Proof of Forever

by Lexa Hillyer

  And now it’s all lost, like some higher being accidentally hit a big fat PREVIOUS PAGE button on the invisible screen of life.

  Camp Okahatchee has a serious lack of mirrors, but she can easily tell by touch that her hair is frizzy. Once it dries, it will be too frizzy. She rummages through her top cubby, the one filled with all the products she can’t cram into her shower caddy, looking for her magic hair balm. Her heart starts racing. She can’t even remember the last time she was seen in public with her hair like this. She removes every bottle and tube from the cubby, lining them along her top-bunk blanket. It’s not here. It’s not here. It’s not here. Was it really fewer than two years ago that she discovered the best product to civilize her pre-straightening locks? This cannot be happening. The panic that’s been hovering like a dark cloud threatens to break into a full-on storm.

  And then, with a whoosh of relief, she locates the pink and black tube. As she pulls it out, a delicate gold chain comes unloosed and clinks to the floor. She stoops to pick it up. It’s the necklace her dad gave her for her tenth birthday, a tiny Taurus symbol. He always called her his stubborn Taurus. She hasn’t seen it in years; she lost it here at camp that last summer, doing something or other—maybe she took it off to swim or it came off in the sand or broke during a run or who knows what. Maybe it just got lost at the very back of her cubby and she forgot to look for it.

  As she clasps it around her neck, the phone conversation she had with her mother right before heading to reunion floods back to her, filling her chest with anxiety all over again. Her dad. Fraud. Investigation. Their assets frozen, at least for the moment. None of it made any sense at all. Tali’s dad is one of the best people she knows—he always talks about how important it is to treat everyone equally, and he shows kindness in small ways that others would never think of, whether it’s bringing home surprise gifts or remembering details of a story you told him years before, or just going out of his way to make you comfortable. No matter how bad things got at school, during her gawky, ugly, miserable phase, she always felt safe at home. Her dad believed in her, said she could do anything she put her mind to—anything she put that bullheaded spirit into, more like it. She even used to joke sometimes that his unconditional love and support was going to make her soft. But she meant it—not everyone sees her the way her parents do. In the real world, she’s had to work for it.

  For the first time, she wonders if her dad ever had to work for it, for the way people just gravitated toward his big, warm smile and generous spirit. She can’t believe he’d ever lie about anything. Sure, he traveled a lot for business and would sometimes tell her that things were rocky or that his company was taking big risks . . . most of it would fly over her head. But anyway, she trusted him implicitly. It simply never occurred to her that he could ever do anything wrong.

  Thinking about it now sends her spinning. She can’t think about it. Because the only word she can come up with to describe how she feels is cold, harsh, and definite: betrayed—a word that lands hard as a rock at the pit of her stomach.

  When she arrives at the big barn-style dining hall entryway, she’s struck by the familiarity of the scene: the clatter, the crowdedness, the unmistakable scent of aging wood, and the rubbery tang of lumpy food kept warm in metal chafing dishes. Tali navigates the circus of pre-sixth-grade boys jockeying for the attention of their female counterparts (the Bunk Fox girls), the chatter of pre-third-graders (the Chipmunks) writing messages in washable marker on one another’s arms, all the way through to the circling Hawks, prowling Wolves, and, finally, the Blue Herons.

  Joy and Zoe are bent toward each other in a distinctly intense-looking huddle over table 17, Joy’s long, brown hair and Zoe’s matching blond—both of which Tali always envied—tucked behind their respective ears.

  Tali plops down next to Zoe; Joy smiles and nods at her tray. “I see you’ve found the Camp OK dinner just as they’ve left it for us,” she says, not feeling particularly hungry.

  “The only question is whether the food’s from two days ago or two years ago, right? Not sure I’d be able to tell,” Zoe adds, poking at her noodles, then giving up and going for her slice of pizza instead.

  “I vote two years ago,” Joy says with a slight smirk.

  “Whatever,” Tali says, forking a bit of salad. “It’s a far cry from fantastic, but it’s edible.”

  “I wonder if this pasta would stick to the walls if we threw it,” Zoe says.

