“You have to stop that,” Nate said.
“Stop what?”
Stevie’s voice was flattened by her position on the floor, her face tilted toward the wall.
“Whatever it is you’re doing. You look like a Blair Witch remake.”
She had been here for almost an hour. Maybe more. Maybe even a lot more. Who even knew? She was on Spider Time now.
When she’d left David’s campsite, she walked around the lake for a while, her thoughts unmoored. She must have arrived back at camp sometime after lunch, then come right
up here to the treehouse, where Nate had been on his laptop, alone and content. Then she got down on the floor and started thinking about the spiders. That had been her day so far.
Nate poked her with the toe of his sneaker.
“This is a David thing,” he said. “Obviously.”
She did not reply.
“Romance seems fun,” he added.
“Don’t.”
“I’m not. I don’t know what happened. I don’t even want to know. But I know you can’t do whatever the hell this is. Don’t you have things to do?”
“Janelle’s got it. She doesn’t need me.”
“I don’t mean Janelle.” He crossed around and sat on the bare window seat and looked down at her.
“I screwed everything up. I ruined everything.”
Nate banged his head against the screen behind him, then jerked forward when it proved to be looser than he imagined.
“Stevie.” He sounded annoyed enough that she pulled her chin off the floor, then gradually pulled herself up. She was dizzy from the extended period of time she’d spent staring at nothing. She looked down at herself, at the white T-shirt that had been so pristine the day before. The shirt was still as rectangular, but it was no longer clean or stiff; it had melted into a bag of damp wrinkles, slashed all over with grime. The marks from Arrowhead Point were really pronounced, almost black. She tried to rub them away, but they didn’t budge. Whatever
was on it wasn’t dirt—it was something more inky and permanent. The shirt was ruined.
This seemed like a bad omen, a dark mark. A message. Her focus was shot. David was gone. The summer split apart like a wet paper bag.
“Stevie.”
Stevie blinked and looked up.
“I got some weird shit on my shirt,” she explained.
“Why don’t we get out of here?” he said. “I have nothing to do up here now, which is great. You’ve abandoned your post. Let’s get out of here and go to town.”
“For what?”
“For something to do. There’s a diner, right? Let’s go there.”
She was about to refuse, but when Nate looked annoyed, it truly startled her. His pale brows furrowed into a point.
“Fine,” she said.
She pushed off the floor. As she did so, she snuck a glance at her texts.
Nothing. Not that that surprised her. Her phone had been sitting by her head the whole time and had never made a peep.
She and Nate got bikes out of the rack, took their locks and keys, and headed down the path, out of Sunny Pines and back onto the now-familiar stretch of tree-lined road. This activity shook off the top layer of her malaise, which was unfortunate, because that layer had been keeping the other,
more painful layers in soft focus. David had probably just driven off down this road. Or maybe he would drive by now. She should stop and call him. Or not. Maybe when she got to town. Call him before he got too far away, onto the highway, out of Massachusetts, out of her life, forever.