by Jamie Shaw
“Well, isn’t it?” Kit’s jaw ticks, and Danica continues. “And she’d be super hot. I mean, think about it. What hit music video doesn’t have a hot girl? You wouldn’t even have to pay anyone.”
Shawn stops walking when he gets to the end of the platform in the middle of the pond, turning around with his eyes narrowed. “And why is that?”
Danica’s alligator smile widens, her long brown hair snaking behind her in the breeze. “Because I’d do it for free.”
She’s dead serious. Utterly serious. Which, I’m guessing, is why Kit completely loses it. She starts laughing, quietly at first—normally, like a normal person. But when personal offense writes itself all over Danica’s face, she starts laughing harder, and harder, and harder. Dee joins in, and Joel tries not to, but fails. Shawn tries to suppress a smile that won’t stay hidden, and eventually, Kit laughs so hard that she descends into a full-on coughing fit.
Sneezes and coughs from nearly the entire band made up the soundtrack of our hike through the woods, but Kit coughed more than anyone else, wiping her nose with her sleeve and insisting that she was fine every time Shawn lectured that she should have stayed home. Now, those coughs get the better of her, and she doesn’t stop until she hacks something up and spits it into the water at Danica’s side.
“Gross,” Danica scolds, which only makes Kit laugh again. “What is your problem?” she snaps, and I wait for her to murder Kit, or Kit to murder her, or someone to murder someone and turn this place into a real-life crime scene, when Mike wraps his arm around Danica’s shoulder.
“Kit’s just delirious,” he says, giving Kit a pointed look. He turns to stand in front of Danica, his big hands on her shoulders. “And they’ve put a lot of thought into this. We all have.”
“I’m just trying to help.” Danica pouts, and Mike studies her for a moment before replying.
“I know. I appreciate that.”
“My idea wasn’t bad,” Danica insists, looking past Mike to implore Shawn. “I could take this music video to the next level. Having a sexy girl in it would make—”
“You realize Kit is sexy as hell, right?” Dee snaps, and I can’t tell if Kit’s cheeks are red because she’s embarrassed or red because she’s sick, but I don’t remember her being that flushed a minute ago. “Look at her. She’s a fucking bombshell. This video will already have a hot girl in it.”
“Well, yeah,” Danica reluctantly concedes, “but—”
“Are you going to shoot the video at night?” I interrupt, and everyone’s eyes swing to me. I don’t even know why I open my mouth, except that something about sharing the same bloodline as Danica forces me to protect her from putting her foot further into her mouth. “To make it more ghostly?”
Shawn stares at me while I use my nonexistent powers of telepathy to beg him to go along with my subject change, and finally, he says, “Yeah.” He scratches his fingers over the stubble on his jaw. “But the film crew is going to bring up all sorts of high-tech lighting to help light the dock so we’ll be visible.”
“It sounds like it’s going to be really amazing,” I offer, and an easy smile finally returns to Shawn’s face, lighting his forest-green eyes.
“Thanks, Hailey.”
“Whose idea was it?”
The guys and Kit start telling me who came up with which ideas, and I listen. I smile back at Shawn, my attention skipping between him, Adam, Joel, Kit, Mike, and even Rowan and Dee—until it accidentally lands on Danica.
She should be happy I changed the subject. The guys weren’t going for her idea, and I was just trying to keep her from looking fame hungry. Or from offending anyone. Or from . . . I don’t know . . . causing Kit or Dee to fly across the dock and strangle her with their bare hands.
But she isn’t happy. Not when she locks eyes with me. Her tight lips and her hard gaze make me an unspoken promise.
She is going to kill me.
Chapter 11
When Danica decides later that afternoon, after the guys have fully scouted the woods surrounding the meadow, that she needs to pee and that she needs me to go with her—which requires a private trek into the trees, just the two of us—I’m fully certain I’m never leaving this forest alive. I know she’s still stewing about the way I derailed her “I should be the star of your music video!” campaign, and I also know that the only punishment for such an offense is certain death.
