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my dad always worked a shift or two. I wondered who was covering for him as I wove my way through the pileup and toward the store, hoping my cap would keep me invisible—I felt like a ghost anyway.
    I knew just what I was looking for: Beaches , over with the new releases. I’d gone to see it at the Montana Theatre with my mom the year before. We cried and cried. We bought the soundtrack the next day. Then I went back to the Montana and I saw it with Irene. We argued over who, between the two of us, was Bette Midler and who was Barbara Hershey. We both wanted to be Bette.
    Barbara Hershey’s character dies near the end of the movie. Her daughter, Victoria, is left behind, like me. She wears a black velvet dress and white tights and gets to hold Bette Midler’s hand during the funeral. She was maybe four years too young to be my equal, and had only really lost one parent (because her dad, while absent, was at least still alive) and she was just an actor, I knew, playing a part; but still it was something to go by. I felt like I needed something official to show me how all of this should feel, how I should be acting, what I should be saying—even if it was just some dumb movie that wasn’t really official at all.
    It was Mrs. Carvell, formerly Miss Hauser, at the register. She taught fourth grade during the school year and worked the video store in the summer—her parents owned it. I’d had her the first year she’d ever taught, but I wasn’t one of her favorites because I didn’t take the after-school tap classes she held in the gymnasium, and also maybe because I didn’t giggle and ask stupid questions about weddings and dating when she’d brought her then-fiancé, Mr. Carvell, to class one day in the spring and had him do dorky science experiments with us. In the end-of-year comments on my report card she had written, Cameron is very bright. She’ll do well, I’m sure . My parents thought this was a riot.
    Mrs. Carvell took the case from me and found the video to put in it without much seeing me, but when I had to say “Post” for her to look up our account, she did a double take, peered close beneath the brim of my cap, and flinched.
    “Oh my God, honey,” she said to me, just standing there sort of gaping, the video stiff in her hand. “What are you doing in here? I’m so sorry about . . . ”
    I filled it in for her in my head— about how your parents swerved off a mountain road and drowned in a lake that shouldn’t even exist, shouldn’t even be there, all of this while you stayed home and kissed a girl, stole some gum .
    “I’m so sorry, just—well, I’m sorry about everything, honey,” she finished. There was a high counter between us, and I was glad she couldn’t easily get around it to hug me.
    “It’s okay,” I mumbled. “I just really need to rent that right now. I’ve got to get back home.”
    She looked more carefully at the title, her wide face scrunched up a little, confused, like she was trying to figure this out, like she could really make sense of it. “Well, you just go on and take this then, okay, hon?” she told me, handing it back without ringing it up. “And you can just call me, even, to come and pick it back up when you’re finished. You keep it for as long as you want.”
    “Are you sure?” I asked, unaware that this was the first official time of so many to come when I’d receive the prorated orphan discount. I didn’t like it. I didn’t want Mrs. Carvell “taking care” of me.
    “Of course, Cameron. It’s nothing at all.” She smiled her big smile at me, one I’d never been granted personally but had seen, on occasion, when she’d trotted it out for the whole class to share—like the time our room won the school-wide pop-top-collecting contest.
    “But I have money,” I said, feeling like I would cry just any second and keeping my eyes away from hers. “I’m gonna want to rent something else soon, anyway.”
    “You can rent as many as you