking about strange things that Lauren would probably never grasp, Camila and her stars and her graves and her magic.
The silence was so loud it rang in Lauren’s ears, making her deaf. She opened her mouth to ask Camila if the silence was too loud for her too, because Camila would probably appreciate the sentiment, but Camila was not there.
Another day passed. Lauren tried not to wonder what Camila was doing as she poured a coffee, what Camila was doing as the songs on Lauren’s iPod changed, what Camila was doing as another customer ran out Cocoa’s front door with his tail between his legs and the bells jingling cheerfully behind him.
Lauren slept and went to work and came home and almost wished she could go back to work again. The house was empty and quiet and still, still not really Lauren’s, still her grandmother’s house.
She did not know what to do with herself within its walls, could not remember what she’d done before she’d met Camila.
The clock ticked and Lauren counted the seconds.
She counted all her beanies. She counted the spiders in the corners. She counted the water stains on the ceiling. She counted the channels on the television. She counted her beanies again. She thought about pouring out the salt container to count the grains of salt.
She put a frozen steak in the oven. It crackled. It burned. The fire alarm went off.
She counted the ear piercing beeps.
86… 87… 88…
“Fire!” someone screeched, louder even than the fire alarm. Mrs. Smith came crashing in through the front door, dressed only in a bathrobe. She did not appear to have a fire extinguisher with her or anything else that would put out a fire. Lauren wondered if she was just there to watch her burn. “Run!”
“You’re making me lose count,” Lauren complained, giving the panicked woman a spiteful glare. “Now I have to start over.”
“Run, you foolish girl!” Mrs. Smith cried, reaching out to grab her by the arm, trying to jerk her off the floor where Lauren was watching the oven smoke. “There’s a… a… fire?”
Lauren rolled her eyes and waved vaguely towards the oven.
“Oh.” Mrs. Smith blinked a few times, glancing between Lauren and the smoking oven, clearly disappointed. A fire in the neighborhood would have been the highlight of her week, Lauren was sure.
Mrs. Smith grumbled something that couldn’t have been complimentary and slapped Lauren on the arm before walking over to turn the oven off. She watched her silently as she climbed up onto a chair, pressing the button on the fire alarm so there was only silence once again.
Lauren frowned and immediately began to miss the noise.
“Even your grandmother was not so terrible a cook,” Mrs. Smith accused, trying to wave the smoke from the air with her bony hand. “Preposterous.”
“And you didn’t like her either,” Lauren pointed out cynically. “Just like you don’t like me, just like you don’t like your husband, just like you don’t like Camila… you don’t like Camila.”
Mrs. Smith scoffed. “I certainly don’t like—“
Lauren was on her feet before she could finish the thought, looming over her small form so her eyes went wide. “What did you do?” She clenched her fingers hard to keep them off her.
Mrs. Smith stared at her with wide eyes. “I’m sure I don’t know—“
“Where is she? I know it’s your fault. What did you say to her?” Lauren couldn’t remember ever feeling so angry before. Her teeth mashed together and her jaw ached and she imagined what she would do to Mrs. Smith if her grandmother hadn’t been the sort of woman she was.
Mrs. Smith glared harshly, recovering from her momentary surprise and lifting her pointy chin defiantly. “I have not spoken to or seen your homeless… friend in days, nor do I wish to.”
She stared at her with beady eyes and Lauren winced and deflated again, moving to collapse back onto a chair. “Oh.”
She blinked at her a few times, staring at faded bathrobe. It was covered in polka dots. Lauren started to count them.
Mrs. Smith frowned hard and gave her a look that was incongruous on her face. On anyone else, Lauren might have called it concern. On Mrs. Smith it just looked painful.
“I…” She trailed off, seeming confused. Lauren watched her; curious if the woman was capable of any emotion other than spite. “I… You should mow your lawn,” she finally came up with, squaring her shoulders and setting her jaw. “It’s atrocious, a dark mark on a respectable neighborhood. Honestly, Miss Jauregui!”
Apparently not. The woman huffed and turned on her heel, marching out the front door and allowing it to slam dramatically behind her.
——-
That night Lauren found herself standing outside the door to the guest room, having momentarily abandoned her watch by the window.
