by Julie Israel
I’m laying out some photos on the table there when knuckles rap the door and my favorite voice says, “Special delivery.”
I break into a grin. Brand meets me where I stand, pulling me to him by the waist and kissing me on the lips. Brand and I have been seeing each other ever since New Year’s—mostly in secret, often here or at his practices. That we’re dating isn’t a secret per se—obviously his band mates and my parents have some idea—but it is still new and exciting, and arguably more of a thrill, to keep our meetings to ourselves.
Our kisses still spin fireworks and raging snow.
“Mm. Fresh from the source.”
“Hang on. I think there’s a fresher one. Let me check.”
He pulls me in and kisses me again, long and deep, until I laugh and say, “Wait, wait! We’re crumpling the pictures!”
Reluctantly he allows me to extricate myself and smooth out the images that have folded in my hand.
“Besides,” I say, turning away to sort them into their stacks, “I have something for you.”
“Oh?” Brand closes the distance between us again. “It wouldn’t happen to be in your pockets, would it?” His hands slide down my back in search of the answer. I giggle like one of Rush Hollister’s hopeless fan girls.
“No . . .”
He kisses my neck. “Somewhere”—a palm traces lightly back up—“closer to your heart?” I catch his hand and spin to face him and he grins.
“In fact”—I duck out and sashay away from him—“what I have for you isn’t here at all.”
Brand bites his lip, eyes trailing after me. I fish a flier from my bag.
“You know about the Shaker the GSBC puts on, right?”
He looks over the paper. “You’re asking me to the Valentine’s dance?”
“Not ‘asking.’”
“Ooh,” he says, play-huskily. “I love it when you tell me what to do.”
I push his chest. “I’m in the GSBC, remember? Helping plan the event?”
I watch for comprehension. He still doesn’t get it.
“A dance like this . . .” I quirk a brow. “They want live music.”
Something crosses his face. “You mean—?”
“I talked to Keegan and booked Muffin Wars a ridiculously well-paid gig next month? Yes. Yes I did. You’re welcome.”
For a moment Brand just stares at me. Then he says, “God, you’re even hotter when you’re managing,” and prowls forward again.
This time, I let him. We kiss, and Brand cups my cheek and presses a hand low on my back, pinning our hips together. I lean into him and squeeze his torso and he groans and lifts me up onto the table.
“Not the project! Not the project!”
Brand slides me away from my papers and draws back ever so slightly, his lips brushing mine. “Five more minutes.”
“Okay, but I’m timing us.”
“Liar.”
It is definitely more than five minutes before we stop again, and then it’s only because a stack of folders—my sorted and unsorted materials—tips over and spills off the far corner of the table.
“Whoops.”
Brand helps me down and moves to pick up what has fallen. I straighten the pieces of the groups I’d been working on—a California trip, a Halloween party, a day spent at the Waterfront Blues Fest—while Brand stacks the folders back one by one.
“How is the project going?” Brand looks over the table. For weeks now I’ve been pairing shots of Camie and Bristol to physical souvenirs from both Before and After.
“It’s going,” I say—which is as much as I can ever say, without adequate wall space. “I’ve started trying to put it all in order, but that doesn’t work for everything and I still don’t know what I’ll—”
“What’s this?” Brand holds up a page I hadn’t meant for him to find: a Venn diagram comparing ANGELA and SPONGE.
Busted.
I make to reclaim the sheet, but Brand holds it out of reach. “‘Likes: learning French; poetry; the neon spectrum.’ Juniper.”
“What?” I lunge and seize the paper back.
“You’re not their fairy godmother.”
“I didn’t say I was.”
“If you don’t stop messing with other people’s business, sooner or later you’re gonna get burned.”
“They’re just observations.”
“Whatever.” Brand takes out a stick of cinnamon gum and his lighter and sets fire to it, apparently dropping the subject. I hastily pull a drawing board from the shelf and swat the flame out against the table.
“Why are you always destroying things?”
His devious smile. “I’m not destroying them. I’m testing them.”
I scoff. “Testing?”
“Yeah. I’m seeing what they’re made of. And let’s not forget who cleaned up after whose ceramic rampage.”
That corks any comeback.
“Look.” Brand sighs and pushes a hand through his hair so that the front is freshly rumpled. “I’m sorry. I just . . . I know what it’s like to have someone think they’re helping you and really, they’re just making things worse.”
I wonder if I know what he’s talking about. “Do you . . . want to talk about it?”
“Not really. But I’d like to make it up to you.”
He walks over, smoothes his thumbs over my hands.
“Well, good.” My eyes stray to another of the pages he retrieved from the floor. “’Cause I think I know how you can.”
“Oh?” He starts to kiss my neck, but I walk us backward.
“You know that . . . scavenger hunt that Booster’s doing tomorrow?” Brand’s breath on my skin makes it hard to concentrate. I retrieve the page and display it between us. “I was wondering if—”
“If I’d do it with you?”
He pulls back to meet my eye. I push my lips together.
