#mcpg

He sat up, feeling like he had to be upright for this conversation and tried to visualize Cam on the other side of the line. On the other side of the country.

He was probably wearing his stupid Snoopy pajamas, the ones with the hole in the right inner thigh, and a shirt he had stolen from someone in the group. He was probably sitting in the dark because he was a freak, twirling the phone cord around his finger like the girls in the old movies he loved so much.

"Cam?" he asked, even though he knew who it is was. "Isn't it like one in the morning for you?"

They'd all done the math to calculate the time differences between them on Starbucks napkins, because Eddie was insistent that timezones were fake and time was the same everywhere.

Cam hummed in acknowledgement. "Yeah. But there's a ghost and I got scared and my mom and abuela are asleep. So I called you."

He said it like it was a casual thing to say, like it hadn't made Derek John's heart skip in his chest.

That was the one good thing about the distance. At least Cam wasn't there to witness the effect he had on him. He could keep all his embarrassing lovestruck feelings to himself.

"Aww, you want me to protect you from the big bad ghost?" he teased.

Cam scoffed. “No. You’re on the other side of the country. What could you do, yell at it?” Derek John could practically hear his eye roll. “No I just.. I missed you, if I’m being honest. And you make me feel brave and I need all the bravery I can get if there’s a fuckin' ghost in my house.”

Derek John was going to pass out. Honesty wasn’t Cam’s thing, always masking his feelings and his words through five layers of performance, but when he was telling the truth, it always felt like a punch to the face.

“Why do you think there’s a ghost?” he asked instead of responding to Cam’s admission.

Cam launched into a story about how his house was creaking and groaning and he had seen a floating white apparition in the bathroom earlier that day.

Derek John nodded along, interjecting in all the right places with skepticism and logical reasoning for creaking floors and tricks of the light.

They stayed on the phone until they both fell asleep, Cam snoring softly in his ear, Pokemon long forgotten.

The first big lie – the first important one – that he ever told was when he was six, and being interviewed by the local news because a video of him singing in church went viral.

"Why do you love to sing so much, Mateo?" the interviewer had asked, voice saccharine and condescending and her mouth too wide for her face.

And, he knew what he had to say, knew the words that would make the people come flocking to the church in droves and herds and packs. That was all he wanted, really, just to have tons and tons of people to show up just to hear him sing.

"Because I love God, and He loves to hear me sing."

To be honest, Cam didn't really care about God anymore at that point. He hadn't since God decided to take his Dad away. If anything, God was an excuse, a background, a footstool for Cam to stand on as he sang, caring too much about it he sounded good and not enough about the words he was saying.

But the lie worked and the church was packed every weekend, and probably would've been until the novelty wore off, if Cam didn't move to the States with his mom.

-

The second biggest lie he ever told – and arguably the most important one to ever fall from his lips – was his name.

It didn't really start out as a lie, at least not on purpose. Kids at school called him Cam, the name Mateo somehow too foreign for their paper white tongues, even though it wasn't hard to pronounce and was just a translation of the name Matthew. Whatever. It didn't really bother him all that much if he didn't think about it for too long.

Mya was the first one to call him Cam, not even bothering to ask, just claiming that was his name now. He didn't argue because last time he argued with someone he got pushed into this mulch and got a splinter in his knee, so he just nodded along.

So, he was Cam at school, and nowhere else, and that was fine. It worked out. People liked him more as Cam anyway. Cam was cool and mysterious. Mateo was a nobody, a nothing little crybaby.

But the first time he became Cam, that was a lie. The lie.

He met Richard completely by accident. His school choir had been invited to sing background vocals on some song he didn't care about. He was fourteen and already had no plans to be someone else's backup vocalist. But he was fourteen, so he didn't exactly have a choice.

They recorded in a big empty piano room for the acoustics and because the choir was too big to fit into a recording booth. He was definitely pouting about it because seeing a real life studio was something that he'd been super excited about. He just had to keep telling himself that one day he'd be in a studio of his own so missing out now didn't matter.

The choir was in the middle of recording for the third take, much to the annoyance of his classmates, when the door opened and a man walked in on his talking on his cellphone.

Cam didn't process any of the words he was saying or the complaints of the other kids around him. He could only focus on how handsome the man was. His skin was peachy, obviously sunkissed and his light brown hair looked incredibly soft. He couldn't tell what color his eyes were from a distance, but they seemed to glitter, even under the horrible lighting of the room.

He looked up, apologized for interrupting and left, but as he did so, he met Cam’s eyes and sent him a half smile. Cam’s heart fell to his feet.

Without thinking about it - something very out of character for him - Cam looked at the school’s choir instructor and blurted, “Can we take a break? I have to use the bathroom.” Then he left without waiting for a response.

