“It feels amazing, guys,” he reports, pushing wavy brown hair away from his forehead.
I watch him splash through water that covers his ankles. It’s not as though I’m staring. I’ve seen it before. Despite getting kicked off the soccer team, he still has a beautiful soccer body—one that he’s comfortable displaying to the world. Literally. His Instagram is 75 percent Shirtless Brett Seager selfies. But he’s now informing us that he’s ditching the shorts to swim in his boxers.
“We’re all friends here, right?” he says, grinning at me as he hops around on one leg and tries to remove his shorts without getting them wet. “You coming in, Zorie?”
“I don’t know,” I say. I brought a bathing suit, but where am I going to change into it—the woods?
“I am,” Reagan calls out, sitting down to unlace her boots. Then she says to me, “I saw you getting close and comfortable with Lennon on the hike. Maybe you should go keep him company.”
Her tone is playful. Confusingly so. She knows Lennon and I don’t talk. She doesn’t know about the Great Experiment. And Lennon and I were only talking on the hike. Not flirting. All he did was adjust my pack! So why is Reagan’s comment making me feel so guilty? I double-check that Lennon is out of hearing range. I think he is. He’s already found a flat piece of land for his tent and is unloading his pack.
“Don’t you agree, Brett?” Reagan says louder.
He cups his ear. “About what?”
“That Zorie should help Lennon,” she says louder.
Oh. My. God. Please shut up!
“If Lennon wants to play good little Boy Scout, let him. There’s plenty of time for that later. Right now, I’m thinking about a line Kerouac wrote in The Dharma Bums: ‘Happy. Just in my swim shorts, barefooted, wild-haired, in the red fire dark, singing, swigging wine, spitting, jumping, running—that’s the way to live.’ ” Brett wads up his shorts and gestures toward me. “Catch!”
I lunge awkwardly to snag them midair. Brett cheers, and then swivels around and wades into the waterfall pool.
“For the love of God, put your eyes back in your head,” Reagan tells me.
My attention snaps to her. “I’m not—”
“You are.” She takes off her hiking boots, and then says in a lower voice, “I told you before we came on this trip that I didn’t want it getting awkward. You promised it wouldn’t.”
“I didn’t ask him to throw his shorts at me!” I whisper back.
“Just watch yourself.”
I’m irritated now. And suspicious. What exactly did the two of them do last night when they were gallivanting around the campsite like teenage winos? I want to ask this, but I settle on, “Why do you care?”
She pulls off her T-shirt. She’s wearing a bikini top beneath it. Her sigh is long and weary. I think she’s still hungover. “You’re taking this the wrong way. I’ve had a shitty morning, and an even shittier summer.”
I blow out a hard breath. “I know you have, Reagan. And I’m sorry about the Olympic trials.”
Her cheeks darken. “I don’t want your pity.” Almost immediately, she seems to realize that she’s snapped at me and closes her eyes briefly before speaking in a lighter tone. “I just want everyone to enjoy this, okay?”
“Me too,” I say, confused. “What does that have to do with Brett?”
“Look, you aren’t the only person to take a bite out of him. Summer’s been with Brett too.”
“What?” This is . . . news to me. My awkward conversation with Summer about Brett and Lennon pops into my head, and now I’m wondering why she didn’t mention this.
“I just don’t want you to be territorial and get your feelings crushed like you did this spring after that party.”
Is she trying to save my feelings or hurt them? Because she’s doing a pretty good job at the latter. And how was I being territorial, for the love of Pete?
Reagan is already jogging toward the waterfall. And I’m left confused and stinging, guilty about something I didn’t even do . . . and irrationally jealous over that Summer tidbit.
I glance back at Lennon, who is busy clearing away rocks to make a place for his tent, while Brett is whooping loudly beneath the mist of the waterfall, begging for Reagan to take his picture.
All this time, I’ve been freaking out about wild animals. Maybe I should have been concentrating on the bigger threat: trying to figure out where I fit into civilization.
12
* * *
“Tell us a ghost story,” Summer says to Lennon from across the campfire.
The sun’s been falling for a half hour or more, and we’re gathered around the fire inside the granite shelter, watching Lennon carefully feed another stick of wood to the flames. He was right about the boulders: They make good benches. We’ve all been sitting here for the last hour, drying out from swimming in the waterfall pool, eating our rehydrated pouches of food. I’m still hungry and could eat another one. But then we’d have to boil more water, and it’s so dark, I can barely make out the edge of the river. Definitely not worth the trouble.
“Why do you think I know a ghost story?” Lennon says.
A chorus of noises echo around the rocks as everyone encourages him.
“You totally know one, dude,” Brett says. “Stop playing.”
Lennon looks up from the fire. “Maybe I do.”
“Ha!” Summer says. “I knew it. Tell us one about killer hillbillies in the woods.”
“Please don’t,” I say.
“Not any about a boogeyman with a hooked hand who attacks people making out in parked cars either,” Kendrick says. “I don’t like hooks.”
Summer laughs and tries to tickle him.
Everyone’s in a good mood, relatively speaking. Reagan, in her own way, has sort of tried to make up for what she said to me earlier. She brought along a small hammer—one of her many purchases from the outdoor gear store—so she helped me stake down the poles for a tarp at my tent’s entrance. She asked me if I was okay, and I lied and said that I was. Then she gave me one of her extrahard back pats, and that was that. We’re good. I guess. She’s been sitting on the same rock with me, and Brett just slid between us. Which should be exciting—his side pressing against mine—but I can’t enjoy it. I’m too busy thinking about her earlier “territorial” speech and how it seems like she’s trying to steer me away from Brett.
Why?
“Come on,” Reagan begs Lennon. “You and your freaky goth fetish . . . We know you’ve got a good ghost story.”
“You have the perfect voice for spooky tales,” Summer adds. “You sound like one of those old horror movie actors from black-and-white movies. The Wolfman. Dracula. All of that.”
“Vincent Price,” Kendrick guesses.
“No, the other one. Dracula. He was in Lord of the Rings.”
“Christopher Lee,” Lennon supplies.
“Yes!” Summer says. “Thrill us, Christopher Lee.”
Lennon pushes up from a squat and brushes off his hands. “All right,” he says. “I heard something a few months ago. But it’s not fiction. It’s what someone actually told me. You sure you want to hear it?”
No, I do not want to hear, thank you. I don’t like being scared. And now that it’s getting dark, I’m starting to worry again about sleeping on the ground. The tents I picked out with Reagan are actually pretty cool, I suppose, as far as tents go. They’re small, but made for two people, which means that there’s some wiggle room inside with just one person occupying. But they’re still not tall enough to stand inside, and knowing that I’ll be stuck in that tiny space later with little more than a thin scrap of nylon between me and all the nocturnal animals that use the waterfall for a watering hole is starting to freak me out.