Chapter 1 #6
“I don’t know,” Ellery said. She’d had an idea, during one of those long nights playing gin rummy last winter, for the beginnings of what might be a creative project. “Maybe.”
He wrapped his arms around her as she was going, pulling her close.
Ellery rested her head against his chest for a moment, listening to the thud of his heart inside his ribs, and when he tipped his face down to kiss her, it didn’t even feel like a transgression.
Instead it seemed insane that she hadn’t spent the entire year kissing Danny.
It seemed ridiculous that they hadn’t been doing this exact thing all along.
That was when the door opened and Camp walked in.
“Uh,” he said—standing there in the doorway, reaching a hand up to yank at his hair. “Okay. Um. Wow.”
Ellery stood and waited for the panic to hit her, was surprised when it didn’t come.
In fact, she felt calmer and more sure than she’d been all year, like everything that had happened since she got here had been leading to this moment.
Like they were never going to wind up anywhere but in this place.
“Camp,” she heard herself say, “come here.”
Camp didn’t move.
“Camp,” Ellery said again, holding her hand out. “Come here to us.”
At last Camp came, the door snicking shut behind him. For a moment, none of them breathed. Finally Ellery put her hands on his face and kissed him; he tensed, but he let her, his mouth cautious and familiar against hers. Then she turned and kissed Danny. Then Camp. Then Danny again.
“Okay,” she said at last; both of them were watching her, dazed looking, their lips red and bee-stung. “Now you.”
It took them a moment to figure out what she was getting at. “Ellery,” Danny started.
“Stop.” Camp looked nakedly terrified. “He doesn’t want—”
“Don’t be stupid,” Ellery said, then turned to Danny. “Tell him not to be stupid.”
Danny opened his mouth, then closed it again, rubbing a hand over his head.
“Don’t be stupid,” he said quietly, and Camp’s entire body went visibly boneless with relief.
When they kissed, it was like they’d been doing it for lifetimes.
Camp reached for Ellery’s hand, pulling her toward them, the three of them a single heartbeat as the light slanted in through the blinds.
Both of the boys fell asleep more or less immediately after it was over, like they had hit the limit of what they could process in one afternoon and needed to power down for a while to let their motherboards cool off.
Ellery watched them for a while—their long limbs everywhere, their faces gone smooth and young—then got up, slipped her clothes back on, and let herself out of the room.
She padded down the steps in her bare feet, the wood floor of Honors House still freezing cold even though it was the end of April.
She opened the door to her room, where the afternoon sunlight was streaming in through the window.
She sat down at her desk, and she started to draw.
It was strangely easy not to see them anymore, Camp and Danny: She changed her routine by just a few minutes, and it was like they lifted out of her life entirely, like possibly they’d been her imaginary friends.
She kept waiting for one or both of them to show up at her door, but they didn’t.
She was waiting for the gut punch of sadness, but it didn’t come.
In fact, she felt like she’d gotten something out of her system.
She felt like she’d had a terrible fever but it broke.
One week went by, and then another. She made iced coffee in the dining hall.
She drew. That was the other surprising thing, the way her hand wouldn’t seem to stop moving all of a sudden, like some secret window had opened inside her that had been painted shut since the beginning of the year.
She filled her entire sketch pad. She drew on napkins and in the margins of her planner.
She submitted her creative project to the Harpswell Committee, a hand-drawn deck of playing cards: Birds and trees and apple cider and sunsets, a king of diamonds drawn to look like Danny.
A king of hearts drawn to look like Camp.
When she got back from her last class before reading week, she found Susie sitting at her desk finishing a paper, birdsong faintly audible through the open window. “All done?” Susie asked.
“All done,” Ellery said. She sat down on her bed, bouncing a little.
Two days ago, they’d had a mostly silent but not necessarily unfriendly breakfast together in the dining hall; last night they’d watched an episode of a Bravo show Ellery had never seen before, and when Ellery asked who the people were, Susie had explained patiently without any huffing.
“Look,” Ellery said now, taking a deep breath. She’d been waiting for the right moment to say this. “I think it’s possible I was a bitch to you this year for no reason.”
