"I mean," she said one night in her room- her dad allowed him to enter her room now, even after daylight hours- "He's not even going to college, right? He's going to be a mechanic or something. I'm her family." But Cameron knew why Bianca was saying these things; because even if she wouldn't admit it, she cared, and was even kind of worried about what would happen to Kat- "Without normal people around her, who knows what could happen? By the time she comes back, it'll be too late! She'll be lost to civilisation forever."
Bianca's behaviour was something Cameron could understand. However, when his mother blithely announced she was abandoning him, he found it hard to rationalise, even if she found it painfully easy.
"Honey, you're old enough to look after yourself now, and with your college application coming up, continuity is really important for your education- your dad's going to be moving around, and I don't want you to jeopardise your future. I won't be gone all the time; only a few weeks- just, don't forget to eat, and make sure you get fresh vegetables."
"Everyone's abandoning me," he said to Bianca the next day. "At least you're going to be around for a while, right?"
"Um. Well," she said, and stopped kissing him.
"Oh," said Cameron, and then Bianca told him she was going on an exchange. To France. For two months.
"I don't want to break up with you, Cameron- "
"Good," he said.
"But I think we should, just as a precaution."
Cameron agreed with her eventually, partly because he knew he'd feel weird saying 'Hi, Mr Stratford' whenever he saw Bianca's father if Bianca wasn't actually with him. Anyway, as he was leaving, Mr Stratford called from the sofa.
"Young man, Bianca won't be here on Thursday but I should emphasise that you are welcome to come to dinner as usual- "
"That's okay, Mr Stratford," he interrupted. "We've just broken up precautionarily."
Mr Stratford looked suspicious. "Really?"
"Yes, sir."
"Oh, thank god," he said, and slumped in visible relief. "No histrionic fits, no delinquency, no long-term drug addiction, no pregnancy- Wonderful. Peace, finally. This is perfect."
"Not quite," said Cameron, and fled before Mr Stratford remembered what highschool students were popularly supposed to get up to on school trips.
He'd ended up spending so much time with Michael in the last year that the audiovisual guys let him make coffee using the machine they'd secretly wired into the school mainframe which filtered and boiled water from cold in under fifteen seconds. They sold it in between classes to the arabica-geeks- "Boiling water fresh each time makes all the difference," one told him, fervently twitching- but there was only so much tech-talk he could take at a time.
One day he went down to the workshop on a whim, and ended up talking to Patrick for half an hour.
"You're not meant to be here," said Patrick through a welding mask, oblivious.
"Neither are you."
"I," said Patrick, carefully directing the gas flame along the outer edge of a length of metal pipe, "am allowed. You are not."
"I'll just, um, go then," Cameron said. He hung back, undecided. "We could, like, meet up or something; talk about how our girlfriends- who are still actually sisters, by the way, which is weird if you think about it- uh, how our girlfriends are on the other side of the country or world or whatever."
"Yeah. Sure. Come by the garage tomorrow." was the reply he got.
"Alright then," he said, and left.
When he turned up at the garage, Patrick was nowhere to be seen. There was a guy doing something to the steaming innards of a battered truck who was maybe in his early thirties and looked like he was probably in charge. The board up at the front said SPARKY CARS in peeling letters, and then in smaller writing, much more recently painted, PROPRIETOR, JOHN J. BENDER.
"Hey," said Cameron. "What does the J stand for?"
The guy looked at him like he was an idiot. "John."
"Oh, okay. Right. Sure." He nodded, hoping he didn't actually look like an idiot. "You know, that's kind of funny, because- Never mind. Is Patrick around?" He swallowed. The guy raised his eyebrows. He was kind of scary.
"He's out back," the guy said eventually. "You want me to go call him?"
"Uh, no, thanks; I'll go."
Out back, Patrick was also doing something almost entirely incomprehensible to the insides of a car.
"Hey, uh, you said we could maybe hang out?"
Patrick looked up at him blankly.
"Talk about how not-here our girlfriends are?" Cameron ventured optimistically.
"Yeah, sure…" Patrick answered, with his head under the bonnet, vaguely rummaging for something. He yanked the fan belt, broken, out of the engine and stood up. "OK. Now we can go."
Patrick's place wasn't nearly as grimy or ill-kept as his reputation would have suggested. There was beer in the fridge and a sofa that was satisfyingly squashy. The music on the stereo was shouty and indistinct.
Cameron stared at the ceiling. "What do you do when your girlfriend isn't around? How do you cope?" The damp stain in the corner had spread since he last looked at it. Maybe he should warn Patrick in case the damp became a problem. Probably, though, if there was one he already knew about it. Or he just didn't care.
Patrick exhaled. "You masturbate until you're numb." Cameron watched the trail of smoke drift upwards. "And listen to a lot of Sleater-Kinney records, but that might just be me."
"Oh," said Cameron.
"Seriously," Patrick said eventually, after a couple of minutes' silence. He lifted his head. "Do you want to fuck or not?"
What? "What?" he managed to say.
"Look, you're cute, but you can't just- " He tailed off. "Oh. Right. Sorry about that. Want another beer?"
Cameron just stared at Patrick, his quizzical expression and black t-shirt and muscles, and made a decision.
"Yeah, sure," he said, and when Patrick made to get up, he held him back. "Um. I meant the other thing."
This time Patrick was doing the staring, so Cameron just leant in and kissed him. There was an awful second when he thought Patrick had been screwing with him, when Patrick wasn't kissing him back, but Patrick just pulled back, eyes crazy, and said slightly breathlessly, "Really? Because I thought-" , to which Cameron said "No, dude, I mean it," not realising it was true until he'd said it.
"Fine," said Patrick, and he got one hand inside Cameron's pants, and wow, that was pretty much the best thing ever.
"How was that?" Patrick asked afterwards, still idly making little circles over Cameron's hipbone with his thumb.
"I don't know," said Cameron. "I feel kind of used."
Patrick grinned. "Happens," he said, and then, "I've got to work late tomorrow, but come round the day after? I can make dinner, even. If you like."
"Sure," said Cameron, and he was suddenly, unreasonably, deliriously happy.