Quietly clearing my throat, I smoothed down the front of the collared shirt my dad had forced me to wear. Luckily, I’d well past grown out of the penny loafers from last year, but I didn’t think she was going to like my boat shoes any better. Whatever. Changing clothes would have meant wasting time getting to her.
I sucked in a deep breath and then spoke through the perma-grin I’d been sporting since my parents had agreed to let me come back to Clovert for the summer. “Catch anything good?”
Holding my breath, I waited for her reaction. I was betting on a scream, though there was a strong possibility I might even get a hug out of this reunion.
Grinning, I stared at her back, waiting for her to recognize my voice. It was a little different from the last time she’d heard it though—everything was different, actually. Eighth grade had been good to me. I’d been growing fast, topping out at a mountain of five six. Dad had told me I was even taller than he was at thirteen, so I had high hopes that I wouldn’t be the runt of the family forever. Thanks to the seven-a.m. basketball drills Dad had forced me to do year-round—a small price to pay to avoid his precious football field—I was starting to fill out. Everyone in the school still hated me, so nothing had changed on that front, but Nora had never cared about that anyway.
When she didn’t turn around, I moved closer and repeated, “Catch anything good?”
“I heard you the first time,” she snapped. “What do you want?”
Well, I guessed my voice had changed more than I’d thought. She didn’t recognize it at all. “Nora, hey, it’s me. Camden.”
“Oh, I know exactly who you are.” All at once, she stood up and spun on me.
Or at least I thought it was her.
Gone was the freckle-faced little girl who wore glitter barrettes and tie-dyed shirts. She was taller, though nowhere near as tall as I was, and makeup rimmed her golden-brown eyes. A pair of silver hoops hung from her ears, and it struck me that I didn’t even remember if she’d had her ears pierced the summer before. Her denim skirt was short, but nothing the girls at my school weren’t wearing too.
But the icing on the holy-shit-who-is-this-girl cake was the red tank top hugging curves that I was absolutely one million percent positive had not been there before but still made my mouth dry.
Holy shit, Nora Stewart was gorgeous.
“Wow,” I breathed like a total idiot. But that was all I had. “Wow” was the literal height of my intelligence in that moment.
Her cheeks pinked as she crossed her arms over her chest and glared. “Why are you here?”
“What do you mean why am I here? I came to see you, crazy.”
She barked a laugh and stomped past me, her shoulder clipping mine when I didn’t move out of her way. A wave of honeysuckle lingered behind her.
Damn, she smelled incredible. That was new too.
Roughly folding her towel, she avoided my gaze. “Look, I already have worms for today. I paid for ’em and I’m going to turn ’em in, but if you want to work tomorrow, that’s fine. I’ll stay gone.”
“That’s gonna make hanging out a little difficult, don’t ya think?”
She scoffed. “Hanging out? Could I be so fucking lucky? Must be nice coming and going whenever you want without a care in the world.” Folding her hands in prayer, she brought them to her lips. “Oh, yes. Please, Camden. Hang out with me. I’m so, so desperate.” She rolled her eyes with a skepticism that had never been aimed at me before. “Ha! You wish.”
Confusion slapped me across the face. “What the hell are you talking about? I’m not coming and going whenever I want. I just got back to Clovert, like, three minutes ago and came straight here. If anyone looks desperate, it’s me.” I paused. Given her current attitude, it wasn’t the easiest thing to admit, but it was the absolute truth, so I said it anyway. “I’ve missed you.”
Yanking and tugging, she fought with the zipper on her backpack. “Bullshit. Don’t feed me that crap. You didn’t even care enough to say goodbye last year and left me sitting here all damn night.” Hoisting her bag onto her back, she started past me.
I stepped in front of her, blocking her path. “That’s not what happened. I tried—”
“I don’t care!” She craned her head back. “Get out of my way.”
“Not until you listen to me.”
“I don’t want to listen to you, okay? It’s not a big deal. Just because we tolerated each other last summer doesn’t mean we have to do it again this year.”