  “I bet I could find out,” Joy says, and reaches over to pick up a noodle from Zoe’s plate.

  Zoe’s face gets serious, and she puts up her hand to stop Joy, then leans in closer. “Wait. We should be more careful. Remember? We don’t want to do anything out of the ordinary. What if we accidentally caused a food fight or something?”

  Tali looks at her skeptically. “Aren’t we basically doomed to screw up?” She stabs a meatball. “There’s no way we can perfectly replicate everything we did two years ago. I can’t even remember most of that summer.”

  Zoe nods her head seriously, like she has already anticipated Tali’s skepticism. “We just have to do the best we can. Camp ends in only four days. We have to focus on getting all of the objects we need for our date with the photo booth. For Joy, that means getting the talent-show tiara. For me, it means winning the fencing tournament again. And for you . . .” She trails off and looks at Tali. “Well, you have it the easiest.”

  “I do?” Tali asks, popping the meatball into her mouth.

  “Sure. All you have to do is explore Blake’s nether regions, like you did two summers ago—aka this summer,” Zoe says, smirking.

  Tali coughs, regretting the meatball. She grabs her Diet Coke, taking a long sip.

  “What she means is you need to get his boxers from him again,” Joy clarifies, as if Tali doesn’t get it.

  “I know what she means,” Tali replies quickly. “You’re right. It’s no problem.” She forces a big smile. Inside, her heart is beating fast. For a moment, she debates telling her former friends the truth.

  But maybe, she thinks, Zoe is wrong. Maybe it’s never too late to change the past.

  Tali can smell the smoke from the bonfire before she can see the flames. Isn’t that what they always say of fire? Funny how from afar it looks so pretty. Harmless, even.

  Tali may not really be the rustic type, but bonfires always remind her of the large beach fires her aunt and uncle in Rhode Island would build on their private strip of sand, back when she was too tiny to even be allowed within five feet of the flames. The Safety Point, they called it. Back when things were simpler, when security could be counted in child-size steps.

  Back when she believed people were exactly as they seemed. People like her own father.

  “You guys,” Luce says beside her, pulling Tali out of a dangerous spiral of thoughts. “For the first time since whatever the hell happened to us this afternoon, I just . . . I don’t know. I got an incredible feeling. I think it’s all this.” She gestures toward the bonfire, its flickering light dancing on her golden-brown skin.

  Joy smiles, toying with her side braid. “I know what you mean. Being back here. It almost seems like it wasn’t an accident. It’s kind of . . . exciting.”

  Tali has to admit, through the thick layers of stress hovering in her mind like smog—the lies, the unanswered questions, the tasks ahead of them, the utter surrealness of it all—somewhere amid that she can feel what Luce and Joy are talking about: that spark. That Okahatchee magic.

  Zoe shrugs as the four of them cross the rest of the grassy field toward the barren, cleared-out area where the fire roars, surrounded by a thick crowd. “I still think I should be practicing for the tournament, rather than, ya know, basking in the weird time warp—”

  “Sh!” Luce turns to Zoe with a finger to her lips.

  “Sorry, sorry,” Zoe mutters, and Tali can’t help but crack a tiny smile. Despite all her c
onvictions about this time travel business, there’s one area in which Zoe Albright could never follow her own advice—subtlety. Zoe simply cannot keep her mouth shut. It’s one of her most annoying, and lovable, traits. Back in middle school, Zoe and Tali could wander the streets of Liberty for hours, getting lost and eating ice cream and rambling about nothing and everything. Once, in eighth grade, they bought a fifty-cent bottle of red glitter and decided to sprinkle it all over the benches along Main Street, so that anyone who sat down would have glitter on their butts. It was dumb, but the two of them cracked up about it all afternoon, despite the fact that Zoe kept giving away their secret and apologizing to various people with sparkly rear ends.

  It’s crowded enough around the bonfire that Tali can’t really get a grasp at first of who’s there and who isn’t. All the thirteen-year-olds are vying for the best s’mores angle, their roasting sticks clashing like they’re at one of Zoe’s fencing tournaments. She takes a step backward to avoid getting skewered by one of them.