The man was at the end of the hallway in a huge, empty waiting room, still on the phone. Cam walked up to him and a lie fell from his lips with ease.

“Sorry,” he said, feigning surprise, “I was looking for the bathroom.

The man looked over and smiled again, wider than before. He had a movie star smile, all straight white teeth. “It’s okay. You’re with that choir, aren’t you?”

Whoever was on the phone was still talking into his ear but his full attention was on Cam. It was intoxicating.

Cam nodded. His hands were starting to sweat. “Yes, sir.”

“Call me Richard. Sir was my father,” Cam wasn’t sure if it was a joke, but he nodded again, laughing quietly. “You’re very good. Your voice is very distinct. It’s easy to pick you out of the crowd. That’s an important skill to have as a singer.”

Cam’s heart jumped from his toes to his throat. He didn’t know who Richard was or what he did, but if he was in this fancy building with his fancy suit and his fancy phone, then his words must’ve meant something. “Thank you, Richard. I should, uh, really find that bathroom now.”

Richard smiled again, somehow looking even more dazzling than before. “You passed it on the way down here.” Then he winked.

Cam sent him a smile of his own, feeling like they were sharing a secret or an inside joke. As he turned to walk away, Richard called out to him.

“What’s your name, kid? Need to know who I’ll be seeing on the charts in the future.”

And to this day, he still didn’t know why he said it, but he did and he couldn’t exactly take it back. “Cam,” he said, with a confidence he didn’t know he possessed. “Cam Perez.”

-

After telling a big lie, it got much easier for Cam to tell little lies. Never anything important, just stupid things. His favorite color, his favorite food, his thoughts on a new movie he hadn’t seen.

Maybe it was desperate and pathetic, but people liked him more when he lied and he liked being liked so he was going to keep doing it.

And in a way, it wasn’t even lying. During interviews, they asked Cam his hobbies or his favorite show to watch, so he answered as Cam Perez: Super Star and not Mateo Gaspar, who didn’t even own a TV. It was easier that way, hiding in plain sight.

But sometimes he didn’t want to lie, and he didn’t want to hide. He just wanted to be sixteen and stay up all night with his best friend, even though they knew they had work to do in the morning.

So, sometimes, he did.

They’d set up a blanket fort in the hotel room, which Alvin would definitely bitch at them for in the morning, and were curled together under it, watching Jurassic Park on Derek John’s laptop. Cam had never seen it, and Derek John thought that was a crime against God, so they’d put it on.

Cam wasn’t really paying attention though, too focused on the way Derek John was absentmindedly tracing over the lines on his palm with a finger. He wasn’t religious anymore, or very spiritual at all, but feeling the pad of his finger on his so called “heart-line” was making him feel soft and sentimental.

And when he felt like that, he was always inclined to start telling truths.

“Cam isn’t my real name,” he whispered into the quiet, as the two kids hid from a velociraptor in the kitchen on screen.

Derek John paused the movie, turning to face him. “What?”

He didn’t sound betrayed or upset, just confused. It felt like a gift.

Cam shrugged. “Well, I mean, it’s my middle name. Or part of it. Cameron. But my first name is Mateo.”

“Mateo,” Derek John repeated, like he was testing it out. “I like it. You look like a Mateo.”

Cam laughed. He’d been told that by his grandmother his whole life. He was named after her husband, and she said he was his spitting image. “Thank you.”

Derek John nodded, reaching out to brush his hair out of his eyes. Cam had to stop himself from leaning into his touch. “Thank you for telling me. But, uh, is Cam like an alter ego thing or a nickname or? Like...”

“Cam is just.. a lie. He’s just the mask I put on for work. You don’t have to think about it that hard.” He shrugged again.

Derek John nodded, obviously not wanting to push, but still in search of answers. “Okay. Why do you feel like you have to lie for work?”

“Because the truth is overrated. Nobody would like me if I was Mateo, so when I’m performing, it’s easier to be someone else.”

Derek John scoffed. “That sounds like fucked up Hannah Montana,” Cam laughed, the sound jumping out of him. “And you’re wrong. I like you as Mateo.”

Cam hadn’t been expecting that. The only people who liked him as Mateo were his mother and grandmother, and that was because they knew him first. “You do?”

Derek John grabbed his hand. “I do.”

“How do you know the difference? You didn’t even know Mateo existed until five minutes ago.”

He shugged. “Because I know you, and I know when you’re performing and when you’re not.”

Cam wanted to say that probably wasn’t true because sometimes he couldn’t even tell which of his behaviors were performance and which ones weren’t but Derek John wouldn’t lie to him. He was the most honest person he knew.

“Thank you,” Cam replied, unsure of what else to say, unable to think of anything except He sees me and it is the most terrifying, most freeing thing I’ve ever experienced. Is this how people feel about God? About miracles?