I flinched as her words slammed into me with the force of a sledgehammer. We tolerated each other? What the hell was that? She was my best friend. I'd been busting my ass day and night all year to make sure my parents would let me come back to Clovert. But apparently, she’d only been tolerating me.
I could barely speak with the knife hanging from my back. “Why are you acting like this?”
“Move, Cam. I don’t give a damn if you do look seventeen now. All it’ll take is one kick to the balls for me to drop you.”
That kick would have hurt less, but I stepped out of her way.
“You can have tomorrow, but fifty worms only. Got it?” She stomped to the container I’d dug into the ground all those months ago and pulled out a plastic baggy with something inside.
My eyes narrowed on the shake of her hand as she struggled to get the baggie into her pocket. Every time she’d get part of it in, the air inside would redistribute and cause a bubble that forced it right back out. I could see some numbers written on the piece of paper that could have been a phone number, but why was it in the container we used for worms?
“What is that?” I asked.
“Did you hear me? Fifty worms. The rest are mine. You may have hatched this plan, but I’ve been running it since you vanished without so much as a ‘see you later.’ So don’t you dare think you’re going to screw me over by turning in a week’s worth all in one day.” She pulled the baggie out and switched it to the other side as if that pocket might be bigger.
It wasn’t, but all her frenzied twisting and tucking allowed me to see one word written on the paper in big, black letters.
Camden.
As if the universe had finally decided to stop torturing me and throw a little luck my way, she dropped the baggie in the next blink.
I dove after it, not one clue what was inside. But without anything left to lose, I snatched it up.
“Hey!” she shouted. “Give that back.”
“Then tell me what it is.”
“None of your business!” She jumped, trying to grab it, but it was a wasted effort. I had her in height by at least six inches.
“Then why does it have my name on it?”
She started tugging on my arm, her whole front becoming flush with my side in the scramble. “Damn it, Cam. Give it back.”
The fact that she was freaking out only made me that much more curious.
The other facts that she was gorgeous and touching me didn’t exactly hurt, either.
Careful to keep it out of her reach, I opened it and pulled out a folded-up sheet of notebook paper. Using me for leverage and channeling her inner Michael Jordan, she almost ripped it out of my hands twice, but I was able to read it before she finally snatched it away.
Camden,
I don’t know what happened or what I did to make you leave without saying goodbye, but I’m sorry. Okay? If you’d just come back, I’ll fix it. I swear. If you get this and I’m not here, call me at Thea’s house or maybe just write a letter with your address so we can talk.
Nora
At the bottom was a phone number and a street address, both of which would have been really helpful over the last nine months. However, it was the pure desperation on that page that made my stomach sink.
“You didn’t do anything to make me leave. You know that, right?”
“Ugh,” she growled, tearing the note into a tiny pile of confetti at my feet.
“Nora,” I breathed, inching forward until I was hovering over
her. “Look at me.”
She shook her head and continued shredding any proof that remained on the paper. “You shouldn’t have read that.”
“What the hell are you talking about? I should have read it nine months ago. And I swear to you, if I’d known you’d left it for me, I would have done just about anything to get it just so I’d have a way to contact you again.”
Suddenly, her hands landed on my chest, giving me a hard shove and sending me stumbling back. “Then why didn’t you?”
Through my confusion, I managed to stay on my feet. “What?”
She advanced on me, black makeup smeared beneath her eyes. “Why didn’t you figure out a way to contact me? Huh? You said you missed me, but you never even tried to reach out to me.”
“I didn’t know how.”
“Hitchhike!” she yelled so loudly it echoed off the trees. “Ask your grandparents to find my address. Hell, mail a letter to Mr. Leonard. I don’t know. Anything.”
I blinked. Damn, why hadn’t I thought about mailing Mr. Leonard a letter?
But she was wrong. I had tried.
