Not Now, Not Ever

by Lily Anderson

  “Aww,” I said, setting the book back on my desk and smiling over my shoulder at her. “That’s true friendship.”

  It felt nice to smile. The atmosphere at camp had completely curdled from the second we’d been left to our new lights-out the night before.

  Breakfast had been about as cheerful as the buffet line at a wake. Each table in the dining hall now had a piece of paper taped to either end, with a team number on it. Hari had forcibly removed Perla from Team Three, sitting her down between himself and Meg at our new spot near the beverages.

  Perla’s sullen demeanor paled in comparison to the counselors’. It hadn’t escaped anyone’s notice that they were also being punished. Their table in front of the picture window had been abandoned. There were no Starbucks cups in hand. Meg was makeupless and unsmiling in wrinkled UCLA sweatpants. After we’d bused our table, they’d marched us back to the residence hall and given us fifteen minutes to inventory our rooms for stolen property. Meg hadn’t even flourished the blank paper when she’d handed them out. It was unnerving.

  Leigh sloughed the rest of the pile into her backpack. The springs whined as she bounced down onto her mattress. “Anything missing on your side of the room?”

  “A bottle of hand sanitizer and a bag of trail mix. Both from my backpack.” Strangely, both had been in the same pocket as my money, but all of that remained. And I’d checked my debit card’s hiding place after Leigh had gone to sleep the night before. I wasn’t sure if our burglar had been extremely inept or simply snackish and germaphobic.

  “They got my binder, my notebook, and,” her lip curled in disgust, “all of my pens. Who steals a woman’s pens? I ask you. They weren’t even good quality.”

  I sat down on my bed, kicking closed my suitcase. It was comically large, sitting across from Leigh’s single bag. “It has to be someone trying to wipe out the competition. Why else would they take all of the binders? I don’t think the counselors did it. Their misery feels too real and it wasn’t on the Cheeseman list.”

  “It could be a prank.” Leigh shrugged, drawing her legs under herself. “Or a secret high-stakes bet. Or ghosts. I have it on pretty good authority that the school is haunted.”

  She waggled her eyebrows at me and I kicked the air between us. “Shut up.”

  I couldn’t stop myself from pulling up the memory of last night in the sci-fi section in vivid, photographic detail. Zoom in on a thumb brushing against the stripe of skin under the hem of my shirt, the taste of Brandon’s hot exhale.

  God. I was made of pins and needles. There couldn’t be a worse day to be forbidden from taking a run.

  “What is that face?” Leigh asked.

  I reached up, touching my cheek. “What face?”

  “Ever.” She tipped her head at me. “Come on.”

  I groaned. “Don’t start that again.”

  “Then tell me about your face!” She laughed, flinging her pillow at me. It flew in a black and white blur and landed at my hip.

  I picked it up and hugged it, half hiding behind the zebra stripes. I hadn’t expected to feel so embarrassed. It wasn’t like I’d never kissed a boy and told my friends about it after. My friends back home would never let me get away with keeping that kind of secret. They would want all the gory details so they could do a director’s commentary over it. He said what? Now you know he’s a virgin.

  And so on.

  “Something happened yesterday,” I said.

  She braced her hands against the edge of her bed frame and leaned forward, her slanted front teeth biting down on her lower lip.

  “I might have kissed a ghost,” I squeaked. “And by ‘might have,’ I mean ‘Whoa oh my God that definitely happened.’”

  She let out a squeal that bordered on banshee-like. “I knew it!”

  I threw her pillow back at her as footsteps slammed to our door, which flew open without a knock. Meg gripped the door frame, ready to throw herself at whatever horror was waiting for her.

  “What happened?” she gasped.

  “Sorry,” Leigh said in a strangled voice. “The burglars stole my tampons.”

  Meg let out a long sigh that was more weary than relieved. “Oh. Put it on the list. You guys only have a couple more minutes before I have to walk you to your first class.”

  “Will do,” I said, quickly grabbing the single sheet of paper we’d been given. I waved to Meg with it as she closed the door again.

  Leigh smothered a fit of giggles in her pillow.