But instead of clubbing me with a fallen tree branch or pushing me off a conveniently located cliff, Danica simply tramps her designer boots through the tall field grass alongside me and complains, “I hate having to hang out with his friends all the time. I hated it in high school, and I hate it even more now.”
“Why?” I ask, and she gives me a poignant side-eye.
“They hate me.”
“They don’t ha—” I start, but Danica rolls her eyes.
“Don’t lie, Hailey. You’re terrible at it. You always have been.”
She’s right, of course. Whenever we got into trouble when we were younger, I’d always have to let Danica do the talking, because if I attempted to spin the truth, our parents would be able to tell in two seconds flat. I’d end up giggling, or worse—crumbling under the pressure and spilling every tiny detail, even ones they didn’t ask for. Once, when Danica and I got caught driving my dad’s tractor, I ended up selling us both down the river and confessing that we had done the same thing a week earlier but never got caught. We were both grounded for three lonely, boring, miserable weeks.
“Okay,” I admit as we finally reach the tree line and I muscle a thick bush out of my cousin’s way, “they hate you.”
“I’m aware,” she mutters, walking through the passage I make. “They don’t hate you though.”
In the shade of bloodred leaves that stubbornly refuse to fall, Danica treats the wilderness like she does everything else in her life: she holds her head high and tramples it beneath her feet. She somehow marches easily over branches and bramble and grass that seem to come to life just to coil around our legs, while I hop and skip and trip behind her, cursing under my breath like a pint-sized sailor the entire way.
“Did you think my idea was stupid?” Danica asks just as I get ensnared in a pricker bush. She pauses to look over her shoulder while I carefully attempt to dislodge a thorn from the baggy sleeve of my orange zip-up hoodie, and I stop fighting with the bush to look up at her. She must be able to tell that I’m deciding whether or not to try lying again, because she immediately scolds, “And don’t you dare lie.”
I cast my eyes back to the thorns stuck in my hoodie, removing them one by one with surgical precision. “No, but I think that the way you suggested it was.”
“How?”
I don’t need to look at her again to know that her eyes have narrowed into her signature mascara-lined slits. But she told me not to lie to her, so I’m going to follow her orders for once. “You didn’t think of them. You didn’t think of all the time they put into their idea before you started telling them everything you thought was wrong with it. And you didn’t wait to hear what they thought of your idea before you insisted on changing their whole video and starring in it. You made it all about you.”
“I—” Danica opens her mouth to protest, but I finish before she can.
“You bulldozed them. You’re a bulldozer, Dani.”
I think about continuing my lecture—about unleashing all of the feelings I’ve bottled up since I moved in with her two months ago, back in August—but I don’t. Just like the band’s video wasn’t about Danica, her question wasn’t about me. If I can get her to understand this, if I can get her to see why she was wrong in this one, tiny situation that doesn’t even involve me, that would be a humongous step in the right direction.
Danica stands there for a long time, her arms crossed tightly as she digests everything I said. Her long hair dances around her shoulders with the breeze, the rest of her prettily statuesque. With my sleeve finally freed from the brambles, I face her, listening to time tick in t
he space between us.
“But you did agree with what I said?” she finally asks.
“Huh?” I’m not sure what I expected—a revelation?—but her question throws me off guard.
“You think the video would be better with a lead ghost?”
“Yeah,” I stammer. “I guess. I mean, I think—”
“Okay, good,” Danica interrupts, a smile settling in her happy brown eyes. “Then maybe you can help me.” She links her arm with mine as we continue walking through the forest, and I lose all sense of direction as I chase her train of thought.
“Help you?”
“Help me convince them to go with my idea. I know I went about it the wrong way, Hailey. You were right.” She bumps my shoulder in a disconcerting show of affection. “But it is a really good idea. It will make the video more popular, which will help the band. And I bet they’ll listen to you. Plus, I’ll owe you one.”
I trip over a rock, but Danica catches me with our linked arms and helps me find my balance. “Why would they listen to me?” I ask as I find my feet.
“Because you don’t lie,” she says, turning her head to smile at me.
“But you do?”