“I’m one of the planners, so I can’t participate . . . but I was wondering if you wanted to meet up beforehand to help set up? We’re doing breakfast at Pippa’s and then splitting up to plant the clues.”
“Who’s ‘we’?”
“Me, the rest of GSBC—and Sponge.”
“Sponge?” Brand tilts his chin down.
“Angela invited him.”
The tilt steepens.
“What! We all have French together. Sponge heard me and Angela talking about it and said it sounded fun. Can we focus on the matter at hand here?”
Brand studies me. “You want to go together tomorrow. Like—officially.”
“Yeah,” I say softly. Brand is so close, I could count his eyelashes. “I know Muffin Wars gets more love when the fan girls think you’re single, but—” I draw a breath and glance at the floor. “These are my friends we’re talking about. Camilla kept her relationship a secret from everyone, even those closest to her, and . . .” And it’s bred more trouble than I care to tally, and still cuts me to the core. “That’s one example I don’t want to follow.”
Brand’s chest inflates.
On the exhale he says, “All right.”
“Really?”
He shrugs. “If it means that much to—ow!”
I am squeezing him in my arms, elated. I guess I’ve never seized Brand with such enthusiasm before, because before I let go he actually winces.
“Thank you!” I cheer, though I try to dial it down a little.
I lace my fingers through his and lean into him. Brand sways with me, hand in my hair, but I can’t help noticing he looks winded.
“You okay?” I peel back to search his face. “I didn’t just crack a rib or something, did I?”
“With your puny biceps?” He folds me back against his chest. “I don’t think so.”
I attack a ticklish spot above his hip. Brand yelps and jerks back, then
retaliates, then puts an end to the war by pulling me and my lips up to his.
- 211 -
“Sorry I’m late.”
Nate pulls up a chair to our double table at Pippa’s the next morning. “There was confusion about who was taking what car this morning, and then the usual Where are you going, What are you doing, Who—”
He breaks off, belatedly noticing that there are more of us than usual.
“Ahem. New people. Hi—I’m Nate.” He holds up a hand in greeting, then inclines his head at Sponge. “Wait a second—don’t I know you?”
Sponge actually closes his laptop.
“Lawrence,” he offers, hailing back. “But nobody calls me that.”
“Sponge, right? We met at the bake sale.”
“Yeah.” Sponge grins, pleased to be remembered.
“Good to see you, man. And . . .” Nate freezes when he gets to Brand, recognition with a tinge of disgust registering.
“Brand,” supplies Brand—not without a cheeky grin of his own.
Nate looks around the table, presumably for some indication of who he is here with, and all eyes gravitate tellingly toward me. Brand smirks and drapes an arm across the back of my seat.
“Right,” says Nate, and his throat moves like he’s swallowed something hot.
Kody, ever the peacemaker, shuffles things forward by passing Nate a copy of our stop list: the dozen places we’ll be visiting and leaving clues before the hunt begins this afternoon. Kody and Angela were officially instated as president and VP after the bake sale, so Fun Fact: The club now has its first full cabinet since 1982. “Okay, guys,” she says, picking up where we left off. “So who wants what?”
My eyes move down the list. Our stops are divided into groups, three sets determined by what’s close to what and total drive time. The last has only two stops, and one is—
“Cedar Falls,” I call, raising a hand. “I mean, the last set—if you guys don’t mind.” I’m not normally one to call things, but Cedar Falls was one of the first places I thought of to remember Camie. Between the distance, icy roads, and being grounded, I never managed to get to it. But who knows? If she went there with YOU—
Maybe there’s still evidence of YOU up there for me to find.
Angela says, “Fine by me. But can I do the second set? That rabbit thing in the other one freaks me out. Ever since Donnie Darko I don’t do rabbits.”
Angela must mean Harvey, the float-sized statue of a rabbit in a captain’s coat in the first set—a landmark, oddly enough, for a boat business. With gloved hands and cartoonish blue eyes, he looks a lot like a character who might have been called back, but was ultimately rejected for the roles of both the Trix and the Cap’n Crunch mascots.
“What?” Nate screws up his face. “Harvey looks nothing like the one in Donnie Darko.”
“Je n’aime pas les lapins,” Angela insists.
“Oh hey,” I inject, suddenly seeing an opportunity, “the second set has Maison Leclair. You should go with her, Sponge. That way you guys can pick up some extra credit along the way.”
“Ooh!” Angela nods. “Et macarons.”
Her eyes find Sponge’s.
She asks him shyly, “You want to?”
Sponge grins. “Mais oui.”
Victory jab. I’ve been looking for unsuspicious circumstances to pair those kids forever.
“Hang on.”
Five heads swivel to Brand.
He says to Kody, “I thought you were a Killmaniac.”
She frowns. “How’d you know that?”
Brand’s eye strays meaningfully to me, and for a long, terrible moment I fear he is going to tell all.
But then he looks at Kody and just shrugs. “Seen your lunchbox.” I feel the blood unstick in my veins. “Anyway, don’t you wanna do the library thing?” He points to the clue that involves looking up the Latin from Lucy Killman spells there.