After my family had gotten back to Alberton, I was grounded for a month. No phone. No TV. The only thing I was allowed to do was go to school, do my mile-long list of chores, and write a letter of apology to my cousin for cleaning his clock. I smiled through pretty much every word of that letter. However, when I finished the horseshit apology and my parents gave me a thumbs-up on draft four million and four, I put a little P.S. down at the bottom.
While I had no idea what Nora’s address was, I knew how to get to her house. Past the grocery store, through the woods, last brown house on the left. All I needed was a pair of legs in Clovert to take the route for me and send back a street name and number.
My cousin, Johnny, wasn’t exactly known for his community service, so I included my last twenty bucks in the envelope, hoping I could bribe him into following through.
Shocker, he didn’t. But I spent every day for a month checking the mail and listening to the messages left on the answering machine, hoping he would.
When Christmas rolled around, I was sure we’d at least go to Clovert to exchange gifts. A fire at the papermill changed everything though. Dad was working overtime, and Mom didn’t want to leave him alone for the holidays even long enough for a day trip to see our family. So there I was, once again stuck in Alberton. On a phone call on Christmas Eve, I finally got the nerve to tell my grandma about Nora and asked if she could find the Stewarts’ phone number for me.
She laughed and told me girls were the least of my worries right now, but if I kept up with the basketball drills, made the track team at school, and got honor roll for the second semester, she’d talk to my dad about letting me spend the summer in Clovert again.
Honor roll I could handle.
Even basketball drills each morning in the privacy of my own driveway were doable.
However, track—putting one foot in front of the other and not falling on my face in front of the whole school—was my own personal, custom-made nightmare.
But with a lot of practice, honing my skill, and fine-tuning my natural abilities, I managed to become Alberton Middle School’s fifth-string long jumper and water boy. I did way more of the water boying than the long jumping, but hey, I’d kept up my end of the bargain with my grandma.
And just a few days ago, she’d made good on her end by convincing my parents that another summer of family bootcamp was exactly what I needed.
“I did try,” I told Nora. “I swear I did. I called in favors from my archnemesis for God’s sake, but I couldn’t find you. And I’m sorry. But I’ve been working my ass off all year long just to be sure I could get back here. And you’re standing here, telling me you tolerated me?”
Her eyes flashed wide, and her surprise fueled my fire.
“You know what? Why didn’t you hitchhike to Alberton? Why didn’t you find my grandparents and ask them where I was? Why didn’t you give me the benefit of the doubt that maybe, just maybe, I wanted to be here that night to say goodbye but something happened? To me. Did you ever just stop to think maybe this isn’t the Nora Stewart show?” Sucking in a deep breath, I shook my head and dug into my pocket. “You know what. Forget it. If I wanted to spend my summer in a place where I was tolerated, I’d have stayed at home.”
I threw our ten-dollar bill, which I carried with me everywhere for no other reason than it reminded me of her at her feet, and turned to stomp off.
I wasn’t sure if my heart had taken a single beat since I’d laid eyes on him again.
My chest hurt and my lungs burned, but it was the nearly constant battle to keep my tears at bay that surprised me the most.
He’d missed me.
And he’d tried to come back.
And he’d wanted to say goodbye.
I wasn’t sure if any of it was true. In my experience, lies were as easy to come by as sunrises.
Just hearing him say those words were a gasp of air to a drowning soul.
The ten. Oh, God. It was ours. I could still see his sloppy chicken scratches scrawled across the top. He’d kept it. Nine full months and he’d never spent it. Not on one of his coveted Cokes or a candy bar. Nothing.
If I was being honest with myself, he was right. I had been living in the Nora Stewart show. The night he hadn’t shown up to say goodbye, I hadn’t lain on the bank, staring up at the sky, worrying that something had happened to him. Let’s be honest, this was Camden. It was equally as possible he’d fallen into a ditch and broken his leg, but my mind had gone straight to how I wasn’t good enough.
I wasn’t worth his time.
I wasn’t worth his attention.
I wasn’t worth him staying.
So he’d moved on. Gone home. Never cared about me in the first place. And never looked back.
