Chapter 112: Packing Up, Moving On

Saturday, April 14, 1984

Cammie was in a great mood at breakfast. No surprise there, since she was with friends and safe, but it was still very nice to see. There was still a long way to go, but things were on the mend, if slowly.

“Oh, I forgot to tell you!” Cammie said. “Mel said she and the boys will be at Study Group tomorrow!”

“That’s great!” Jas said. “I thought it was very cool of her mom to bring her here.”

“We talked,” Camille said. “I can say from experience...”

She gave us a grin.

“ ... that is, my experience, not Jasmine’s...”

And another grin.

“That, by the time a child is at most fourteen or fifteen, often younger, laying down rules isn’t the way to succeed and grounding won’t work. Any smart child will find a way around unreasonable rules.”

“And draconian rules?” Cammie said.

“One should not be allowed to use rules of that sort,” Camille said.

“I agree,” Cammie said. Then she grinned and added, “Obviously!”

“So,” Jas said, “what are we doing today?”

“That depends,” I said. “We need to check with Elizabeth. If the Clarkes will be out today, our first priority is retrieving Cammie’s things. Otherwise, Angie wants to do some furniture shopping, and we were talking about planning for the summer trip.”

“I need to ask,” Cammie said. “Does no one else think it’s strange that Angie’s solution to my needing a bed is to just go furniture shopping? Not ... like ... an air mattress, or even a real mattress, or some thrift-store bed frame, or...”

“Nah,” I said.

“Nope,” Jasmine said.

“It only slightly surprises me,” Camille said, grinning a bit.

“It makes sense,” I said. “She really does need a bigger bed for college. Well, that, or I need a bigger bed, since my bed is technically Angie’s bed. Either way, we need at least one larger bed — the house only comes with twin beds — so, shopping.”

Cammie nodded. “There’s more to it, but ... yeah.”

“In this case, it’s money left to her by Frank,” I said. “He’d want her to use it for things that would last. It’ll mean something to her to do something special with it, both for you now and for herself later.”

Cammie blushed. “That’s ... well, okay. That’s different. I hadn’t thought it through that way. It’s just ... everyone’s been ... you know, I’ve got nothing, and...”

Camille was the first to get her arms around Cammie, but we all hugged her.

“You’ve got more than many people have,” Camille said. “You have someone special to you, and you have people who love you, want to help you, and will stand by you through thick and thin.”

Cammie nodded, after a second. “You’re right.”

“We love you, Cammie,” Jas said.

“We all do,” I said. “You know that.”

Cammie blushed and smiled. “Thanks,” she said, sniffling just a bit.

“And you have a lot, beyond that,” I said. “Brains, beauty, drive, ambition, and loyalty — and that’s just for starters. We didn’t do any of that — we just made sure no one could hijack that.”

Cammie blushed a bit more. “Again, just ... thanks! I know that, I just ... it’s...”

“We get it,” Jas said. “And ... you’re going to need time.”

“Talk to Angie,” I said.

Cammie bit her lip, then nodded. “That’s good advice. I will.”

“And a professional,” Jas said, grinning. “It really made a difference for me when I needed it.”

Cammie nodded again. “That, too. Already something I want to work on.”

Elizabeth said that she’d talked briefly to the Clarkes. While they were clearly very unhappy, they grudgingly agreed that today was the best time to handle things. Therefore, they were going to be out from noon to four, and we could fetch Cammie’s things then.

Elizabeth stressed the need to be cautious. Anything in Cammie’s room was fair game. Anything not in Cammie’s room was not. If Cammie could convincingly claim it was hers and had to be hers, that was one thing, but unless it was unambiguous, it stayed.

The whole thing was making me very nervous, so I asked Elizabeth about our options.

“What do we do if they accuse us of taking something we shouldn’t?” I said.

“At this point, it’s ‘he-said, she-said’ unless they can point to the missing item,” Elizabeth said.

“I think we need a plan,” I said. “Could we get witnesses?”

“They’d have to be people who the Clarkes couldn’t just accuse of being on our side,” she said.

“Hang on,” I said, then set the phone down. Then I looked at Cammie and asked, “Cammie, do you have any family locally who you trust? Or trust enough for this, anyway?”

She bit her lip. “My uncle and my other aunt are ... they’re okay. Not my favorite people, but ... yeah. I can manage. Are you thinking what I think you’re thinking?”

“If you’re thinking of seeing if they’ll watch us, then yes. We need witnesses who aren’t ‘on our side,’ or paid by us, but who will back up that we didn’t take anything we weren’t supposed to take, and particularly not from anywhere else in the house,” I said.

“I ... yeah. That should work. I can be around them.”

I picked the phone back up, saying, “Did you hear that?”

“Yes,” Elizabeth said. “That sounds like a good solution.”

“Will you be there, too?”

“You paying me?” she said, sounding playful.

“Of course,” I said.

“Then, yes.”

“We’ll call you back if Cammie’s aunt and uncle will help.”

“Sounds good!” she said.

