by M. F. Lorson
“Harper camps there every summer. She loves it.”
“Oh really?” My eyes went wide, and I feigned all of the enthusiasm I possibly could.
“With her Girl Scout troop.”
“Her Girl Scout troop?” I echoed.
Meanwhile, the blonde across from me mouthed the words “Drop dead” while I laughed.
“She’s been in since she was seven. I have the cutest pictures of her as a Brownie.”
“I would love to see those,” I said to her mother. She jumped out of her seat so fast, I thought she was going to take the tablecloth with her. This time, Harper dropped her face in her hands and shuddered with a stifled laugh.
From the seat next to me, I could feel Hunt watching me and Harper teasing each other back and forth, her throwing me stink face gestures while I smiled and winked back. After her mom returned with a photo album that made my heart sing, full of pictures of, as promised, Harper in her little brown vest and blonde pigtails, we cleared the table together.
Mrs. Huntington cornered me in the kitchen as I was rinsing plates, and she put her hand around my shoulder. I almost didn’t see it coming. I was so relaxed and actually having fun that when she leaned in and said, “You two are cute together. I haven’t seen Harper smile like that in a long time,” I froze.
Swallowing down my nerves, I gave Mrs. Huntington a tense smile. “We’re just friends,” I lied. We were not even friends, but then again...I just ate dinner at her house. I looked at baby pictures of her and had a mini Mexican rice food fight.
Glancing back at the table where Harper and her dad sat, I noticed her smiling, and a pang of guilt attacked my gut.
“Well, whatever you two are, I’m glad she has you. You keep her out of trouble.”
Again, I smiled at her as I dried my hands and she ushered me to the table, carrying a plate of chocolate chip cookies with her.
“You can’t leave until you’ve had dessert.”
“Thanks,” I said, taking one from the plate. I was unnerved. Unsettled. What she said in the kitchen had me feeling like I was pinned to the mat without warning, with no moves left to make.
“You okay?” Hunt asked as he reached for a cookie off the plate. I didn’t answer him as I registered the sugary treat making its way to his mouth. And my hand moved on instinct.
“Hunt, no!” I shouted as I swiped his hand away, sending the cookie flying across the table and landing on the floor for the dog. The room sat in a daze, the chief of police staring at me with his mouth hanging open—while beside him, his daughter erupted in a hefty laugh.
Harper
“He launched at my dad, and the cookie went flying. If you didn’t know what I knew, you would have thought that cookie was covered in asbestos.” Reagan hugged her arms to her stomach, her shoulders heaving up and down with a combination of laughter and the motion of the van. Our entire troop was crammed into an eight seater, destination Grover State Park.
“It was the single most satisfying moment of my summer thus far,” I admitted.
When the laughter subsided she shook her head and eyed me sideways.
“Do you realize what you are saying right now? That Landon Maxwell is the best part of your summer?”
“Tormenting him is the best part of my summer,” I corrected. “There’s a big difference.”
“If you say so,” said Reagan.
I didn’t like the sing-song tone of her voice. She was acting like we were kids again, and I didn’t want to admit I had a crush on the boy I chased around the playground. Chasing him was the last thing I wanted to do. Unless of course it ended with physical abuse, even a short distance egging could be nice. I smiled imagining him pulling long strands of sticky yolk from his short blonde hair.
In the front passenger seat, Reagan’s mother chirped on and on to Abigail Collins.
Reagan rolled her eyes beside me. “Maybe the two of them can get mother-daughter T-shirts or something.”
Abigail Collins had been a pain in Reagan’s butt since our brownie days. She was the perfect scout, sold a gazillion cookies, earned all the patches, the list goes on. That all would have been annoying, but the most upsetting thing about her was that she connected with Mrs. Riley, and well, Reagan didn’t.
I wanted to say something comforting to Reagan or at least insult Abigail, but by the time I came up with something Reagan was already pulling headphones over her ears and cueing up her Dirty Dancing playlist.
