Through Her Eyes (Camren)

Chapter 3: Bugs That Bug

Lauren had a plan. It was a brilliant plan.

She may have come up with it at three in the morning, lying in bed staring at the stark white ceiling with tired eyes, but still, it was brilliant.

In Lauren’s old house, her parents’ house, there had been cockroaches. They skittered around on the kitchen floor as Lauren lay awake at night. Her father would never do anything about them because he never really cared about anything, so Lauren figured she’d just deal with them herself. One night Lauren was laying in wait with a can of bug spray, poised and ready, listening for the sound of hard little bodies crawling across the tile.

The problem was, when Lauren flipped on the light so she could see the vermin she was planning on killing, well, they all ran away. They were afraid of the light.

Camila, Lauren figured, was sort of like a cockroach.

She only came around during the night, made a mess of Lauren’s trash, wouldn’t go away no matter how much Lauren glared. So, Lauren thought, maybe the light would scare Camila away, too.

On Tuesday morning Lauren called in sick to work – “Lauren! You have to come it! Who will cover your shift?”“Who needs to cover it? Just put up a big sign with the directions to Starbucks on it, it’s all I do all day anyways.” – and went someplace she had never been before.

Home Depot.

The store was huge – isle upon isle, more than twice Lauren’s height, floors of hard concrete, bright orange shopping carts.

“Can I help you?” someone asked, and Lauren turned around to find a guy in an orange apron watching her with flirty eyes. There was a pin clipped to it proudly proclaiming his name as ‘John.’

“There’s a girl that goes through my trash,” said Lauren.

John blinked. “Okay.”

“It’s a problem.”

“Um…” The guy was looking over his shoulder nervously, all the flirty attitude gone. Lauren was sort of gratified to be the crazy customer for once.

“But I have a plan,” Lauren assured him, a little crazed. “A brilliant plan.”

John did not look reassured.

“I want a light,” Lauren explained, since John didn’t look like he would be willing to help for very much longer. “One of those ones that turns on when you walk by it.”

“…Isle twenty-three,” John said, and then edged away very quickly, narrowly missing walking into a burly man’s shopping cart.

Lauren spent the better part of the day installing the light over the garage door. She hit her thumb with the hammer twice and narrowly missed dropping it on her boot. It was a perilous job. Lauren was never going to be a handyman…handy-woman… whatever.

But that was fine, because she was going to be a rock star, anyway.

When the light was finally installed, the sun was already going down, so Lauren went back inside to wait and watch by the window.

——-

When Camila showed up that night and the light snapped on, she laughed and clapped her hands together gleefully.

Apparently it was much easier to find the shiny things in Lauren’s trash with the extra illumination.

Perhaps ‘brilliant’ was not the word.

——-

Every night for the next two weeks Camila showed up to go through Lauren’s trash.

Lauren watched her from behind the screen door, through thick glass windows. For eleven days Camila picked through the trashcan with fascination and Lauren watched, wondered. Camila held to their deal, never left any garbage on the ground anymore. On the twelfth day Lauren shrugged her shoulders and stopped watching.