Chapter 8
I found Freddie just where I knew he’d be.
In his inconvenient spot, standing in the middle of the path.
This meant everyone had to walk around him, but Freddie—lost in the good news that he’d just gotten—was oblivious to all of it.
I could see his face was back to being regular-size, not red and puffy.
I’d hurried through what was now becoming a routine with Bryony and Ms. Mulaney—encouraging Bryony and the Emmas to go on the roller coasters, splitting off from Ms. Mulaney when she got her ill-fated agent call.
The only slight detour I’d taken was to write out the Freddie list once again—this time, adding the new things that I’d learned.
Freddie
-Brother named Jack
-From Croydon
-Loves Excalibur!/poster above bed/Geraldine Bewley school project
-Weird fruit and vegetable allergy
-Rocky road ice cream/Sweet Emporium
-Surf liner up to LA for meetings
-Manager coming tonight
-Mates with Niall from school days
-Lyrics in black notebook
-Tristram′s real name is Doug; he′s from Chicago. Alfie is Aussie. Lettuce is rocket??
-Always losing phone
-Mum told him he′d lose his head if not attached to his neck
Sometimes the only home you′ve ever known/is the favorite sweatshirt you′ve outgrown.
Knowing your moment of destiny is just around the corner.
But I wrote this list as fast as I could and then hurried to find him, because we didn’t have a surfeit of time.
Clearly, it hadn’t been enough to throw out Alfie’s dinner—he must have eaten some of the cursed stir-fry before we got to the greenroom, which meant we needed to stop it as soon as possible.
I walked right up to Freddie—he was still staring at his phone, reading the email about the manager coming. And I hated that I had to burst his bubble so soon after getting good news, but the faster we got through this part, the sooner we could start fixing things.
“Hi,” I said, coming to stand right in front of him. “I’m Cass Issac. Excalibur.”
Freddie just blinked at me, then looked down at what he was wearing. “Like, my shirt?”
“Not exactly.” I gave him a smile, took a deep breath, and launched into my explanation.
It didn’t take as long this time, or maybe I was just getting better at going through the situation. But by the time I got to the part about what was going to happen with the performance unless we intervened, Freddie started nodding.
“Okay,” he said. He looked down at the Freddie list I’d handed him during my explanation and then back at me, his eyes wider than usual. “I’m just trying to get my head around this.”
“I know,” I said, “and it’s okay if it takes you longer. But right now—right this moment—you have to call Alfie and tell him not to eat the shrimp. Er, prawns.”
“Right,” Freddie said. He pulled out his phone and pressed a button to make a call. “But this is amazing! I always wanted to believe something like this was possible.”
I smiled at him. “I know.”
He laughed. “Right, of course. It’s ringing,” he said, then frowned. “Voicemail…Alfie, mate! I need you to stop eating your prawn…” He glanced at me.
“Stir-fry,” I supplied.
“Stir-fry,” Freddie continued.
“Tell him it’s not a carb thing,” I whispered.
“It’s, uh, not a carb thing,” Freddie said, looking a little taken aback. “It’s just for health and safety. So just bin it and get something else to eat, okay? And maybe avoid seafood altogether? Cheers.” He hung up and looked at me. “Think we did it?”
“I don’t know.” I honestly wasn’t sure I could take seeing Alfie throw up again, and I wanted to do everything I could to try and prevent it, for my own sake as much as Freddie’s. “Maybe we should go check?”
Freddie nodded. “That’s a good idea. I am going to need to eat something, though.”
As though on cue, my stomach grumbled. “Me too. But maybe, let’s get it to go?”
We ended up getting hot dogs at Angry Dogs.
Freddie got the full Angry Dog, whereas I decided I might not be up for that level of spice at the moment and chose the Slightly Annoyed Dog.
We ate them as we walked toward the stage where Eton Mess would be performing, trying to work out what, exactly, happened to give Freddie his allergic reaction.
“It happens onstage?” he asked, taking a bite of his Angry Dog.
I nodded. “You start out fine, and then, like a minute later, you’re having this reaction. And you knew about it last time—you promised me you weren’t going to eat anything, just to be on the safe side.” He took another bite of his hot dog, and I nodded at it. “How is that?”
“Really good,” he enthused. “You should have gone for spicy.”
“I think I’m okay,” I assured him.
“Now, while these are good, the hot dogs at Award Wieners are slightly superior.”
I laughed. “At where?”
