Not Now, Not Ever

by Lily Anderson

  “No,” he said lightly. “Usually they’re bickering and feeling each other up.”

  “Shut up, B,” Trixie said, in a hum that made me think of Meg.

  “He’s not wrong,” Ben said.

  “I didn’t say he was wrong,” Trixie said. “I told him to shut up. You should do likewise.”

  Ben’s teeth appeared in a grin that split his beard. “Make me, gorgeous.”

  “How do you guys get anything done?” I asked, mostly to remind them that Brandon and I were there. “Don’t you go to these exalted schools where you’d have to, you know, focus?”

  “Uh, yeah,” Ben said, raising his eyebrows at me. “Why do you think we don’t go to the same school? Can’t be trusted within a mile of each other.”

  Trixie let out a long, put-upon sigh. I almost felt bad for her, until I remembered that she and Ben were going to get to go back to Fort Farm and I was going to get shuffled back to my dorm, having to go back to communicating with Brandon through knocks on the floor.

  Life was entirely unfair.

  When we made it back to the right half of the fork in the road, Hunter and Jams were sitting on the ground under the tree house. Jams’s head was resting on Hunter’s shoulder as they murmured to one another. At the sound of our approach, they started to scramble apart, but Ben waved them off.

  “Don’t mind us, gents. We’re all here unofficially.” He planted his hands on his hips and tipped his head back, examining the underside of the tree house. “How’d you guys get up there?”

  “We climbed?” Jams said.

  “Damn. I was hoping for a ladder or something. All right.” He leaped up, his long arms grabbing the lowest branch. He walked up the trunk. The exposed skin above the line of his beard purpled with effort as he swung his legs up and onto the floor of the tree house.

  Trixie walked to the base of the tree. “You okay?”

  “Peachy,” he called back. “I landed on a bag of marshmallows. Hey, these are from my kitchen!”

  “It’s his kitchen now?” Brandon asked.

  Trixie shrugged. “He really likes to cook.”

  “It’s a shame he sucks at it,” Jams whispered.

  “Yes,” she said warily. “It really is.”

  “Jesus!” Ben called down. “Look at all this booze. This summer could have been a lot more fun if we’d known this was up here.”

  “Ben!” Trixie snapped.

  “Right.” His head appeared over the edge of the tree house. “Stay high on life, kids.”

  “Did you guys leave the binder up there?” I asked Hunter and Jams.

  “We left everything up there,” Hunter said.

  “We didn’t even put fingerprints on anything,” Jams said. “I’m not going home because someone wanted to live in a tree.”

  “The tree houses are for living in,” Trixie said, one eye on the bottom of the tree house. “That’s what the Rayevich counselors said when we were setting up the climbing challenge. Students make them to live in when the weather’s nice. They go around town, loading up pallets from Walmart and Fred Meyer to string up in the trees. And when they get caught and have to dismantle them, they take them out to the river to have bonfires. It’s a whole ritual thing.”

  “Incoming!” Ben called.

  We all jumped back as a binder came flapping down from the sky and smashed into the ground. Ben followed it with significantly less grace as Trixie retrieved the binder. She cradled it in her arms.

  “I need light,” she said.

  Hunter dug into his pocket and pulled out a jumble of keys. He turned on a tiny flashlight and aimed it at the binder’s pages as Trixie started frantically flipping them.

  “That’s the only binder up there,” Ben said, dusting himself off. “But it’s a pretty sweet study cave.”

  “It was empty when we did the climbing challenge,” Jams said.

  “Which made it perfect when someone needed to ditch all the stuff they stole out of the dorms,” Hunter said.

  “Someone who wanted to keep studying while no one else could,” I said.

  “Studying while also getting absolutely frakking blotto,” Ben said. “I can’t stress how many bottles of booze are up there.”

  “There are no notes,” Trixie muttered. She looked around at us, her pupils tiny in the light of the flashlight. “It’s totally clean.”

  Brandon craned his neck to see. “Really? What the hell? That’s unnerving.”

  “You think?” Ben said. “What kind of maniac doesn’t take notes? Not even a highlight?”