She reached for the doorknob hesitantly, unsure. It was, she told herself, her guest room, her house. She could go in if she wanted to. It wasn’t an invasion of privacy – it wasn’t even Camila’s room. Camila didn’t live there.
Lauren grasped the knob firmly in her hand and pulled the door open.
The room looked exactly the same as it always had, exactly the same as Camila had left it when she’d gone… wherever it was she had gone. The bed was made, Lauren’s pajamas still folded up neatly on the floor by the closet.
Lauren stepped through the doorway, staring at the pale walls and the fluffy blankets, so ordinary. She tilted her head, trying to imagine what Camila had seen when she looked at them, wondering what the world looked like to Camila. Everything Camila saw, she seemed to find magic in. Lauren could stare until her eyes bled but she didn’t think she’d ever see it.
The walls were just walls, the carpet was just a carpet, the bed was just a bed – a bed Camila had slept in.
Lauren walked over to the bed and sat down, running her fingers over the soft blankets and wondering what they felt like to Camila. She wondered if the luxurious linen was as different from a sleeping bag as Lauren thought it was, or if Camila saw the sleeping bag as something special and unique just like she saw everything as special and unique.
Probably.
Lauren flopped down on the bed, her long messy locks against the pillow as she stared up at the blank, water stained ceiling – three water stains in this room, Lauren had counted – and wondered what Camila saw there when she stared up at the same ceiling. Did she see stars in the grooves of plaster? Did that water stain look like a cloud?
Lauren closed her eyes and counted sheep.
——-
Lauren had never slept beside Camila. She’d never shared a bed with Camila, though Camila had invited her. She wished now she’d taken the opportunity when it had been offered to her.
Still, when Lauren woke, her nose buried in a pillow that smelled like what Lauren supposed was Camila, she reached out an uncoordinated arm, expecting her fingers to find Camila there, sleeping in the same bed.
Her fingers only met air, cold and drafty, and Lauren blinked herself awake, oddly confused. Where was Camila?
Not there.
“Crap.” Lauren let her hand flop back down onto the covers.
She groaned and pushed herself up onto her elbows, the dark room around her, strange and unfamiliar. Even as a child, Lauren had never slept in the guest room. She’d always had her own room at her grandmother’s house, the same one she slept in now even though she was gone.
The clock by the bed was glaring at her, big bright numbers declaring the time 2:08 AM. Lauren rubbed her eyes tiredly, wondering what had woken her. There were no sounds in the house, just like there had not been for days, but Lauren rolled out of bed anyway, walking down the hall towards the family room to check, again, if Camila was there.
Lauren could not help but worry for Camila. Camila, alone inside her head – which was far from empty, but still Lauren worried. She could not bring herself to think of Camila interacting with people who did not know her, people who would not see the magic that was Camila and would only see a strange looking girl who confused them, people who had no respect or understanding of how amazing Camila was. Lauren’s stomach was in anxious knots as she looked again out the family room window worriedly.
Lauren didn’t expect Camila to be there, which probably was why Camila was.
She looked outside, expecting darkness when instead there was light. The motion sensor light was on.
Lauren froze, staring out into her brightly lit front yard, watching the movement near her trashcan with wide eyes.
“Holy shit,” Lauren muttered, and then she was running out the front door, down the steps and towards Camila who was standing there in her black and purple hoodie with a nameless piece of garbage in one hand. “Camila!”
Camila shifted, looking up to Lauren with surprised eyes. “Yes.”
“Camila,” Lauren repeated because it was the only thing she could think to say. She hooked her fingers desperately around Camila’s wrist, pulling her into a hug that Lauren couldn’t even convince herself was friendly but indifferent. Not even close. She buried her face in Camila’s shoulder, her fingers clawing at Camila’s back. “Camz.”
“Good morning,” Camila greeted, patting Lauren’s head in a strangely reassuring motion.
“Good morning,” Lauren greeted back. “You left. Where were you?”
“I was chasing the stars,” Camila answered seriously, pulling curiously on a strand of Lauren’s messy hair now. “Where were you?”
Lauren snorted against Camila’s shoulder. “I was right here. I missed you,” she admitted, though it was probably fairly obvious by the death grip Lauren had on Camila. “Why did you leave? You’re not supposed to leave.”
