Through Her Eyes (Camren)

Chapter 20: Unusually Ordinary

“Camila, I love you,” Lauren declared in a squeaky voice.

Camila stared at her hands.

Lauren cleared her throat and tried again.

“Camila,” she called, brandishing the bent spatula that had once been known as Ariana. She spoke out of the side of her mouth, waving the spatula back and forth like it was speaking. “Camila, I love you! Why won’t you talk to me anymore? It makes me sad.” The spatula drooped in Lauren’s hand, doing a convincing impression of a very depressed kitchen utensil. “Lauren can’t dance. Who will dance with me now?”

Not Camila, it seemed. She stayed seated at the table, staring at her hands with dull disinterest.

Lauren spun around the kitchen once, leaning over to dip the spatula in a strange imitation of a ballroom dance. Camila didn’t look up and finally Lauren sighed and set Ariana on the table, giving her a consoling pat.

After Camila had stopped speaking to her inanimate friends, Lauren had started to feel like she had to. Camila had been so fond of them, her affection contagious, and now they were all being abandoned. Lauren was being abandoned.

“You’re not going to talk to any of them?” She asked, not really expecting a response. Lauren knew Camila wouldn’t and she knew why. She just didn’t know how to fix it without taking everything she’d said back.

If she took everything back it might make Camila happy again – her heart clenched at the thought – but it would make Camila think they were going to be together, too. Lauren couldn’t do that only to have to take it away again.

Lauren couldn’t be with Camila because Camila was… so strange, but she didn’t want Camila to stop being strange, either. Lauren wasn’t sure how that worked exactly, how it was going to work. Not very well, at the moment.

“Not even to me, huh?” Lauren kicked lightly at the foot of Camila’s chair imploringly. Camila bit her lip. The only sound piercing the silence was of toast popping up.

“Yeah,” Lauren said. “I didn’t think so.”

Picking up her burnt toast, Lauren greeted the toaster anyway. It seemed like it would have been strange not to.

——-

The harder Camila tried for normalcy the stranger she seemed. Camila was not made to be average. Maybe she never had been. Lauren couldn’t imagine it. Maybe Camila had spent her whole life creating a world of magic and delight around herself like a storybook.

The paintings had names even when Camila wasn’t speaking to them, the walls were more than walls even when Camila wasn’t acknowledging it. Camila couldn’t change those things. Camila couldn’t change herself. She could only try to suppress it, hide under suffocating layers of expectation.

Lauren wouldn’t let her.

Camila was sitting by the window in a dark room when Lauren plopped down beside her, pressing herself into Camila’s space like it was still their space, like Lauren was still welcome. Camila wasn’t looking out the window but down, a heavy book balanced on her knees. It was an old history textbook – Lauren could easily tell as the title was right side up.

“Your book is upside down,” Lauren pointed out, leaning closer. “How can it speak to you like that?”

Camila made a frustrated noise, looking a bit like she wanted to throw the book at Lauren. Really, Lauren wouldn’t have minded a book in the face as long as it meant Camila was listening. A reaction, any reaction.

Abruptly, Lauren yanked the book from Camila’s fingertips. Camila jerked back, wide-eyed and startled, and Lauren grinned at her.

“You be quiet,” she instructed, even though Camila had said and would have said nothing. “I’m going to read this book. I’m an awesome book-reader. It’s one of my many hidden talents. You just listen.”