I hung up, then handed the phone over to Cammie. Ten minutes (and one surprisingly pleasant call — it sounded as if Cammie’s aunt and uncle were more eager to help than she’d expected) we had an agreement. They would meet us at Cammie’s house at noon. We would all go in, along with Elizabeth. Paige and Jas would help pack, but they were also in charge of taking photographs — before, during, and after.

Cammie’s aunt and uncle would be watching. Anything in Cammie’s room was explicitly fair game, so their job was to watch us when we weren’t in Cammie’s room.

I called Elizabeth back and she approved the plan. Everything was a go. Then I called home, said hi to Mom, and then told Angie the plan. She would bring Paige. That way we would have two large cars and plenty of people to pack things up and haul boxes.

I, along with Jas and Cammie, ran to a few stores along the way, picking up a bunch of boxes and tape and other packing supplies, plus cameras to document everything. We also picked up burgers from McDonald’s to munch before packing. Not my favorite food choice, but fast.

Cammie protested that we were getting more boxes than we needed, but I was pretty sure she was wrong, and pointed out that she was going to need to move from Houston up to College Station in the not-too-distant future. That mostly quieted the complaining.

Of course, many college students eschewed boxes and went with trash bags for things like clothing, but we weren’t the average kids making the average move. Nor would Cammie be getting any assistance from her family, unlike most college students.

My hope was that, at minimum, things would get to the point where Cammie would invite her parents to her high school graduation and they would attend. If I’d said that to her, or them, right now, I expected the reaction would be strongly negative.

Of course, that might not happen. It might be Cammie’s college graduation before that could happen. Perhaps not even then. Who knew?

Time heals many wounds, though, and family is important. As I’d hinted to Cammie, if Angie could forgive Sharon, nearly anything was possible. Not easy, and Cammie’s parents would have to do a fair bit of the work, but possible.

We arrived a couple of minutes late. That was intentional. We wanted Cammie’s aunt and uncle to see us arrive. Yes, it was possible that we’d come over, grabbed the key, gone in, taken things, put the key away, left, then come back, but even describing that scenario pointed out how unlikely it was. We would’ve had no idea when Cammie’s parents would leave or when her aunt and uncle would arrive, neighbors might have seen us, and so on and so forth.

Every bit of cover helped. Well, if they were out to get us, that is.

When we arrived, a middle-aged couple were out front talking to Elizabeth. I assumed that was Cammie’s aunt and uncle. Her face made that fairly clear, too — there was a clear resemblance.

The three of us headed up there.

“Camellia,” the middle-aged woman said.

“Aunt Penelope,” Cammie said, nodding.

“We heard what happened. You ... you know they were trying to do what they thought was best,” Penelope said.

Cammie nodded. “But it wasn’t best for me, and it’s not best for most people. I need to be allowed to decide what’s best for me.”

Penelope sighed. “I understand. We see both sides, though.”

“And...” Cammie said, then hesitated before finishing, “That’s why I called you. You can see both sides. All we want is to pick up my things and go, but I’m at the point now where I can’t trust that they won’t accuse me or my friends of taking things we shouldn’t.”

Penelope nodded. “David and I will keep an eye on things. May we look in any of the boxes as you remove them?”

“Yes, and I encourage you to,” Cammie said.

Penelope smiled a bit. “Your lawyer said you would feel that way.”

“I’m very grateful to Ms. Crawford,” Cammie said. “This whole thing wouldn’t have worked out so well without her. Not at all.”

We all headed in. Cammie retrieved the spare key, then went to the front door. She unlocked the door. David and Penelope entered first, looked around, then allowed the rest of us in. Jas and Paige went next, taking ‘before’ pictures.

The day was relatively boring for the most part. We started in Cammie’s room, of course, and packed everything. I was barred from touching any clothing or going in Cammie’s dresser, so my job was packing up things from her desk and bookshelves. That amounted to quite a bit of stuff, really.

We took nearly everything. Most kids who go off to college leave the majority of their possessions at home, planning to get them much later (or, perhaps, never at all — when I cleaned out Mom and Dad’s house, there were still things in the places I’d put them as far back as ninth grade). Cammie couldn’t do that; anything she didn’t take she might well never see again. Therefore, even the books she probably didn’t care about and would never read again, the clothes she would never wear, and so forth went into boxes.

In a way, that felt bad. Cammie’s mother would probably have wanted a few things for sentimental purposes, and that wasn’t going to happen. As much as she wasn’t my favorite person right now, I had a perspective that no one else had. No one else in our group had ever had a child of theirs leave home, after all.

But it was necessary. One day some of these things might be given back to Cammie’s mother — or, perhaps, they wouldn’t be. Actions do have consequences, and there was no one to blame here but Cammie’s mother and father.

By two-thirty, we’d finished stripping Cammie’s room of nearly all of its character. We left only a few things Cammie was certain she would never want (a few old posters, some books she was certain she didn’t care about, some clothing that wasn’t in any condition to be worn again, and so forth). At that point, we started in on the rest of the house. That was both a faster and more tedious project, because it involved Cammie carefully looking around each room and seeing if anything was truly ‘hers.’

The first place we covered was the bathroom Cammie used. It had plenty of her things in it, and we cleared those out.