“Absence makes the heart grow fonder,” Camila told her. “Are you fond of me yet?”
“You know I am,” Lauren breathed.
Camila smiled, bright and happy, pleased with herself or pleased with Lauren or just pleased with the world in general. Lauren grinned stupidly back, the muscles in her face pulling weirdly.
“I saw friends,” Camila offered. “They want to meet you too. They like you.”
All of Camila’s friends seemed to like Lauren. “None of your friends are like you and me, are they Camz?”
“No one is like Lolo,” Camila agreed easily, combing her fingers through Lauren’s hair, which she seemed to be fascinated by.
“Okay… but, humans. None of your friends are humans. None of your friends look out for you. None of your friends talk to you.”
Camila glared and tugged hard at Lauren’s hair, clearly offended by the statement. “They all talk to me. Even the trees. I bet the trees don’t talk to you.”
Lauren winced, pulling her hair from Camila’s fingers and stepping back a bit. “No, I guess they don’t,” she admitted.
Lauren still wondered, though. She wondered how a person, a person who seemed to love to talk and communicate and interact as much as Camila did, could live their life with almost no real human interaction. Only, apparently, the trees.
“Michael stays with me,” Camila offered when Lauren said nothing.
Lauren shook her head. “But human beings, Camila. Not the stars or the shiny things…”
“He’ll be back soon,” Camila said a bit hollowly, eyes going slightly unfocused the way they sometimes did.
“Michael?” Lauren asked, beginning to wonder if perhaps the name really did belong to a person. It was a dangerous thought. With Camila things were never the way Lauren thought they would be.
Camila nodded, looking a bit lost. “Or… maybe I was supposed to go see him?”
“Were you?” Lauren asked as she pulled Camila away from the trash and towards the house. Camila followed easily, staring at the walls and the carpeting like it was amazing to her, brilliant and special, just as Camila always did.
“Was I?” Camila asked, turning to focus intently on Lauren curiously.
Lauren bit her lip, unsure. “How would I know?”
“You’re Lauren.” Camila said it like it meant something, staring at her with trusting eyes.
“Yeah.” Lauren swallowed, a hesitant smile on her lips. “I guess I am.”
Her name had never really meant anything before. It seemed that it did now, and if it meant something to Camila, Lauren figured she’d have to live up to that.
“When was the last time you saw Michael?” Lauren encouraged, pushing Camila so they were both sitting on the couch in the family room, the same one Lauren had been waiting on, sleeping on for the last days, waiting for Camila to come back.
“Monday,” Camila answered, which would have been a weirdly specific answer for her, except that to Camila ‘Monday’ could have been any day.
“This Monday?”
“Some Monday.”
Lauren ran the pads of her fingers worriedly over Camila’s face. She seemed cheerful, as Camila almost always did, but she had dark circles under her eyes and her cheeks were a bit hollow. Lauren wondered if Camila took breaks from chasing the stars to eat or sleep.
Camila yawned and nuzzled Lauren’s fingers and Lauren smiled affectionately. “Tired?”
“So are you,” Camila accused sleepily, which was true enough. Lauren had never been so happy to be awake in the middle of the night, though.
Lauren stood, tugging at Camila’s arm so she would follow her and leading Camila towards the guest bedroom. The blankets were rumpled from Lauren’s tossing and turning. Camila made a pleased sound at the sight of the bed and crawled down onto it, no complaints about Elvis being lonely or the stars missing her.
“Do you like it here?” Lauren asked her, standing awkwardly over the bed as Camila nuzzled the same pillow Lauren had been resting on earlier.
“Yes,” Camila told her easily.
“That’s good,” Lauren said, because it was, and then she crawled onto the bed with Camila.
Camila rolled over to blink at her with sleepy eyes, a sparkle in them that said Camila did not mind the company at all. She reached out with one hand and grabbed Lauren’s hand in her own, placing their entwined fingers on the pillow between them.
“Stay,” Lauren said, not sure if it was a question or a command but sure that Camila would interpret it however she pleased. “Stay here. Stay with me. Please stay.”
Camila hummed pleasantly, squeezing Lauren’s hand. Lauren squeezed back.
Camila stayed, after that.