  “Hey,” a male voice says, touching her arm. “Careful.” It’s Jacob, broad and built like a jock, one of Blake’s closest friends. Tali’s heart thrums in her chest. Blake must have come if Jacob’s here.

  And all at once, she spots him, directly across the fire, laughing broad and easy while pounding another guy on the back, his dirty blond hair tousled and damp as though he’s come directly from a shower, his white T-shirt accenting his deeply tanned skin.

  Tali realizes she’s sweating.

  “Thanks,” she says distractedly to Jacob. He has barely registered her—this is the curse of the twin As—and is already about to make his way over to Blake and the rest of his friends. “Hey, where’d you get that?” she asks, her voice sounding awkward even to her as she nods toward what appears to be a Dixie cup full of something very likely spiked.

  Jacob raises an eyebrow. “Blue cooler behind the sprinklers. Blake brought a stash. Benefits of being a day camper. Help yourself, if you want. Just don’t tell anyone.”

  Before she has a chance to thank him, he’s gone. But it doesn’t matter. This is her in.

  “Come on, guys,” she says, turning back to her crew. “We are going to need some liquid courage.”

  Tali tries not to catch Joy’s eye, but it happens, and what passes between them wordlessly makes Tali’s pulse still for a second. It’s like Joy knows, just from a look. She knows Tali’s nervous. It’s possible she knows even more than that; knows about Blake. But in that same moment, it’s also completely understood that Joy won’t say a word.

  Tali always used to take this quality of Joy’s for granted—that she understood people in a way no one else did. That she would keep your secrets for you even when you didn’t realize you had them. But now Tali wonders how Joy does it, how she can hold so much of other people’s dirty laundry. She wonders what happens to Joy’s emotional hamper.

  She wonders why Joy left them. But part of her doesn’t want to know the answer.

  The four of them find the barely concealed blue cooler, and Tali gives a silent prayer of gratitude to whatever gods control underage drinking at camp. They always seemed to take a particularly lenient view of Okahatchee. Inside the cooler, melting ice sloshes from side to side as she plunges her hand into the achingly cold water and retrieves a three-quarters-empty liter of Russian vodka. She sees a bottle of cranberry juice as well, but upon further inspection discovers it to be empty. Straight vodka it is, then. She pulls four flimsy Dixie cups apart from the rest and begins to fill them each to a centimeter below the top, but Luce makes a face. “I’m not drinking that without a mixer.”

  Tali shrugs and keeps the fourth cup in her hand—she can bring it to Blake. “Suit yourself!”

  Then she swivels the cap onto the bottle and stashes it back in the cooler, glancing over her shoulder to make sure she hasn’t been spotted by any of the counselors.

  Zoe takes a sip, winces, coughs, and laughs.

  Tali rolls her eyes. “Can we try to play it cool? You may recall I’m on a mission to seduce someone.” She didn’t mean to sound so bitchy, but Zoe shakes her head, like she’s not surprised.

  “Whatever,” Zoe says, pouring out the rest of her drink. “I need to practice fencing anyway. I don’t need to be parading around with you on a quest to get some ass.” She starts to march off.

  “Zo—” Tali calls out, but it’s too late. Zoe has disappeared into the crowd.

  “I’ll check in on her later,” Joy says, shifting her weight. “Come on, let’s go find your boy.” She loops an arm through Tali’s, and Tali feels a tad better.

  As they approach Blake’s side of the bonfire, they almost run straight into Jeremy Farber, biggest contender for the Douchiest Counselor of the Year Award. Luce gasps, backing up, and Joy giggles, hiding her Dixie cup behind her back.

  Fortunately, he doesn’t see them, since he’s lost in conversation with the head of Bunk Otter, Suzanne Simonson. Tali boldly takes a sip from one of the cups she’s holding. The vodka stings her lips and burns a trail from her throat to her stomach, then settles, warming her from the inside.

  They dodge through the cluster of fourteen-year-old boys currently pegging one another with balled-up bits of tinfoil, and all of a sudden, Tali’s heart is in her throat and she feels like she can’t swallow. Blake is only three feet away. She’s way past the Safety Point . . . stunned by how hot he is up close. It has been two full years since she has seen him in person.