  I threw the paper back at my desk, not caring as it floated to the floor. “Now when they find the burglars they’re going to be like ‘Hey, why did you steal all of that girl’s tampons?’”

  “Good!” Leigh snickered. “I hope they have to buy me a new box. That’s what they get for putting my entire future in jeopardy.” She propped her chin on the pillow and forced herself to stop grinning. I could see the tic of more giggles lurking in her jaw. “Please go on. You were telling me about the haunting of your underpants?”

  “Oh my God,” I said with a shocked laugh that echoed off of our cement walls. “No, I one thousand percent was not. We kissed. Well, we kissed a lot, but it was strictly first base. Not even a hint of stealing second.”

  But that might have been the fire alarm’s fault. Not that I was going to posit that theory to my dear roommate, who was busy joyfully bouncing on her bed again.

  “Save your sports metaphors for someone who gets them,” she said. “I have been on this hype from day one.”

  “Which was nine days ago.”

  “Nine days of being hell of right. You guys had the stink of high school sweethearts all over you. Just like Jams and Hunter. And I was right about them too! I should work at a carnival or something.” She stared off into space, possibly imagining her booth at the carnival of her dreams. She blinked at me a second later. “So, what now?”

  “What now is we’re in lockdown,” I said, leaping off my bed and grabbing the list of stolen items off the floor. “We were talking about trying to get off campus, before we found out that camp is kind of, you know, ruined.”

  “Getting off campus is a great idea!” she exclaimed.

  “I don’t know if that’s actually true.” I shook the paper at her. “Burglaries. Lockdown. Entire future slipping through my fingertips.”

  “You’re only seventeen once. You’re young, you’re hot, you’re away from home, and you’re sucking face with a ghost. Live your life! We can’t study after hours anymore. What do you have to lose?”

  “If anyone catches us, we’ll be sent home and we will both lose the chance to go to this school.”

  And my parents would kill me twice. Once for running away from home and once for getting caught sneaking around with boys.

  Leigh’s mouth flattened into unbridled annoyance. It was the way the Lieutenant looked at Isaiah’s diet and my hair. “Ever Lawrence, is there a nice boy with too much hair and the wrong name waiting for you in Sacramento?”

  The only thing waiting for me in Sacramento was a swamp-ass August, a car with half a gallon of gas in it, and the name I had to share with my dad. There might be parties or hangouts with stolen kisses from nobodies, but there wasn’t a somebody. There wasn’t a typewriter-wielding, esoteric-fact-spewing, pencil-twirling, just-enough-tongue-using ghost in Chuck Taylors anywhere but here. Balls.

  I threw my hands up. “No. There’s not.”

  She clapped her hands like a giddy child and hopped to her feet again. She sang an off-key jingle to herself. “I am the rightest girl in right town. The mayor of right town is Leigh!” She skipped over to my phone and pressed a button to see the time. “I can buy you like seven minutes if you’re okay with me telling stories about your bowels to Meg and Trixie.”

  “Wait, what?”

  She dropped to the floor and gave a shave-and-a-haircut knock against the carpet. It took a moment for the two answering knocks to sound under my bed.

  She glanced up at me, eyebrows high on her forehead.
“Seven minutes, starting now.”

  *

  I was out of breath by the time I made it to the upstairs lounge. As I groped in the darkness for the door handle, I was struck by a cold flash of panic that it would be locked and I’d be stuck on a forbidden floor, in the pitch black, with nowhere to go. But the handle eased under my fingertips and I slid inside the pumpkin.

  As my eyes adjusted to the dim, uneven light coming through the small windows, my pulse was deafening in my ears. I flexed my bare feet against the pumpkin’s thin, knobbly carpet, glad that I’d thought to kick off my shoes and socks before slipping into the stairwell. The floor below me was full of competitors, none of whom would bat an eye before reporting any sign of rule breaking, especially today.

  Sneaking around was practically begging to be dragged off campus and thrown back into the furious and heartsick arms of my family. All over a dude. Some white boy with shaggy hair who I’d known for barely over a week, who I’d once mistaken for a figment of my own imagination.