“Of course not,” she says with a too-big smile just as we step from the tree line. The afternoon sun crashes into me, and my gaze swims over waves of golden grass to a large dock in the middle of a pond, where all of my friends are still laughing and carrying on.
“I thought—” I thought you had to pee? I start to ask, but I never get the chance.
“Come on,” Danica peeps, dragging me toward the dock and, consequently, toward the confused looks I get once we arrive there.
Since when are you best friends? Rowan’s look asks.
Why are you letting that she-devil touch you? Kit’s look presses.
I glance away from both of them, to Dee’s pinched brow, narrowed eyes, and tight lips. Did she make you drink the Kool-Aid? Are you brainwashed? Are you silently screaming for help? Should I drown you in this pond and put you out of your misery?
“Did you two get lost or something?” Mike asks, and I let his deep voice kidnap my attention. I turn to see him smiling up at Danica and me from the end of the grated platform, where he’s sitting on a plum-purple blanket with Joel. He’s wearing a black and green Dallas Stars snapback hat and a matching green hoodie, and looking at him now feels like staring into the sun.
I’ve tried to avoid doing it too much since meeting up with the group today. It’s strange, hanging out with him in person. Listening to him talk. Watching him laugh. Just . . . being around him.
I’ve ended every night this week by playing Deadzone with him. And every single night, with the exception of the nights we’ve talked on the phone, my phone has dinged with a text from Sexy as Fuck Drummer just before I’ve drifted off to sleep.
Sweet dreams, Hailey.
I find myself waiting for those three simple words. The text doesn’t always come right away, and on those nights, I’ve tossed and turned, trying not to think about him.
I know I shouldn’t fall asleep thinking about my cousin’s boyfriend. I probably shouldn’t even play games with him. I never mention our Deadzone games to Danica, and I’m pretty sure Mike doesn’t either, seeing as how I haven’t been axed in my sleep.
Deep down, I know she wouldn’t be okay with it. But if Mike is okay with it, why should that matter? We’re just friends. He knows we’re just friends. Even if he wasn’t with Danica, we’d still be just friends—because Mike likes girls like Danica, and I am so not her.
Only . . . standing here breathing the same air as him, I don’t feel like Mike and I are friends at all. This Mike is someone I can’t talk to. This Mike belongs to Danica, and the other Mike is someone else. Someone who texts me to wish me sweet dreams.
I wonder if he does that for Danica . . .
“Hailey got stuck in a thorn bush,” my gorgeous older cousin teases, finally dropping my arm to go and sit on her boyfriend’s lap. He makes room for her but doesn’t take his eyes off of me.
“Are you okay?” he asks, and the genuine, open concern in his voice makes my cheeks heat with embarrassment. The two Mikes I know come together in those three little words—the gamer I spend my nights with, and the rock star dating my cousin. The guy my little brother idolizes, and the man who commands venues full of screaming girls.
“Yeah.” I attempt a laugh, but it sounds so awkward, I try to transition it into a cough instead, earning me confused looks from everyone who hears it.
“Are you getting sick too?” Shawn asks, referring to the plague that seems to be spreading within the group. His nose is red from wiping it with his sleeve all day, and Patient Zero—aka Kit—still looks like she could just lie down and die right where she’s standing. Joel is fighting a cough, Adam has exhausted Rowan’s entire supply of travel tissues, and even Dee looks like she had to put on extra makeup today to accomplish her normally effortless Covergirl glow.
“No,” I hurriedly answer, willing my cheeks to return to their normal pale color.
“Are you sure?” Shawn presses, his brow crinkled with worry. “You look kind of flushed.”
“You do look really red,” Mike agrees, and I consider jumping into the pond and living at the bottom forever and ever and ever.
Why did I have to laugh like that? What kind of loser pretends to cough?!
“Are you running a fever?” Rowan asks, pressing the back of her hand against my forehead while everyone watches me turn from blush red to beet red to really freaking just-kill-me-now red.