Sloane, Reagan and I, all loved movies from the ‘80s. It was our thing, our epic middle school bonding agent. Without Sloane’s obsession with Molly Ringwald, we probably still would have become friends, but best friends? It was hard to say. The funny part was our favorites were all so completely different. You definitely wouldn’t find me daydreaming about Jake Ryan or Patrick Swayze. Reagan on the other hand had a bumper sticker that read, Nobody puts baby in the corner and a history of bad perms.
My phone pinged with a text.
Drake: I forgot to bring snacks. Sneak me a box of thin mints?
My lips curled up in a snarl without my permission. Thin mints, seriously? That was a joke Landon would make. I had explained to Drake rather passionately in fact, that what Reagan and I did was not the same as kiddos outside the Supermarket learning to count change through cookie sales. This was our final year as Girl Scouts and though we were all aiming to earn that Gold Award and finish the program strong, it was especially important to me.
A Gold Award on a college application could be the difference between acceptance and actual years of lectures from my sister on how I didn’t take school seriously until it was too late. I didn’t need anymore lectures from Alice, and I definitely didn’t need another shining example of how she exceeded expectations, and I continually dropped the ball.
Drake knew all of that, so it was super tooly of him to make cookie jokes. Also, tooly of him to forget I was away at camp this week.
Harper: You’ll have to find a new supplier. I’m gone all week.
Drake: They don’t let you take the cookies camping?
Now he was really getting on my nerves. When we reached our destination, phone service would be limited. I’m pretty sure girlfriends, or unlabeled girlfriends, whatever I was weren’t supposed to feel this way, but I was actually looking forward to having an excuse not to have to answer his texts.
“You look annoyed,” said Reagan, pausing from her pink glitter-filled fantasy of being hoisted into the air in front of hundreds of jealous vacationers to assess my mood.
“I’m thinking about mosquitos,” I lied. Satisfied, she tucked her earbuds back in. Reagan was a lot less suspicious than Sloane. Sloane would have turned laser-like focus on my mood change and then gone into full on fix-it mode. This was probably why Reagan and I were closer. I wasn’t a big fan of talking about my feelings and though Reagan was a great listener, she wasn’t a prober.
My phone pinged again, and I felt guilty for thinking it, but I kinda just wanted to turn the thing off.
I decided to tell Drake we were almost there and I would call him after the trip. Only before I could open the text to reply I was distracted by a flash of movement pulling up on the right hand side of the van. I recognized the deep guttural sound of Drake’s bike before I spotted his black leather jacket in the side mirror.
His text read, Look out the window, and my heart leapt out of my chest. Either this was going to be the week of a lifetime, or I was about to lose my chance at a Gold Award for a boy I wasn’t even sure I wanted to be with.
Landon
“Camping? Like sleeping outside?” Gabe’s voice through the phone was high-pitched and on the brink of laughter.
“Yes. I want to clear my head, okay? Can’t a guy go camping without an interrogation?”
I cut the box to the brand new tent, pulling out the booklet with instructions on assembling it. I maxed out my credit card buying supplies for this little week-long getaway, and everything was still in bags from the outdoor store.
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“I’m not buying it,” Gabe chided from the speaker of my phone that was laying on the trunk of my car.
“Well, you don’t have to. You just have to cover for me when Dad comes home.” It wasn’t like I expected my dad to really care where I was when (or if) he came home, but I didn’t want my brother to worry.
“He called this morning,” Gabe added in a leveled tone. “He’ll be in Florida for the rest of the week. Thinks he found a new job or something.”
“Or someone…” I mumbled.
“Yeah, I considered that too.”
Neither of us said anything for a moment while we let the anger sink in that our dad was possibly ditching us for someone else. As if that was somehow worse than him ditching us for work. Ditching us at all just plain sucked.
“Just be careful and keep in touch.” Gabe gave me his best stand-in-Dad line.