  Trixie swung her head. “Not even an underline.”

  “You genius school kids are creeped out by the wrong things,” I said. I pointed over our heads. “There’s a tree house full of stolen shit here?”

  “Of course,” Trixie said, closing the binder. “We’ll need to go get the other counselors so we can clear it out and inventory what we have here.”

  Ben pointed an accusing finger around at us. “Which means you runaways better scarper back to your dorms and tuck yourselves in. And tomorrow we will pretend that we never spoke to each other.”

  “Any chance we can get one of those bottles?” Hunter asked. “It’s gonna be a stressful week with the Melee—”

  Trixie threw him a terrifying look. “Goodnight, campers.”

  Jams, Hunter, Brandon, and I didn’t wait to be told a second time. The four of us started back up the path through the arboretum.

  “Do you want to take the long way back to the residence hall?” Hunter asked Jams.

  Jams beamed at him. “Obviously.”

  “Good night, you two,” Hunter said with a chuckle, as he and Jams took the fork toward Fort Farm.

  I wrapped my arms around Brandon’s bicep and kissed his cheek. “Not what I was expecting from my first date.”

  “Me either.” He frowned up at the tree canopy. “I can’t even walk you to your door.”

  “You can walk me to the door of my floor.”

  “Or,” he said, drawing the word out until it had a dozen Rs on the end, “I could walk you to the door of the top floor and then to the door of the upstairs lounge?”

  “Huh,” I said, pretending to think about it while my heart started boxing my ribs. “You know, I heard somewhere that all of the counselors are going to be out soon to clear out a tree house that someone might be living in.”

  “What a perfect time to watch Independence Day and make out.”

  “Um, hello? It’s always a perfect time to watch Independence Day and make out.”

  “God. Please don’t ever go back to California.”

  “I’m sorry, what was that?” I blinked at him innocently, cupping my ear. “I couldn’t quite…”

  “S’il vous plaît ne pas aller à la Californie.”

  31

  Lack of sleep scraped at the backs of my eyelids and memories of the night before filled my muscles with cicada buzzing. It had been after three when Brandon and I had sneaked back down from the pumpkin, our eyes bleary from the harsh glow of the laptop screen and lips aching from use. It wasn’t until after lunch, when Bryn Mawr clapped her hands together and told us to line up in the quad, that I remembered that we were heading into a double Cheeseman event today.

  I hadn’t even thought to stretch. Whatever was coming our way was going to hurt.

  Jams and Hunter exchanged a blushing glance as the counselors marched all of us into the arboretum, taking the right fork out of the tree canopy. The sky over the ash tree was so blue that it hurt to look at it directly. Other than the trampled grass around the trunk, there was no sign that all of the counselors had ransacked the tree house the night before. I couldn’t tell from the path if all of the stolen goods had been cleared out from under the blue tarp roof.

  “Why hasn’t anyone mentioned it?” I asked Brandon softly as we passed by. “I expected an announcement at breakfast or lunch, but nothing?”

  He smothered a yawn in his elbow. His hair was frizzy and matted ov
er his eyes. “No one wants to hear that everything except the binders was found. Especially not when the first skirmish is the day after tomorrow.”

  “Don’t remind me,” I said, squinting into the fierce daylight. “I don’t think I’m ever going to feel truly prepared.”

  “No one does,” he said. “That’s why they can’t even hint at getting the binders back. Everyone wants to keep studying, to have some semblance of readiness. Anything else would be spit on.”

  “Yeah?” I asked with a smile. “You don’t want your socks back?”

  He sighed heavily. “I do miss my socks. I borrowed a pair from Jams today. They aren’t the same.”

  “I will bore the pants off of you talking about properly cushioned socks,” I said.

  “Really? I’m listening.”

  Laughing, I popped a kiss onto his lips. Behind us, I heard the snapping of fingers. We turned to see Meg, tiny and furious, sweeping her hands at us.

  “Eyes on the road, please, little rabbits,” she chirped. “I’m not explaining any pregnancies to parents, thank you very much.”

  Leigh cackle-snorted.

