9
“YOU HAVE TOhand it to them, it’s a pretty badass way to break the news,” Trey said as he steered my Prius along the bumpy dirt road. “Just dropped the sign in the ground. Boom. Sold. We’re out.”
Trey flung his fingers out in front of him, mimicking an explosion. Nick snorted and shook his head. For once, he was speechless.
Mack was next to me in the back seat, his long limbs going every which way. Worn jeans cuffed at the ankles, a pair of beaten-up, slip-on navy Vans. He still looked like a cool kid from Southern California, and it dawned on me as I surveyed him that he’d always been like this, stylish without ever even realizing it.
I shifted my gaze back out the window, taking in all the small changes to the place. My eyes centered in on a patch of land that had been divided into rows, each of which overflowed in a beautiful bounty of green. A fence ran around the perimeter, painted all different shades of the rainbow, and at the entrance, a tiny farm stand.
“Is that a vegetable garden?” I asked as we got closer, the small wooden baskets of zucchini and tomatoes now coming into view. “Where the tetherball courts used to be?”
“It is; good memory, Millen,” Mack replied. “Do you want me to go stake some balls out there so you can play next to the corn?”
“Only if you want me to throw one of the balls at your head,” I snapped back.
“That’s number one on my list of things for us to do together while you’re here,” he said, reaching a hand across the middle seat and ruffling my hair, not missing a beat.
“Mack planted that whole garden himself, Clara,” Nick chimed in from the front. “He’s like Pine Lake’s Johnny Appleseed.”
“My pet project from a couple of summers ago,” Mack said nonchalantly. “I worked on it with a bunch of senior kids.”
“Wow,” I said. Even I could begrudgingly admit that this was, well, very cool.
“Yeah,” he continued. “The campers grow everything, and what we don’t use for meals, we give away to the community at the stand.”
“Mack’s being humble,” Trey said. “Didn’t someone write an article about it, and you? And how you brought the locals and Pine Lake closer together?”
“Just the town paper, not, like, the Boston Globe.” Mack waved Trey off, but it was obvious from the way his eyes glinted as he spoke that he was clearly proud of what he’d created. “But, yeah, I love working with the kids on the farm stand. I was going to keep it going this fall and try to bring schoolkids in to run it.”
“I bet they’d love that,” I said, marveling at the beauty of this once-empty slice of land that now bloomed full of life.
“Yeah,” he sighed, more wistful than I was used to seeing him. “Plans changed, though.”
Here it was again, that earnest side of Mack that disarmed me.
“What?” he said with a raised brow when he caught me staring.
“Nothing, you’re just sitting on a bunch of work stuff that I need,” I said, pointing to the manila folder peeking out underneath the edge of his thigh. Inside was fifteen-year-old Clara’s note, and I breathed a sigh of relief when he shifted and slid it toward me. The last thing I needed was Mack using my ten teenage action items to torment me. He’d probably try to cut my hair off in my sleep. And the lover thing? I’d never hear the end of it.
“Maybe this is Mack’s way of helping you take a break,” Nick said matter-of-factly as he leaned over the console to talk to us in the back seat. “Clara swore a sacred vow that she’d try not to work this week.”
Mack gave a shrug, his hair flopping down across his forehead. “I should probably keep sitting on your stuff then. For the cause.”
“Yeah, I’m sure my boss would love hearing that all my files got ruined because of some guy’s ass,” I huffed, clutching the folder tight in my lap. We rolled past the soccer field and the art barn, which was still covered outside in splatter paint, and almost surely overflowing with camper arts and crafts projects.
Three figures stood in front of Sunrise, the juniors bunk our group always made our home base during weeks like this. It sat in the middle of a row of identical cabins, painted a bright white with forest-green shutters. “Whoa,” I said, marveling at their shiny new colors. “Didn’t the cabins used to be gray?”
“Lotta big changes up here, Millen,” Mack said slyly.
Nick twisted around in his seat. “Mack convinced Marla and Steve to paint them a few years ago.”
“They look good,” I said, as the shapes in front of us began to take a clearer, human form. So clear that I could see as we approached that one of the people was very, very pregnant.
