Through Her Eyes (Camren)

Chapter 1: Girls and Raccoons

——-

Some luck lies in not getting

what you thought you wanted

but getting what you have, which

once you have got it you may be

smart enough to see is what you

would have wanted had you known.

~ Garrison Keillor

——-

Lauren had a raccoon problem.

Every night for the last week she’d heard the damned creature banging around in her front yard and every morning she’d found garbage scattered on the ground around her trashcan – banana peels and old magazines soggy in the morning dew. Lauren was not amused.

Nor were her neighbors.

“I’m really not asking much,” Mrs. Smith said with a disapproving frown. She was an old gossiping woman with a hooked nose and shifting eyes. She’d known Lauren’s grandmother but Mrs. Smith hadn’t liked her and she didn’t like Lauren, either. Lauren wasn’t sure that Mrs. Smith liked anyone, really, not even her own husband. Especially not her own husband. “I think the whole neighborhood would appreciate it if you would keep your trash inside your trashcan, Miss Jauregui.”

“Right, trash inside the trashcan, I keep forgetting.” Lauren gave her neighbor a large, faked grin. Mrs. Smith glared.

“Kids these days…” she grumbled, stomping off with her head held high. Lauren rolled her eyes. Fucking suburb with its fucking nosy neighbors.

She’d never wanted to live in a place like this; she’d lived in a nice, comfortable house in Miami, in the actual city, where no one bothered her before her grandmother had died. She’d left the house to her though and she couldn’t just leave it to rot, couldn’t sell it when the old woman had obviously thought her more suitable than her own parents to take care of the place. Besides, her often complaints about wanting to be independent had given her parents the perfect excuse to send her there. So Lauren stayed and watered the plants her grandmother had loved, fed the strays who had loved her.

It wasn’t the life she’d been planning on having.

Lauren couldn’t do much about nosy neighbors though, couldn’t do much about the too perfect streets or ugly SUVs and screaming kids. She couldn’t do much about the life she’d never planned to have and the grandmother she’d never wanted to lose.

The raccoon, though, Lauren could do something about the raccoon.

It took her three days. It seemed that whenever the damn thing came around Lauren was already in bed and too tired to care. On the third night though, Lauren was watching a horrible movie on TV when she heard the telltale scuffling and banging of aluminum in her front yard. She stood from the couch determinedly, jogging out her front door towards the trashcans, planning to scare the thing away with her superior brain size, decent muscle definition, and slight anger towards the cable company and its crappy programming.

“Hey!” Lauren yelled as she ran out towards the street and waved her arms in large, hopefully intimidating motions. “Get out of here! Shoo! Go through my neighbor’s trash instead!”

“But I like yours,” a voice responded from nowhere and Lauren stopped dead in her tracks, hands frozen comically above her head.

Raccoons were not supposed to talk. Lauren was really pretty sure of this.

“Guh?” Lauren blinked rapidly, trying to see through the darkness of night and smoggy air. She was a few yards away from the street and it was dark, the moon small, but squinting her eyes, Lauren could just make out the outlines of someone standing over her garbage can. They were about her height and slim, picking through Lauren’s trash like it was the bargain bin at the mall. “What the hell?”

“You have so many shiny things,” the voice continued. “Don’t you want them anymore?”

“Who the hell are you?” Lauren demanded, moving her arms uselessly by her sides. A raccoon she had planned for, had even Googled how to get rid of them. This? No, not so much.

“Camila,” the person, Camila, responded easily, pulling something out of Lauren’s trashcan and then tossing it aside casually.

“Camila,” Lauren repeated dumbly. “What the hell are you doing?”

Camila said nothing, unconcerned with Lauren’s presence, still digging through her trash.

There were a lot of homeless people in LA, it was an undeniable part of living there. Her grandmother had lived in a suburb, though, ten minutes out of LA. If this girl was homeless she was also lost because there was nothing here for her – houses cramped too close together with perfectly square front lawns. Lauren didn’t know why anyone would come here by choice. Lauren didn’t even want to be here.

“That’s great, really, fantastic,” Lauren muttered, shaking her head in disbelief. The girl continued to ignore her. “You mind getting the heck away from my house, Camila?”

Camila stopped, raising her head to look at Lauren finally. Lauren couldn’t see her face in the darkness, though. Maybe it was best that way, maybe it didn’t matter.

“Your house?” Camila asked, tilting her head oddly. “You live here?”

She’d just come out the front door, hadn’t she? “Of course I-”

“In a trashcan?” Camila continued, sounding awed. “Really?”

“What? No, I-”

“Do you like it? I’ve never met anyone who lived in a trashcan before.” The girl sounded genuinely excited about it.

There was a crazy person on Lauren’s front lawn.

She really would have preferred the raccoon.

“Okay,” Lauren said, raising her hands in a sort of halting motion like she could slow things down that way, make sense of something that made no sense at all. “Okay, now listen.”

Camila cocked her head.

“I live here, here in this house, okay?” Lauren asked, pointing theatrically. “The house? That’s where I live.”

“Ohh,” Camila said, nodding. “Okay.”

“Good.” Lauren sighed. “Good, so, I live in this house, and this is my trashcan. See?”

“I do see, yes,” Camila answered, reaching into the trash to pull something else out, holding it in her hand this time, angling it into the moonlight, examining it carefully.

“Great, so, if you could not go through my trash like some sort of… something. That would be great, awesome, really.”

“Would it?” Camila asked, dropping the object she’d been examining into a plastic market bag by her feet. It was a light bulb, Lauren thought, a girl named Camila was stealing her broken light bulbs.

“It would,” Lauren said slowly, clearly. “…Please leave now.”

Luckily, the girl seemed to understand this, at least. She leaned down, picking up her bag and holding it closely to her chest. “Can I keep this?”

Lauren stared. “Keep…? Yeah, keep whatever you want, just, don’t go through my trash anymore, thanks, bye now.”

Camila took a step back obediently, disappearing into the darkness around her so quickly it was almost creepy. Lauren blinked slowly, staring down at her front lawn, once again covered in garbage.

“Well, shit.”

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A/N: Hello, everybody! I posted this story I while ago on tumblr but I'm finally posting it here! The story is finished so you can expect at least a couple of chapters a day :) By the way, have a little patience with this story. I promise you'll like it ;)