  Brandon’s shoulders rounded up to his ears and his eyes squeezed momentarily shut. “I have three older sisters, and yet no one has ever embarrassed me more than Meg.”

  I giggled and poked him in the side. “I think she’d take that as high praise.”

  Ahead, the paved path stopped and a dirt trail appeared, cutting a serpentine curve between pine trees so narrow that we had to squeeze two by two to keep from running into the trees. Galen looked elated when Perla fell into step with him ahead of me and Brandon.

  “I’m understanding why they’d call this the Mud Trail,” Galen said with a strange forced laugh. “Most of the year, this must be soup.”

  “Don’t you want to study archaeology?” Perla asked, more confused than sneering. “You’ll have to be less of a wuss about dirt to go digging for artifacts.”

  “Perla,” Kate said with a frown, “you do know that not all archaeologists are Indiana Jones, right?”

  “Really, my interest is in cartography,” Galen started.

  Perla cut him off, rolling her eyes and pointing as the line veered off the trail. “No time for maps, Doctor Jones!”

  Bryn Mawr was shooing everyone into the trees. Our part of the line followed, sidestepping branches and crunching across the cracked, dry ground. The landscape tipped up and then slanted down. The trees thinned out, possibly to a clearing, but ahead there was only the unnatural crawl of dense, blue-tinged white fog.

  “I take back every time I made fun of you for thinking the school was haunted,” Leigh said, appearing at my elbow.

  The air had an unmistakable, cold cloy. It was a smell that stuck in your nostrils and swelled in your lungs like chewing and swallowing a pair of tights. I knew it from too many of Beth’s plays to count. Hamlet, Macbeth, even Oklahoma! all cranked up the fog machine and let the billowing white stink clouds fill the stage like a crappy TV dream sequence.

  “Welcome to a double event,” said Bryn Mawr, standing in front of the wall of fog. “Today’s challenge is to crawl through the swamp on Dagobah.” The word seemed to physically pain her. I didn’t believe for a second that she had any idea what Dagobah was or which Jedi master had lived there. “Once on the other side, you will fight to the ‘death.’” She threw up finger quotes in case anyone was worried. “In a lightsaber duel. A ribbon will be awarded to the person with the fastest time through the swamp and to the person who defeats the most opponents in the duel. But you may not compete in one without the other. It would be an unfair advantage. Those who do not wish to compete will be led to the other side of the swamp by their counselors. If you’d like a chance to win one of these two ribbons, make a single file line in front of me.”

  “No way,” Galen said with a shudder. “That fog is going to give me an asthma attack from here. I’m not crawling through it.”

  “I’m not crawling for shit,” Perla said.

  “Wonder of wonders,” Jams said. “Perla doesn’t want to play.”

  “Don’t pick at each other,” Meg chided. “Come on. We’ll go to the other side and watch all the excitement.”

  She led Perla and Galen through the trees, following the long line of other campers who were opting out.

  “I thought the lightsaber duel would be more of a draw,” Hunter said, as the rest of us trudged to Bryn Mawr’s queue.

  “I doubt they’re real lightsabers,” Kate said.

  “You’d better hope so,” Leigh said. “Otherwise, we’re gonna have a lot of hasty amputations to explain.”

  “The heat of the lightsaber does cauterize the wounds on impact,” Brandon said. “So at least there wouldn’t be any infections or complications.”

  Jams laughed. “I’d call decapitations bloody complicated.”

  “But the cauterizing would stop the bleeding,” Kate said. Her face fell. “Oh. Sorry. Slang.”

  A whistle blew on the other side of the fog and Bryn Mawr tapped the first two people in line—Meuy and another of the girls on our hall—to go into the fog. It was only a few minutes before the whistle blew again and the next person was sent down. It was disconcerting not to be able to see what was going on through the fog. Only the shouts and groans of the crowd reacting came back to us.

  I snapped at a tangle in my hair as the line moved forward, only to stall for another stretch. When Brandon kissed me for luck and slunk into the fog, I tried to think of a quote from Earnest to distract myself and came up short, so instead I started mentally reciting the Litany Against Fear from Dune on a loop to steady my heartbeat.