  The absence of old friends one can endure with equanimity, I recited to myself in an imagined British accent. But even a momentary separation from anyone to whom one has just been introduced is almost unbearable.

  I’d never believed it before, although I’d heard half a dozen different actors playing Cecily say it with varying degrees of ingenue swooning. My homesickness was a rock in my shoe, about the same size as the pang of hurt when I thought about how long it’d be until my mom’s next visit to California, or the thought of Ethan finishing growing up without me in the house.

  But here I was, punchy with want for someone I hardly knew. And compared to the pebbles of the rest of my worries, it was like a boulder that kept knocking me sideways.

  It was entirely stupid, but even if I’d had the password to stop it, I probably wouldn’t have typed it in. Because, as Brandon’s meringue-light voice entered the room through a crack in the door, I felt like all of the electricity in my body could have powered the entire coast.

  “Ever?”

  “I’m here,” I whispered back.

  The door opened fully and he slipped inside, careful to muffle the sound of the latch. He was in the white T-shirt and jeans combination he had been wearing on the first day of camp. He took three long strides and stopped short an arm’s length away from me.

  “Is everything okay?” he asked. He shook his head so that his hair brushed over the bridge of his nose. “Stupid question. Is everything okay other than, um, everything? Nope. Sorry. Let me try that again…”

  “I’m okay.” I took a hesitant step forward, suddenly afraid that he might run away like a startled deer if I moved too quick. “Is anything missing from your room? Is your typewriter safe?”

  “It’s safe. Who else would want it?” He rubbed a hand over the back of his neck. The friction made a quiet shushing sound. “But Jams’s binder is gone. And most of my socks. I had a pair for every day of camp.” He shrugged, his arms flopping by his sides. “I didn’t want to pay to do laundry fifteen minutes away from home. What about you guys? Anything missing?”

  “Nothing vital. Other than Leigh’s binder.”

  Silence filled the room like a flood, pushing against the squash-orange walls and lodging deep inside of my throat.

  “I can’t stay long,” he said, shifting his weight from one Chuck to the other. “Cornell’s going to do an inspection soon.”

  “Right,” I said, shoving the word out of my suddenly dry mouth. “Same here. With Meg.”

  I’d felt like there was too much to say before, and now I was legitimately struggling to find a single word that wasn’t the most awkward. It didn’t help that I was pretty sure that each of Brandon’s fidgets and flinches was making my heart crank the emergency brake.

  Maybe he didn’t want to be sneaking around with me. Maybe he was trying to flinch his way to the door and down the stairs and away from me forever. Or until our first class, which was in something like three minutes.

  “Brandon?”

  His throat constricted as he gave an audible swallow. “Yeah?”

  “I didn’t imagine last night, did I? I was kind of picturing a different reaction to having a time crunch in this empty room.”

  He moved in a blur. High-tops scuffed my toes. An arm around my waist. A hand cupping my jaw. A kiss seared against my lips, which I caught up to only in time for it to be over.

  “Sorry,” he breathed. “I didn’t want to assume—”

  I buried my fingers in his hair and rubbed my nose against his cheek. “I didn’t want to attack your face when you walked in. I mean, I did want to, but I didn’t want to freak you out.”

  “I know we ate breakfast next to each other—”

  “You put jam on waffles. Who does that?”

  “I wasn’t sure if you’d changed your mind—”

  “Nope. I am so all about this.”

  I caught his lower lip and used it to tug him back until we collided with the wall, a crush of mouths and heartbeats. Kisses rained down against my neck, accompanied by a brush of eyelashes on skin that made me shiver.

  “I can get us off campus for Friday night. There’s no Cheeseman trial then, so we won’t miss anything here,” he said, each word a puff of hot air against the thin skin under my ear. “We’ll need Jams and Leigh to help cover for us.”

  “What do we tell them?”

  His head popped up so that we were nose to nose. If I’d wanted to, I could have counted his eyelashes. “That we’re going on a date?”

  “Oh. That’s like really official, isn’t it?”

  He gave me that wide-open smile that I adored. “I was told that it’s best not to leave these things ambiguous.”

  I ran my thumb across the apple of his cheek. “You were told?”

