“No,” I repeat. Sorry, Thomas, but the cousin lie is no longer working for me. I blink, realize I’m staring, and turn away.
“But you do know her?” Raj asks, watching me with this one-sided, flickering smile.
“No. I mean, yeah. Yeah, I know her. We go to the same school, remember?” And that’s it. She’s not even talking to me, so I’m definitely not thinking about her. I know I asked if we could be normal—which, in hindsight, seems like such a pathetic attempt at begging for friendship—and she said yes, but I bet she regrets it. I bet it didn’t feel like her heart was a fist unclenching. I bet she’s going to come over here and say—
“Bradley?”
My head jerks up. Celine.
“Can we talk?”
I ignore her butterfly eyes and nod. “Okay.”
Raj grins as Celine and I crawl into the tent.
Inside, Celine headbutts the saggy part of our roof like a fault-seeking missile and looks at me. “Um.”
“Don’t judge.”
She rolls her eyes, but the action is more amused than scathing. Weird. Very weird.
“I thought you were pissed at me,” I blurt, then instantly regret it. Why would I mention that? I could honestly sink into a hole.
Celine blinks and echoes my thoughts. “Why?”
“We didn’t talk. Yesterday.”
Her brow furrows, like you could press a fingertip between her eyes and smooth the creases out. In this shadowy, raindrop-stained blue universe, she is very soft and dark, like falling into bed at night after a long, hard day. “I didn’t think we needed to talk. You said…not-enemies.”
So she wasn’t ignoring me—just being infuriatingly literal and pragmatic and other Celine-like qualities. “Typical. I put my pride on the line to negotiate an historic peace treaty and you can’t even tell me good morning?”
“Do you hear yourself?” she asks me curiously. “Like, when you speak? Or is it just noise?”
I’m going to strangle her.
“Why do you look like you’ve got gas?” she asks.
I rub a hand over my face. “You know what I admire about you, Celine? Your class and sophistication.”
She snorts. “Bite me.”
“No, it’s impressive. You’re like a debutante, or something. If I didn’t know any better, I’d think you’d gone to finishing school.”
Her laughter is unexpected and tastes like treacle and it does not implode reality. I wait for something, anything, to come along and sour this conversation, making us utter and abject enemies again, but nothing happens. My palms start to itch.
Her smile fades. “Hey,” she says awkwardly. “Um. So, I want your…advice?”
In my head, I collapse from shock and Celine holds smelling salts under my nose. Out loud, I say, “Makes sense. I am wiser and smarter than you and always knew this day would come.”
“Would you like to see the pictures I took of my tent?” she asks sweetly, tapping her phone. “Holly poked her head in and said it was perfect. I assume she then emailed Katharine Breakspeare about how I’m a shining example of teamwork, leadership, and strategy.”
“All right, Celine, give it a rest.” I tut at my saggy privacy curtain. “Raj says it’s a feature, not a bug.”
“Raj says a lot of things. He’s incurably positive.”
“Just so you know,” Raj calls, “I can hear you out here. Like, you do realize tents are not made of brick walls?”
We ignore him. Celine reaches up and starts fixing my saggy tent. She seems to be hooking bits and pieces together through the fabric. If we were more than distant acquaintances, I might be impressed by her never-ending competence.
She turns her head and catches me staring. My cheeks feel flammable. What’s wrong with me today?
But clearly Celine doesn’t think anything of it, because she just jerks her chin as if to draw me closer. I crawl over until we’re a foot apart. There’s a tiny dot of mascara under her lower lashes, and she whispers to me. “It’s Aurora’s eighteenth on Friday.”
I watch her mouth moving for a second before the words sink in. “What? Oh. Really? That’s rough.” Imagine turning eighteen out here, sleeping on a borrowed mattress in a room with very old carpet that probably hasn’t been shampooed for months or even years. It’s tragic. Like, literally Shakespearean.
“…lovely,” Celine is saying, “so I want to do something for her, but I’m not sure…I’m not really…My ideas all seem…” She fumbles her words in a deeply un-Celine-like manner, and I try not to smile. She’s like a toddler who’s still learning to verbalize feelings. The urge to squeeze her around the middle is therefore completely normal.
“Yeah?” I ask, still not smiling. “All your ideas seem what?”
She scowls in response. The tent is fixed and officially Celine-standard. “Oh, never mind.”
“Go on.”
“It’s nothing,” she snaps, turning to crawl away.
Well, now I feel bad. “Hey, hang on…” I don’t realize I’m touching her until it’s already done. My hand is on her upper arm and I only have a split second to shrivel inside with the sheer awkwardness of it all before I let go.
Her arm is really soft. Silk-soft. Cloud-soft. Honestly, who has skin like that?
I clear my throat and close my hand into a fist. “Just…what were you planning to do? For Aurora?”
She eyes me warily. “I want to throw her a party. On Friday. After curfew.”
“Sorry, what?” I splutter. “A party? You?”
“Will you lower your voice?”
Good point. I continue winding her up at a lower volume. “An illicit, illegal, after-hours—”
“It’s not illegal, Bradley, come on.”
“We can’t be in each other’s rooms after curfew,” I remind her.
“Yes,” she says tightly, “I realize that. But Zion says they can get a cake from Tesco Express for after dinner, but anything more is out of the question because then everyone would need one for their birthdays. Obviously I said no because that sucks, and anyway, I don’t want to invite everyone—”
Ah, the sheer Celine-ness of that statement. Some things never change.
“—so I thought we could just have a very small but very good secret surprise party, except I don’t go to that many parties and obviously you do.” Her tone implies that my regular presence at social gatherings is unspeakably disgusting, but I let that slide.
“Let me get this straight. You—you—are planning to break the rules to make sure Aurora has a decent eighteenth birthday. And you’re asking me to help.”
Celine is wary again, like I might laugh, or refuse, or bite her. I’m not going to do any of those things. I couldn’t if I wanted to, because I’m too busy grappling with this unwelcome reminder of what a good friend she can be. She doesn’t care about people easily, but once you’ve got her, you’ve got her.
Until you give her up.
There’s a hollow space in my stomach that feels a lot like regret.
“Well?” she asks, eyebrows raised.