And just when I think things can’t get any worse, Danica proves me wrong. “Was that a fake cough?” she accuses, and I’m sure the look on my face must be something akin to a slow loris about to be obliterated by a steamroller.
“What?” I squeak, scraping at a cover that’s about to be blown to bits. “What the hell kind of question is that! Of course it wasn’t a fake cough. Why would I fake cough? Why would anyone pretend to cough? God, Danica! Who would do that?”
Me. I would do that. Me me me me meee, oh God.
“I’m fine,” I insist when everyone just stares at me—including Mike, with his concerned brown eyes, his frowning lips, and a perfect layer of scruff on his jaw that might make a smarter girl try not to act so stupid. “I just, I mean, I’m, it was—” Oh my God. I’ve forgotten how to use words. I’ve forgotten how to sentence! “It was a really strenuous walk,” I finally manage, wiping nonexistent sweat from my brow simply because I need something to do with my hands that doesn’t involve hiding behind them.
I don’t know why I can’t speak or laugh or cough or even breathe like a normal person right now, but the suspicious look on Dee’s face doesn’t help.
“Do you want to sit down?” Mike asks, gesturing to a spot beside him on the blanket that Rowan spread out earlier. My eyes flit to Danica, who watches me from his lap with just as much bewilderment as everyone else.
“Uh, yeah,” I say, taking Mike up on his offer simply because I don’t trust my knees to keep doing their job of holding me up if I don’t sit down soon. “Okay.”
I plop down cross-legged next to him, feeling like the biggest idiot in the history of idiocy. Why did I fake a cough? What the hell was that even supposed to accomplish? Like a weird fake cough is any better than a weird fake laugh? Why am I so freaking weird?!
“Water?” Mike asks, holding his half-finished bottle of water out for me, and I shake my head while trying to figure out some way to get everyone’s attention off of my nonexistent, delirium-inducing fever.
Luckily, Danica rises to the occasion. “So Hailey and I were in the woods talking about your video, and—”
“Motherfucker!” I interrupt, my pointer finger wiggling inside the hole I just found while nervously fiddling with the sleeve of my hoodie. I don’t know why I have the worst luck with clothes lately, but I was counting on this hoodie to be one of my go-to jackets for fall. And now it has a freaking hole in it. A godda
mn hole. A mother—
“What?” Mike asks while I mutter enough curse words to make my mom disown me, and I angrily wiggle my finger at him.
“That damn thorn bush murdered my hoodie!”
Mike captures my pointer with his calloused fingertips and lifts my hand over my head, inspecting my sleeve and then sticking his finger in yet another tiny rip. “Here’s another one.”
I pull my arm away and crane my neck to see the underside of my sleeve. “Dammit.”
“It’s not too bad,” Mike lies. “Give it to me when we leave, and I’ll get my mom to patch it up for you.”
My first instinct urges me to tell him that his mom has already done enough for me, but since I never told Danica about Mike’s mom helping with my stained hoodie and I’m guessing she’d read a whole lot more into it than she should, I don’t. “Your mom would be able to fix this?”
“Mike’s mom can fix anything,” Joel praises, his long legs stretched out on the purple blanket. He tosses a pebble into the water, his blond mohawk waging a silent but valiant battle against the brisk afternoon breeze. “She can get blue hair dye out of yellow T-shirts.”
“And lava cake out of white carpet,” Mike says to Shawn, and Shawn chuckles as he coughs into his arm.
“And grass stains out of zebra-print boxers!” Adam throws in from where he’s smoking a cigarette at the side of the dock, and all four guys crack up laughing at some private memory they share.
“She made me a scarf once,” Danica interrupts, her cheeks dimpling with the memory. She shifts in Mike’s lap to give him her smile. “Do you remember that?”
“For your sixteenth birthday,” Mike recalls, and Danica practically squeals at his jogged memory.
“Yes! She gave it—”
“You said you hated that scarf,” he interrupts, and Danica’s smile vanishes.
“I did not.”
“Yes, you did,” Mike says, his voice devoid of all the nostalgic warmth it held a second ago.
Indignant, Danica begins to argue, “I would never—”