Page 42 of Treasured By Them
“Hey, Danica!” Malcolm waves from the shed. “I need some help with the canoe.”
“Be right there!” I flip forward to a blank page and write it all out again, adding the letters to each spot. Then I copy down the code I’d written beneath it.
61 is M.
11 is A.
41 is L.
13 is C.
Shit. I can already see where this is going. I had a crush on him, but something tells me I wasn’t writing the name of my crush. Because hell, I was eight. I also had a crush on Blaise Pascal. And if you look at pictures of him, well…my tastes were iffy at best.
Did Malcolm attend the camp? I mean, obviously not as a camper—he’s my dad’s age. But could he have been there as an adult?
Zora just told me he spent a lot of years around here. Which years?
An image flashes in my mind—Malcolm wearing one of those red camp t-shirts. He’s sitting at a picnic table with other camp counselors. It’s a memory.
He was there.
Why don’t I have any pictures of him, if he was there? This was right around the time I had my silly, little-kid crush on him. I probably would’ve taken more photos of him than the lake, in that case.
I stare at my “equation,” and the code I made with Pascal’s triangle. I don’t have to write it out to know the final three letters will be O, L, and M.
“Is that your old camp scrapbook?” Malcolm is suddenly standing over me.
His gaze is on my scrapbook, not my math journal, but I quickly slam the journal closed over my pen.
“Um. Yeah.” It’s hard to breathe. I have to get away from him until I know what I’m looking at with that code. Was I a besotted eight-year-old, writing my crush’s name down over and over again?
Or was I traumatized and leaving myself a message for later?
“Let’s take the canoe out.” Malcolm claps his hands twice. I get a sudden flashback of him encouraging a camp full of children forward, clapping in the same way.
Where the fuck is Zora? And why did I send Caleb away?
“Nah, I think I’ll stay here. It’ll be dark soon, anyway.” I look for my phone—my lifeline. It’s on the little table between Malcolm and me.
“Come on, it’ll be like old times.” He gives me a pleading grin, raising his eyebrows and clasping his hands together.
“You mean like when we were at camp?”
His smile freezes in place. “Well, yeah. We did canoes all the time, remember?”
“I’d forgotten most of it. The scrapbook reminded me.” A big, empty void grows in my gut. Blaise Pascal and a bunch of other old dead guys argued whether or not nature abhors a vacuum. But I have living proof of a vacuum in my stomach right now. It’s an emptiness so acute, it feels solid.
“So?” He claps his hands again. “Shall we?”
I force a smile of my own. “Sure. I’ll just toss my beer bottle. I don’t want to attract bees.”
I thought I’d grab my phone on the way, but he maneuvers himself over, blocking me. Casually, though. It could be an accident.
While he waits for me to toss my bottle in the recycling at the edge of the deck, he flips open the cover of my math journal.
I gasp. “Hey, that’s private?—”
“Numbers, huh?” He examines the last page I was writing on, which had been bookmarked by my pen. “What’s this?”