Holy shit.
“Sam!” I practically fell out of the car as Trey shifted into park. Tripping on my sandals, I raced to get to my oldest camp friend, who stood, hands pressed against her lower back, talking to Eloise and the tall, lanky man next to her.
Sam turned her head, awash in its usual crown of black curls, and shrieked. “Clare-bear!”
She opened her arms wide, which I knew was intended to end in a hug. Instead, I stopped a couple feet in front of her, gawking.
“Look, I don’t ever like to comment on people’s bodies, but I might have to make an exception here. You’re—”
“Yup.” She nodded, a smile wide across her face. “Big time.”
Eloise sauntered up next to her, her orange-red hair tucked under a baseball cap—her fair skin could burn even on the cloudiest of days—and braided tightly down her back. It shone like the last moment of a sunset, that explosion of color that occurred just before the sun slipped past the horizon. True to form, she was decked out in all black, her leggings and tank top somehow looking like formal wear on her.
“She’s peed like five times and we’ve only been here an hour,” Eloise said, leaning in to give me a peck on the cheek, and then tugging me in tight for a hug, which was more emotion than I was used to getting from her.
“That seems reasonable,” I said, still shocked. “Also hi.”
“Hi,” Eloise purred back, dragging out the word as she squeezed me, a departure from her usual curt staccato. If I didn’t know any better, I’d assumed she was stoned, but Eloise rarely let any substance other than pure, type-A energy, and the occasional cocktail, control her. She could be both effortless and calculated, which had been a formidable combination on the soccer field and in swim meets back in the day.
I inhaled the faint scent of some sort of luxurious hair care product as we embraced, that intoxicating mix of chemicals intertwined with florals. Her eyes trailed down my neck as she pulled away, her lip crooking up just a bit. “Nice necklace.”
“Mack was waiting at the entrance of camp to give it to me,” I said with a shake of my head as I yanked the stupid thing off and shoved it into my tote bag.
“Of course he was,” she replied, brows tweaked knowingly. Eloise was a stock analyst, a Wall Street job I didn’t quite understand, other than it meant she was paid to see things from all angles and then attempt to tell the future of a company’s financial prowess.
She grabbed the man next to her by his elbow, tugging him close. “Clar, this is Linus. My partner.”
Eloise’s normally controlled, clipped delivery dripped with affection, the closest I’d ever seen her come to swooning. Nick and Trey weren’t lying. Eloise was smitten.
“Nice to meet you, Clara,” he said with a firm grip of my hand.
Linus was handsome, with close-cropped black hair, olive skin, and delicate, wire-frame glasses.
Sam leaned into my shoulder. “He brought a solar-powered lantern,” she murmured in my ear. “He thought we’d be in tents. He’s sweet.”
“She seems different,” I mused as we watched Eloise and Linus saunter hand in hand over to the rest of our group.
He was decked out in a loose white button-down and army green hiking pants—the kind that you could unzip at the knee and turn into shorts. I distinctly remembered my seventy-one-year-old dad wearing a very similar pair last summer, and the fact that Linus was almost definitely half his age and wearing them unironically made me like him instantly.
“She is,” Sam agreed, nodding. “She’s in love.”
“I heard, but I didn’t quite believe it until I saw it with my own eyes.” I shook my head, overwhelmed. “I’ll process that in a second, but first can we discuss you?”
Arms wide, I finally gave Sam a proper hug. She was so short my chin practically rested on her head, and I squeezed her as hard as I could without squashing her beautifully round belly.
“Were you going to wait to have the kid before you told us?” I asked, looking down again to make sure what I was seeing was real.
“Well, you’re the last person to find out, actually,” she said, and her eyes shifted slightly. “I tried to tell everyone in person or over the phone. I’ve been waiting for you to text me back so we could set up that FaceTime chat.”
My stomach sank. All around me were signs that my friends’ lives had chugged on together, with me on the periphery. They shared a closeness that I’d once been part of, but now I was the outsider, the last to learn about all the ways their lives were growing and changing while mine had seemingly stalled out.
And I had no one to blame but myself.