  His laugh hiccupped our chests together. “You thought that I was naturally cool enough to know how to ask you out? I’m a nerd, Ever. A certified and well-documented nerd. I had a rolling backpack until last year.” He reached up, gently twining my hair around his fingers. “So yeah, I asked for advice as to how not to immediately screw this up. I can’t even kiss you without permission.”

  “You shouldn’t kiss anyone without permission. That’s called assault.”

  “You know what I mean.”

  I did know. What if it all disappeared? What if he changed his mind? What if the wanting went one-sided? I was pretty sure my ribs would cave in on my organs and I’d shrivel up like a sex-starved raisin.

  “I want you to kiss me, Brandon. But we have to go back downstairs.”

  “Ten more seconds,” he said.

  His hands braced against my shoulder blades. I locked my arms around his neck and closed my eyes. It was just a hug, underscored by an almost unconscious sway.

  But it was the first time all day I had no urge to run.

  26

  I watched the envelope pass from Meg to Brandon. It was about the size of his palm, cheerfully coral, with a nondescript stamp in the top corner. I only had a chance to read “B. Calistero c/o Camp Onward” before it disappeared into the pocket of his jeans. He caught my eye and grinned as Meg started shooing us to clear our lunches so she could walk us to our next class.

  At least, we were supposed to think we were going to our next class. I knew from our pinched schedule that the campus run was today. If the Cheeseman events were still allowed. Which I prayed they were, because I hadn’t been allowed out of sight of a counselor in days, much less allowed to get actual exercise. Leigh kept trying to get me to do yoga with her, but it was too much standing still. I had way too much energy to burn. I’d tried jogging the length of our floor, but Perla’s shouts for quiet had drawn Meg out of her room and had sent me back to sit on my mattress. I really regretted not stealing the Octavia Butler book out of the Lauritz before we’d been denied access to it. I suddenly had free time.

  While everyone else started collecting plates and silverware, Brandon and I volunteered to stay behind to wipe down the table
with one of the sudsy rags that had started being left out in big red buckets at the end of every meal. I got the feeling that Lumberjack Beard was taking the lockdown particularly personally. Three days in, our food wasn’t even imaginatively bad anymore. Lunch had been last night’s meatloaf set out with bread for sandwiches. Add in our new “clean your own table” mandate and some rumblings about teams being told to wash dishes, and all signs pointed to one grumpy, gangly Lumberjack.

  Brandon wrung out a rag and handed it to me and then got one for himself. We stood on either side of the table, wiping down the wood in tight circles. Uneven streaks made Meg twitchy. Then again, few things didn’t make Meg twitchy these days. She kept glaring at the Perfect Nerd Girl and snapping at Hari.

  “Did you get fan mail?” I asked Brandon, keeping my voice quiet so as not to draw attention from the surrounding tables.

  He made a confused face before jumping with recognition and pulling the envelope out of his pocket. He tore it in one long swipe and shook out an index card. He smiled. “Good. Our ride is secure.”

  He passed me the card. The handwriting was inhumanly neat, nearly its own font of round corners and ruler straight lines.

  Meet me at the corner of College and Hillview at 8 pm on the dot. Stick to the shadows. If you get caught, I don’t know you. Hang in there, kid.–HKL

  I handed it back across the table and continued buffing ketchup out of the wood grain. “That looks like a ransom note. Are you sure you aren’t being kidnapped?”

  He folded the card with three creases and slipped it back into his pocket. “Well, we are. Technically. Only in the strictest legal parameters.”

  Under the strictest legal parameters, I had kidnapped myself the second I’d crossed the state line into Oregon, but I really didn’t want to think about that right now. “If we get caught—”

  “We won’t,” he interrupted. “I’ve already talked to Jams. He and Hunter will cover me. Leigh will make sure that no one comes looking for you, right?”

  “Yeah.” Leigh had been too delighted when I’d unfolded the plan for Brandon and I to leave campus on Friday night. In return, she wanted a box of Raisinets from the movie theater and a full recitation of the menu of gelato flavors, since I wouldn’t be able to transport a waffle cone for her.