“Promise.”
After the call ended, I spent the next hour erecting a tent that was big enough for three people but meant for just me. Grover State Park was scattered with camping spots, each with its own fire-pit, picnic table, and nearby restroom facility, so I was pleased to see that it wasn’t as rustic as I was afraid it would be. Not to mention, my spot was right off the road so I didn’t need to take the Lambo off-road to get here.
Just then, a large van passed by, and I watched for a familiar face in the window as it continued on the dirt road to where the group spots were situated. I didn’t see her through the dark windows, but I knew she was in there.
Why were my hands shaking?
She should have been the nervous one. I was here to keep a close eye on her because I had a sneaking suspicion Harper was up to no good. There was no other logical reason she would be spending a week out in the woods with a bunch of do gooders, pretending to be an ambassador or whatever she called it.
I’d been thinking about dinner at her house ever since that night. It grated my nerves to think that Harper didn’t appreciate what she had. A dad who would do anything to keep her safe and happy. A mom with open arms who probably never let her walk through those doors without a hug. I sure as heck wasn’t going to let her do something stupid to jeopardize all of that.
Not because I cared about Harper. But because...it just wasn’t right.
Shortly after the van passed, the rumble of a motorcycle distracted me from my task of blowing up the air mattress with the hand pump that would take no less than twelve hours to inflate my bed.
I knew who it was before I even looked up to see him pulling into the camping spot next to me.
No way.
No. Way.
With his leather jacket and black shades, Harper’s loser of a boyfriend climbed off his bike with little more than a backpack and a bottle of water. He glanced toward me and gave me one of those idiot head nods before throwing his backpack down and pulling out a long piece of fabric that looked like a parachute. Through the mesh window of my tent, I watched him install a hammock between two trees, and I had to bite my tongue to keep from laughing. That idiot was going to sleep in the trees, get devoured by mosquitoes, for what?
For a moment, I was just glad he didn’t have a tent for Harper to crawl into at night—not that I cared what they did at night, but I didn’t want any of that happening right next to me.
If I really wanted to figure out what these two were up to, I needed to talk to him. Which I wasn’t exactly looking forward to. After swallowing my pride, I walked toward his spot and offered him some bug spray.
“Hey, man,” I said with a fake smile on my face. “The bugs are hell out here.”
He took the bottle without smiling back. “Thanks, dude.” Nodding toward my set-up, he said, “Out here alone?”
I figured I needed something in common with him...to hold his interest. So I lied. “Yeah. I’m actually here so I can see my girlfriend. She’s camping with the Girl Scouts over there.”
His expression changed immediately from bad attitude hipster to Matthew McConaghey in every movie he’s ever been in. A lazy smile spread across his face as he held his hands out to the sides. “No way. Me too.”
“Seriously?” I laughed, putting on a pretty good show.
“Yeah. My girl is still in high school, so you know...this is the only time I can really get her alone.” Then he winked at me, and it became seemingly impossible to hold my smile with all of the bile trying to force its way out of my stomach.
I was no saint. Sure. But I certainly was preying on younger girls and ambushing them at their summer camp just to get fifteen minutes of alone time with them.
What a supreme loser.
New goal for the week. Keep this loser as far from Harper as possible.
Harper
Ordinarily camp was an escape. Sure, Abigail and the twins tried to bog down the fun with their insistence on talking about actual scout stuff, but Reagan and I were great at tuning that out. For us, these trips were a much needed break from the all encompassing soul crushing pressure of being a teenage girl. This one didn’t feel that way though. Because somewhere nearby Drake was leaning up against his bike, just itching to get me in trouble.
I was helping Reagan put our tent up with one eye on the poles and the other scanning the tree-line for movement. I thought I was being subtle, but she was on to me.