  I must not fear. Fear is the mind killer.

  The line moved again.

  Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration.

  I stepped past Bryn Mawr into the fog.

  I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over and through me.

  My eyes adjusted as I walked into the wall of fog, enough to see that the sides of the clearing had been walled off with the same kind of blue tarps that formed the roof of the tree house full of contraband. At knee level there was a series of hula hoops half-buried in the soil, forming a long, worming trail. In front of them was a blond girl with a surgical mask over her mouth and a stopwatch in her hand. It took a moment for me to recognize her as Ben’s cocaptain, Faulkner.

  “We’ll pay for your laundry,” she said, her voice muffled through the surgical mask. “I’ll time you once you’re down.”

  There was no point in mulling it over. I dropped to the ground. The dirt scraped at the skin on my elbows and knees as I crawled under the first hoop, dragging my legs behind me. I could almost hear Sid’s voice in my ear, telling me to go faster, to wear my Lawrence on the outside. Getting gassed was a BMT staple—facing tear gas with riot gear on and then peeling back the mask to report to the superior officer.

  You’ll watch grown-ass men sob and puke, Sid had told me. But you’ll be smart and you’ll listen when they tell you that having milk with your breakfast ups your chances of vomiting. You’ll let your eyes cry and not make a sound.

  This wasn’t tear gas. This was stank-ass CO2. I could handle dry ice. I could handle anything. Fear was the goddamn mind killer.

  I got to the end of the hula hoops and ran to the edge of the field, past the double fog machines churning out clouds and into crisp, fresh air. The spectators were sitting farther ahead, interspersed with the pine trees. Directly in front of me were Cornell, Ben, and a girl with purple streaks in her hair, who I vaguely recognized from the dining hall. She was holding a fake, blue foam sword that was slightly longer than her arm.

  Cornell clapped at me like an enthusiastic coach. “You made great time, Ever!”

  Ben handed me a red foam sword. There was blue and red dust in his beard. “The foam is covered in chalk that will track any shots made. Faces and bathing suit areas are out of bounds. First to make contact wins the round.”

  Th
e sword was unevenly balanced in my hands. It had a short, almost useless guard at the top of the hilt. I would have been better off with an actual plastic lightsaber. Still, I’d helped Beth learn enough stage combat over the years to be vaguely competent with a fake blade. I gave it a practice roll around my wrist.

  Show-offy? Yes. But I could taste blue ribbon and I wanted everyone else to know it.

  Cornell blew a whistle and Purple Hair stepped to me, her sword raised. She swiped hard at a diagonal, wanting the clink of swords together, like we were playing Peter Pan versus Captain Hook. I went low. A red chalk dust appeared in a neat line across her shin. Cornell’s whistle blew again.

  Waiting for the next person to come down the hula hoop crawl, I bounced on the balls of my feet to keep alert. Ben reapplied chalk to both swords.

  I hesitated when Leigh came scurrying into the clearing. I didn’t love the idea of attacking my own roommate. But she beamed at me as she took the blue sword and said, “When are you ever going to get to attack someone with a sword again?”

  I caught her across the stomach within the first three strikes, because she leaped toward me when she should have retreated.

  Kate let out a battle cry before she threw herself at me with the sword held high over her head, leaving her entire torso open.

  There was a tall Korean boy whose elbow I clipped while he tried to spin away.

  A light-skinned girl with pressed, glossy black hair, who tripped and fell into my foam blade.

  The girl who won the Breakfast Club challenge, who didn’t even take the lightsaber from Ben because she had a mouth full of dirt from crawling through the fog.

  Sweat was stinging my eyes and dripping at the nape of my neck. My shoulders were starting to ache. My mouth was painfully parched, the remnants of dry ice taint, and pine dust seared into the inside of my cheeks. I looked out into the crowd as I waited for the next competitor and spotted my team waving and cheering. Meg was beside herself, hopping up and down with Leigh.

  Ben and Cornell gasped in unison. I turned back in time to see Isaiah lurching out of the fog, his shoulders hunched so hard that Grandmother Lawrence would have stuck a yardstick in his shirt to straighten him out.