Susie closed her laptop, turning to give Ellery her full attention. “Continue,” she said.
Ellery rolled her eyes. “In my defense,” she said, “you were a bitch to me first.”
“When was I a bitch to you?”
“At the beginning of the year!” Ellery said. “That thing about how I talked about California too much.”
“I don’t remember that at all,” Susie told her, “but I’m sure I said it. I was so unhappy at the beginning of the year.”
“You were?” This was surprising.
“Of course I was!” Susie said. “I was so lonely. And you were just, like, completely mute and maybe going to jump out the window any minute, and then you met Danny and Camp and you were just”—she made a whooshing sound—“gone. And that was that.”
Ellery almost told her then about all of it, about how she’d spent the year in the middle of a grand romance but it wasn’t anything like she thought.
But that was a conversation for another day.
“It turns out I really like romance novels,” she said instead.
“I’ve been stealing them off your shelf when you’re not here. ”
“I know,” Susie said, smiling a little.
“You do?”
“Of course I know,” Susie said. Then: “Can I ask you a question without you getting offended? Have you never had a friend who’s a girl before?”
“I’ve never really had friends at all before this year,” Ellery admitted before she could stop herself, and Susie looked at her like she had just casually handed over a Rosetta stone, some key to unlocking Ellery’s entire personality.
“Oh,” was all Susie said.
They were quiet for a while, both of them studying. “Look,” Susie said eventually. “I was supposed to live with Violet from down the hall next year, but it turns out she’s probably going to transfer to be closer to her loser boyfriend. So I’m down a roommate.”
Ellery tilted her head to the side. “Are you asking me to—”
“Yeah,” Susie said. “If you want.”
“I do want,” Ellery said.
She startled awake the next morning to the sound of Susie’s gasp across the room. “You bitch!” Susie said. “I thought you said you weren’t doing the Harpswell.”
“I did say that,” Ellery admitted blearily, sitting up and pushing her hair out of her face. “But I changed my mind.”
“Well, you won.”
“I did?” Ellery said, blinking. “Seriously?”
“Yes!” Susie said. “How am I the one telling you that? Didn’t they send you an email or something?”
“I don’t know,” Ellery said. “I haven’t checked.”
“How have you not checked?”
“I was sleeping,” Ellery pointed out reasonably. Both of them started to laugh.
She saw Camp one more time before she left for California, the two of them standing on the green summer lawn outside Honors House. “I told you you could win it,” he called by way of hello.
“You did,” Ellery admitted, tucking her hands into the back pockets of her jeans and stepping closer. “Thank you for the recommendation.”
“Of course,” Camp said. He’d submitted the letter way back in October just like he promised, Jonah K. Marlowe had told her. It had been in her file all year long. “How was the lunch?”
“What, the convocation thing?” Ellery asked. “It was fine. I ate weird salmon and then when I got back, Susie wouldn’t stop talking about how she could smell it.” She waved away a cluster of tiny blackflies hovering between them. “Your dad didn’t even show, for what it’s worth.”
Camp huffed a sound that wasn’t a laugh, exactly. “I guess something must have come up.”
Ellery took a deep breath. “He doesn’t deserve you,” she said, all in a rush before she could talk herself out of it. “You know that, right? Your dad, I mean. Like, whatever else—” She broke off. “He just. Camp. He doesn’t.”
Camp nodded, though all at once he wasn’t quite looking at her. “Yeah,” he agreed unconvincingly. “No, of course. I know.”
“Okay.” Neither of them said anything for a moment. Ellery could hear the birds chatting back and forth up in the trees. “Well. Have a good summer, okay? I’ll see you.”
“I’ll see you,” Camp said, hugging her goodbye hard and quick.
Ellery headed across the lawn, stopping briefly to watch as a sparrow made its nest in the eaves of Honors House.
As she climbed the sagging steps to the porch, the front door opened and Danny stepped out, barefoot in shorts and a Preston Athletics T-shirt, his dark hair golden in the light of the late afternoon.
“There you are,” he said easily, looking at Ellery and then at Camp, still standing alone on the grass, like he was waiting. “You guys want to come and play cards?”