“That one goes through the center,” she said, her face twisted with confusion, and I knew she was trying to figure out a delicate way to ask what was up with me. After all, we had been popping this particular Igloo into form since Reagan turned thirteen and we pooled her birthday money and my allowance to free ourselves from the group sleeping arrangement. It wasn’t cliquish bestie stuff; it was just that Abigail snored like a trucker.
“Right, sorry,” I mumbled. Pulling the long flexible pole out of the corner sleeve and moving toward the center of the tent.
“Is there something or someone you're looking for?” asked Reagan. She lowered her voice to a whisper.
I did not want to tell Reagan about Drake. Maybe she deserved to know that I was hiding a boyfriend, but she definitely didn’t want to find out this weekend. Not when her mom was the official chaperone and bringing boys on Girl Scout trips was so totally out of line.
“Nope,” I answered, obviously too sharply because Reagan lowered her eyes like a kicked puppy and I started to feel real guilty.
“I’m just nervous about talking them out of the rain garden,” I tried. Truthfully that was at the bottom of my totem pole of concern right now, but I knew Reagan would buy it because it played on her own fears. She was great at following, not so great at leading. Objecting to Abigail’s proposal wasn’t going to be comfortable for her.
“We just have to come up with something more compelling,” she said. We had managed to get the tent up and all that was left was hammering in the spikes at each corner. Judging by the heft in her swing, Reagan was imagining that spike was someone's face as she slammed it into the ground with a rubber mallet.
“Alright slugger, this tent isn’t going anywhere, you can put the mallet down.”
Red faced and irritable, Reagan began tossing our gear inside the tent. I waited till she was down on her knees to unroll her sleeping bag before I said, “Be right back. I’m going to run to the bathroom.”
I didn’t like ditching her in the middle of unpacking, but I needed to talk to Drake and find out why he was here and how long he planned on staying. If this was meant to be some grand gesture, I was flattered, but it didn’t make much sense. We had been dating for the better part of six months and thus far I had never gotten the impression he couldn’t live without me for a week. Heck, it wasn’t uncommon for him to go a week without so much as texting me.
I didn’t have to find him because the moment I stepped behind the orange cinder block bathroom a familiar set of arms scooped around my waist and pulled me to him.
“Surprised?” he asked.
Surprised was an understatement, but I welcomed his lips as he inclined his head and
pressed a gentle kiss to my mouth. I knew there was a chance Reagan’s mom or one of the girl’s would walk around the corner and catch us, but when we kissed, his fingers played the vertebrates of my back like a piano, and I lost the ability to think anything beyond, yes please and I’d like seconds. Our relationship was mostly kissing, and I wasn’t complaining.
“A little,” I replied, trying not to give away the fact that I had nearly wet myself when I saw his motorcycle out the side window of the van.
“I figured now was as good a time as any to see what you girls really do on these trips,” said Drake, tugging me by the hand away from the bathrooms and toward a small grove of trees where we could hide from anyone who might happen upon the bathroom.
“Mostly animal sacrifices,” I said. “Really boring stuff.”
Drake raised one cocky eyebrow, “I was thinking more like pillow fights in your underwear.”
I shook my head. I guess it was good to know that making dumb comments about girl’s sleepovers was an inherently male thing. Like even the Dallas Winstons of the world couldn’t stop themselves from picturing giggling girls bouncing around in a cloud of pillow feathers drifting around them like softly falling snow. Pervy thoughts were a universal concept I suppose, but I wished he was better. I often wished dating an older guy meant dating a smarter guy, or a more mature guy, but that was not the case with Drake. With Drake, the fact that he was older only had one benefit.
It would have driven Alice crazy.
I so loved imagining how I would reveal who my boyfriend was to her. I’d had more than one imaginary conversation with her to prepare.
My favorite intro was, “Remember that guy you used to hate? The one who was always working on his bike and making fun of your 4.0? That’s my special guy.” Imagining that had gotten me through any number of bad days. Especially since she still complains about the time he and Mike got motor oil on her precious cardigan.
