Ghost Time

sleep much last night, he said, and then I started telling him, I told you so! but I stopped, because I’ve already told him he needed to sleep like a hundred times, and it’s no use.
    I’d been sitting there, with our notebook in my lap, looking through Cam’s last entry while he was gassing up the car. It was page after page of 1s and 0s, but done in all these different styles, like twenty different graffiti artists had tagged and retagged this endless wall. It’s so cool—I’d never have thought of that, I said,thinking out loud while he started the car. All information can be rendered in 1s and 0s, so I wrote you a note in code. In code , I said, like, yeah, right, and he cocked his head and raised his brow all Spock-like. Okay, then, tell me, what’s this say? I asked, showing him the last page, and he said, Forever. It’s Forever written in 1s and 0s, and I said, Ha!, cocking my head back at him, and he said, I’m serious—that’s exactly what all those pages say: Forever. Then he smiled, reaching over and squeezing my hand, like he’d never let go.

TUESDAY, APRIL 5, 2011
    (TWELVE HOURS LATER)
    5:54 AM
    I was having this really bizarre dream where I come to, and I see Cam’s car—like the first thing I see is Cam’s car, parked in front of this two-bedroom house in the middle of nowhere. And there aren’t any other houses around, just this little white house, and the grass is so overgrown, it’s waist high, except for the yard right around the house. It’s not like I’m scared or anything, but it’s weird, so I walk over to Cam’s car to see if the keys are in the ignition, and they are.
    I get in, and just as I’m about to turn over the engine, I hear Cam—like, his voice starts calling my name. And it sounds like he’s in the house, waiting for me, so I get out, and I walk over and knock on the front door, but nobody answers. So I stick my head inside and say, Hello? but no one answers. And then I see that there’s nothing in the house; it’s empty, and Cam’s not there. I turn around, and he calls me again: Thee, come here! It soundslike he’s out front, right, so I go back outside, but he’s not there, either. So I walk around the house, looking for him, but I can’t find him anywhere, and then I start to hear pounding, and he keeps calling me, Thea!, Thea! His voice gets really loud, too, and I’m just about to yell at him to stop knocking and come out, when I realize it’s my mom’s voice—I’m dreaming—I was just dreaming.
    I have no idea what’s going on, and I can barely open my eyes, but I told her to come in, and when my door opens, it’s not just Mom, Karen’s there, too—Cam’s mom, she’s standing at my door, looking all crazy. Seriously, I’ve never seen Karen look like that, and then she looks behind me, in my room, and she goes, Where is he? And I’m just like, I don’t know. I mean, I actually turned and looked around my room, too, like… I don’t know, maybe there was some way Cam was in my room, and I didn’t even know?
    Cam? Karen says, and my mom looks at me, and I look at my mom, like, I have no idea what’s going on. I said, Karen, Cam’s not here. I don’t know where he is. And she goes, He didn’t come home last night, and then I was just like, What the fuck? Is he okay? Was he in an accident? Where is he? I said, He left right before my mom came home, and Karen goes, His car is here. I said, Karen, I’m telling you, I never saw him after he left yesterday, and Mom nodded, agreeing with me, and right away, I started feeling woozy, like when you lose cabin pressure.
    I sat up and I go, Wait a second, and I got my phone, and I tried calling him, but he didn’t answer. Not only that, there was no message—his voice mail didn’t pick up, the line just wentdead, disconnected. I looked at my phone, and then I tried again, and the same thing happened again. By that point, I was totally awake, and Karen and my mom were standing there. But when I looked at Karen, the way she looked at me, I knew she’d already tried and experienced the same thing: no answer. His car is here—it’s out front, in your parking lot, she said again, and I go, I’m telling you, I watched him drive away last night, and I haven’t seen him since, Karen.
    We walked into the living room, the three of us, and Karen said she’d called the police, and they said to give it a day, twenty-four hours, since he’s eighteen and legally an adult, but that there