In my head, Camden had abandoned me just like my mother had because that was more believable. It didn’t matter if he was a twelve-year-old boy who had spent a summer catching worms with me and she had been a grown woman who was supposed love and protect me until her dying day. Nope. None of that mattered.
The only thing I knew for certain was he hadn’t chosen me.
But what if he had? What if Thea had been right and he was just a kid who didn’t get to make choices?
Maybe he was selling me a dream of lies, but I needed to know what he’d done with the choices he could control.
“Camden, wait!”
He stopped only a few steps away and turned around, planting both hands on his hips. “What?”
God, he had changed so much. Not only was he a giant now, but he had a jawline and little muscles under his shirt. Yes, it was a button-down with the sleeves rolled up, and he was wearing boat shoes, but Freaking Camden Cole was pulling it off.
“Why did you keep that?” I squatted and picked up the money off the ground. “Why not spend it? There must have been something you wanted over the last year.”
“There was a lot of stuff I wanted, Nora. Almost all of them involved being here with you though. That ten was as close as I could get. Maybe it was stupid, and I should have bought a dozen slushies or something. But I didn’t because I thought we were friends.”
“We are friends,” I whispered.
He shook his head. “Doesn’t feel like it right now. You know, I was so excited about getting here today. I was already sitting in the car when my dad’s alarm went off this morning. I had it all mapped out. If we got on the road by six, I could beat you here and surprise you. But then he wanted coffee and breakfast and we had to run by the papermill, where I sat in the car for a million years. Then we had to run back past the house. And then it was lunchtime, so we had to stop for that.” He shuffled his feet. “Anyway. You get the point. I got here as quick as I could.”
Oh, God. That was sweet. Rambly. But sweet.
Then again, Camden had always been sweet—and, yeah, rambly too.
“What happened? That night when you didn’t show?”
He scratched the back of his neck, a ghost of a smile pulling at his lips. “I got in a fight with my cousin. He was being a dick, so I punched him.” His grin stretched so wide I feared for his lips. “Knocked him clean out.”
“What?” I gasped, trying to wrap my mind around the idea of Camden knocking anyone out. Last year, he hadn’t been what I would have considered a fighter in any capacity. Though he did look like he’d be able to take care of himself now.
“Yeah. I wasn’t thinking about all the trouble I’d get into. My temper just got away from me. I never would have done it if I’d known I wouldn’t be able to see you again. I spent all year doing chores, working out, making good grades—anything to get on my parents' good side just so they’d let me come back here. You’ve gotta believe me.”
Trust. That wasn’t my strong suit.
But if it meant being able to keep Camden, I’d risk it all to try.
Talk to him, I heard Thea’s voice say in my head. It would mean exposing myself and hoping he wouldn’t run for the hills all over again, but if I didn’t say something, I was going to lose him no matter what.
I swallowed hard and crossed my arms over my chest, faking an attitude to cover the tears welling in my eyes. “You can’t do that to me again. Do you hear me? You can’t just leave and expect me to assume it’s because you got into a fight with your cousin or tripped and fell into a ditch. My brain doesn’t work like that. I freak out and panic. And…I don’t know. My mom left when I was seven. She met a guy and moved to Texas. If I can’t get my own mom to come back, if I wasn‘t good enough to make her stay, what reason do I have to expect that you would, either?”
“Because I will,” he promised. “It might not be right away and you might have to wait for a while, but I’ll always come back.”
“You say that now but—”
“But nothing. We’re friends, Nora.” He took a giant step toward me, completely in my space without actually touching me. His breath fluttered across my bare shoulder, and his words wrapped around me like a blanket in the middle of winter. “Friends stick around even when they live three hours away. Even when their parents ground them for a century. Even when their parents are idiots and take off. Even when all the worms in Georgia have been caught. Friends—true friends—always come back.” He extended an outstretched pinky my way, and I’d done enough pinky swears with Ramsey to know what he was asking for. “Okay?”
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