Also in Set #2.
“I guess, but . . .” You can tell Kody totally wanted to.
Nate says, “Then you and Angela go, Kody. Sponge and I can face the Great White Rabbit, and afterward he can help me pick out a hat.” Hat Museum: second stop in the first set. “What do you say, Sponge?”
Sponge tilts up his hot blue frames and slides out his feet, displaying lime-green Vans. “I do have an eye for accessories.”
“But—”
My protest is cut short by a shout of “Nate, number twenty-seven!” Nate gets up to claim his order; by the time he returns the matter is settled, Sponge claiming that he doesn’t really need extra credit for French anyway.
Brand nudges me with a smirk. “Guess that means I’m stuck with you.”
I fix him with a look and mouth “Date block.”
∞
I’m still grumbling when we arrive at Cedar Falls over an hour later: a long bridge high above the ground before an epic waterfall. One of the more popular hikes in the area, Cedar Falls was a place Camie and I used to go to get away. Sometimes, on a warm summer’s day, we’d come up with a blanket, spread it out on the grass in the picnic area, and lounge. We’d read. Tan. Drink cream sodas with lemon and blow bubbles. A couple times Cam even brought her guitar.
I haven’t been up here since she died, but it occurred to me this morning that it is relatively secluded. Nice place for a private outing.
Or to take your secret boyfriend.
“‘Thank you, Brand,’” Brand mimics when I shut my door and start up the trail without waiting for him.
“I’m still mad at you,” I grouch without turning.
“About Angela and Sponge?” Brand jogs after me, shoes crunching gravel. “Come on.”
“But you knew I was trying to set them up. You knew, and you still totally date-blocked me.”
“Hey.”
Brand brushes by and overtakes me, bracing my arms so I’ll stop and look at him. When I do, I half expect him to be mad.
But Brand just studies me and breaks into a grin. “Has anyone ever told you you’re incredibly cute when you’re angry?”
“No, probably because they knew it would be the last thing they ever did.”
“Go ahead. Take a shot at me.” He holds out his arms in full breadth, a manly invitation to throw a swing at his chest. I glower at him, an exasperated look like I’ve grown weary of his games, and push aside some bushes to start around him.
Then, when he doesn’t expect it, I spin back and aim a fist at his shoulder.
He catches it easily, laughing as I struggle against his muscle.
“I hate you,” I tell him to his grinning face.
“You hate it when I’m right,” he says, pulling me in.
“I hate it when . . .”
He leans close as he stays my fists, daring me not to meet his lips instead of finishing that thought. I see two options:
A) Let him kiss me and then say, all breathy and defeated, “God damn you, Brand Sayers.”
B) Go for the exposed crotch.
I raise a knee to feign B and Brand flinches, swearing.
“I never said I played fair!” I cackle, and sprint off up the hill ahead of him.
∞
“Were you raised by mountain lions?” Brand asks a few minutes later, panting behind me as we reach the top.
I don’t answer. I’m already at the bridge.
I take a few deep breaths before eagerly skimming the messages carved in wood: single words like Smile! and BASTARD, couples’ equations, drawings of weird creatures and characters with speech bubbles.
“You’re looking for her.” Brand has caught up to me, and caught on.
I don’t lift my sweeping gaze. “She’d have brought him here. I know it.”
He doesn’t answer, but I can tell by the way he watches me from the foot of the bridge that Brand pities me.
He thinks I’m deluding myself: grasping at straws, groping for traces where there aren’t any.
But what he says is, “Want a hand?”
We each take a side. But after several minutes scouring, nothing with YOU or Me or Camie’s initials turns up, and with a sinking feeling I realize that I am chasing fantasy. There’s nothing here. Just another dead end. I was stupid to hope for more.
My chest deflates with a sigh. “I don’t know what I even expected to find. ‘You’ and ‘Me’? What would that’ve told me that I didn’t not know already?”
“Uh . . .” says Brand.
“Exactly.”
I slouch to the side near the falls and lean over the railing. Brand does the same.
“The guy you’re looking for might not be here, Juniper . . .” He inclines into my eye line. “But he’s out there somewhere. And knowing you, you’re too stubborn not to find him. You’ll get him the letter eventually.”
I smile a little. One thing I like about Brand Sayers: For all the things he fights me on or annoys me with, sometimes he knows exactly what to say. He also knows when to say nothing, and just let the moment be. Like now, as he rubs my back and doesn’t press for an answer.
“C’mon,” I say after a while. “We better hurry if we’re gonna make Madame’s by two.”
We kneel to chalk our clue onto the bridge. Then, when I dust my hands and pick up the box to put the stick away—
“Brand!”
He jumps. Frantically I point at where the box was sitting.
On the floor, beside the fresh streaks of pink, are two minute lines inked in black:
i carry Your heart with Me
(i carry it in my heart)
His eyes widen.
“Camilla’s letter said almost exactly the same thing,” I recall. “‘Wherever I am in the unknown ahead, you (in the pocket of my heart) will also be.’” I’ve read it enough times to know.