  He and a couple of his friends, including Jacob, are sing-shouting something indiscernible in a half huddle. They erupt in laughter. That’s when Blake’s blue eyes catch hers. Time seems to slow as recognition registers, and then the unthinkable happens. He winks at her. She offers a tiny smile in response, moving toward him and causing Joy’s arm to unwind from hers. Then she lowers her shoulder just enough so that her bra strap slips down.

  “Hey!” he says, throwing an arm around her as they approach, causing her to lose a little more vodka from both her cups. “It’s the hot gymnast!” He says it sort of to her and sort of to his friends, as though making an announcement. Heat rushes through Tali’s ears and down her body.

  Joy and Luce exchange quick looks of skepticism, which Tali tries to ignore. A moment ago, she was relieved to have her old friends beside her. Now, she kind of wishes she’d come alone, instead of having them stand so close to her, like petite bodyguards.

  Still, she laughs, giving a friendly nod to Jacob, Soffi, Sam, and the other people she doesn’t remember as well. “I’m not a gymnast anymore,” she qualifies, “but I can still do splits.”

  “Hear, hear!” Jacob says, holding up a cup to toast with. “To the splits.”

  Tali lifts one of her cups, too, and that’s when she sees it: that signature, fried-blond bob, weaving its way toward them. The girl is wearing an all-pink outfit—all pink. How could Tali have forgotten?

  Rebecca Ross. Bunk Wolf. Tennis prodigy, just like Blake. Adorable, aggressive, annoying . . . and Tali’s biggest roadblock for Blake’s affection.

  As far as Tali knows, Blake has never been that interested in Rebecca. They were never actually together, at least not officially. But she was always hanging around. Tali is flooded with memories: Rebecca swishing over to him in her tiny tennis skirt, Rebecca taking Blake’s arm and begging him to dance with her at the Midsummer Formal, Rebecca in her tiny bikini, trying to capsize Blake’s boat during sailing lessons.

  Tali takes a deep breath. Things will be different this time around. She will be different.

  Rebecca stops on her opposite side, facing Blake and practically trampling Luce. Tali can’t help but notice that she’s poking out her ample chest. She puts her hand on Blake’s bicep. “There you are! I couldn’t fiiind you before,” she says to Blake in a whiny voice, wearing the most irritatingly cute pout Tali has ever seen. “Have you been holding out on me?”

  “’
Course not, Bex,” he says amiably. “I saved a cup just for you,” he says, handing her a half-full Dixie cup.

  Before she can lose her nerve, Tali turns, inhaling the musky, heavy scent of Rebecca’s floral perfume. “Hey, Bex,” she says. It’s the first time she has ever directly addressed Rebecca in her life.

  Rebecca tilts her head. “Hey, what’s up?” Now her voice sounds normal—apparently she saves the simple syrup for the boys.

  The lies come fluidly, easily: “I just saw Cherry Brentworth. I think she was looking for you? Over there by the main office?”

  Rebecca rolls her eyes and turns back to Blake. “Looks like I have to go babysit a friend. Wanna come?”

  Before Tali can even protest, Blake’s hand is in Rebecca’s and she’s yanking him away from his friends, away from Tali and Joy and Luce . . . away from the glowing circle of fire.

  Just like that, Tali is a nobody again—no, the ghost of a nobody—hovering in the darkness, just on the brink of everything she wants. The heat is overwhelming now, the smoke choking.

  “What a ho,” Luce announces.

  Joy looks at Tali, her eyes both searching and a little sad.

  Tali cannot stand that look. “I . . . I gotta go,” she says, then promptly turns and weaves through the clamoring, shouting crowd, toward the quiet sanctuary of the line of trees in the distance, not bothering to stop when vodka sloshes all over her hands.

  At the edge of the woods, she stops and throws back what remains of her vodka. She cringes. It tastes like nail polish remover and hair balm, but after a few seconds she feels calmer, steadier, more like her old (new?) self. The alcohol isn’t enough to make her drunk or even dizzy. All it does is make her feel smooth, as though she’s gliding over the surface of the earth like an air-hockey puck.