“The name might be silly, but the hot dogs are not,” Freddie assured me. “Honestly, I think at this point, I’ve tried all the food at the park, so you should really trust my opinion.”
“I mean, I’m getting there,” I said, realizing with some surprise that this was the third dinner we’d had together. “A few more loops and I’ll catch up to you. But maybe be extra careful this time, okay? I just don’t understand where this allergic reaction is coming from—”
I stopped short when I realized that Reagan, Zach, and McKenna were walking toward us.
They hadn’t seen me yet, but unless I wanted to have a very awkward conversation with all of them—mostly revolving around why I was a terrible person who hadn’t brought churros—I had to get out of sight, and fast.
“You okay?” Freddie asked, his brow furrowed.
“Yeah, we just need to hide.”
“Hide?”
I looked around in a panic, knowing I was about to be spotted unless I moved quickly. But where could we even go?
“Here,” Freddie said, jumping into action. He grabbed my free hand with his, and the moment we touched, I felt that zing travel all the way through me. He pulled me behind the nearby cookie stand so that we were out of sight. “Okay?” he asked.
“Maybe.” I glanced around to try and see Reagan, but attempted to do it surreptitiously.
Seeing where I was looking, and still holding my hand, Freddie steered me so that he was facing the direction the trio was coming, with my back to them.
Then he dropped my hand and leaned his arm against one of the posts holding up the cookie stand.
I looked up at him. And I hadn’t realized, until this moment, just how close together we were.
I could have risen up on my toes and been near enough to kiss him.
I wasn’t going to—we were both still holding hot dogs, and we had to stop Alfie from eating the shrimp.
But it was more than that. It was the fact that this wasn’t the Freddie who’d stood close to me in the moonlight and tucked my hair behind my ear.
It wasn’t the Freddie who’d turned my hair around his fingers in the hallway, asking if he could see me after the show.
This Freddie had just met me, and while I hadn’t just met him, I still wanted to be respectful of that.
Even though, standing this close and breathing him in, seeing his strong arm resting on the post above me, I could feel my resolve start to weaken.
He looked down at me and raised an eyebrow. “Think we’re okay?”
I nodded, trying to get a hold of myself. We were on a mission here, and I couldn’t lose sight of that just because Freddie had an accent and a dimple and a lock of hair I was dying to run my fingers through….
“Right,” I said, forcing myself to look away from him. I took a step back and glanced over where I’d seen my former friends. I could see their backs now, walking away with no idea of how close I’d been. “Okay, let’s go.”
“Sure,” Freddie said, falling into step with me as we headed toward the stage area. “But you really are going to have to explain what that was.”
“Of course,” I said, shaking my head. “Sorry. I did explain it to you already. But not this you. It’s—Well.
Those were people I used to be friends with, back in Los Angeles.
And I found out tonight…that they’re pretty mad at me.
” I tried to push it away, but the look that Reagan had given me when they’d first recognized me—the shocked betrayal—was seared in my brain.
“Why are they mad at you?” Freddie asked, taking a bite of his hot dog.
I took a bite of my own, then told him the story—my dads moving all the time, the way I always had to leave schools just as I was starting to make friends. How I was never able to really relax or settle in.
“So,” I said, when I’d finished giving him the abridged version and we’d both tossed the remnants of our dinners away, “because of all that, I’ve found that it’s easiest to just try and make a clean break with people. And I thought it was fine! But then I ran into them, and, well…”
“So that’s why you’re avoiding them.”
“Yeah. Well, not just them.” Freddie raised an eyebrow at me, and I took a breath and explained about Nora and Greta, and even though I didn’t really want to—Bruce.
“And since I’m stuck in this loop, it’s like I’m always looking over my shoulder.
The last thing I want is to run into them so they can tell me how mad they are at me.
” My mouth twisted as I said it. These words, which I’d been trying to toss off, instead landed heavily.
Freddie shook his head. “Our worst mistakes are a hall of mirrors—reflecting back to us all we shouldn’t have said.” He blinked, like he’d just surprised himself, and his expression was one I was now getting quite familiar with. “That might actually be a good—”
“Lyric?” I finished for him, with a smile, already pulling the Freddie list and Ms. Mulaney’s pen out of my bag.
“Uh, yeah,” he said, looking a little abashed as he scribbled it down. Then he pointed to the two other lines he’d come up with. “Who wrote these?”
“You did,” I said, and smiled when I saw his surprised expression. He tore off the bottom part of the list, then handed it back to me.