“Oops,” Raj says. “That probably wasn’t very committed of us.”
“Nope,” I agree. My eyes flicker across the tent-dotted clearing without permission, and I catch a glimpse of Celine. Her tent’s been up for ages. She’s now helping everyone else put up theirs, showing both leadership and team-building skills.
If I don’t get this scholarship and Celine does, I’m going to shave off my hair and eat it.
“Hey,” Raj says, dragging my attention back to our sad excuse for a tent. He pushes the peg into the grass. “How’s this?”
“Wrong. You’re supposed to hold it at a forty-five-degree angle.”
“I thought it was a ninety-degree angle?”
“No,” I say patiently, “the guide ropes loop into the pegs at a ninety-degree angle. The pegs—”
“Come on, Brad,” he interrupts, “just whack the peg for me. You can do it.”
I wave the damp scrap of paper that passes as the instructions. “I know you read this, because you got muddy fingerprints all over it—”
“Ouch.”
“—so you must realize the numbers were very clear. Forty. Five. Degrees. We have to do it right or it’ll…collapse! In the night!”
“Brad, we’re not sleeping in these tents tonight.”
“No,” I say seriously, “but it’s the principle of the thing.”
“Fiiiiiiine,” he says, and takes the sheet, squinting at the diagram. I only realize I’m smiling when the rain streams around my cheeks instead of down them. “All right, how’s this?”
I want to appreciate the effort, but mentally, I’m questioning his eyesight.
He catches my expression and adjusts his grip again.
I wonder if he’s ever studied angles in his life.
“Bloody hell,” he laughs, “you hold it, then!”
That’s not a bad idea. We switch jobs, and he only bonks my fingers eight or nine times.
Once the tent is up, we crawl inside it to admire our handiwork. I eye his muddy walking boots, and he kicks them off before they can spoil our beautiful shiny plastic floor. “Not bad,” he announces.
“Not good, either,” I allow. The right side of our tent’s inner lining dips drunkenly toward the floor.
“Rubbish. This is a feature, not a bug.” Raj ducks under it and disappears behind a swathe of blue fabric. “Privacy compartment. Now I can get changed without you clocking my six-pack and getting jealous.”
“Wow, thank God for that. Did we remember to hook all the clips to the outer lining?” I ask, trying to sound unsuspicious and nonjudgmental.
His head reappears, brown eyes huge and innocent. “You must have forgotten, Brad. That’s okay. I don’t mind.”
I laugh. A lot.
When we crawl out again, Celine’s there. Okay, not there—she’s a few meters away, being all perfect and impressive. I watch as she helps a sunny Irish Traveller girl named Mary wrestle a tent key into a pole.
“Don’t be scared of it,” Celine says firmly. “It’s not going to break.”
“It’ll break my damn nose if I let go,” Mary huffs.
“Then don’t let go,” is Celine’s sweet-as-honey response. She doesn’t seem bothered by the rain; she’s taken her coat off and wrapped it around her waist. Her hoodie’s unzipped and her collarbone is gleaming wet. A few braids have slipped out of her ponytail but her black eyeliner—two wings per eye, like a butterfly—is sharp and clean and as unbothered as she is.
“Mate,” Raj says in this very weird tone of voice, “isn’t that your cousin?”
“No,” I reply, watching Celine corral tent poles as if they were rogue boa constrictors.
“Oh.” He sounds relieved but still dubious. Relubious. “It’s just, Thomas said—”
“No,” I repeat. Sorry, Thomas, but the cousin lie is no longer working for me. I blink, realize I’m staring, and turn away.
“But you do know her?” Raj asks, watching me with this one-sided, flickering smile.
“No. I mean, yeah. Yeah, I know her. We go to the same school, remember?” And that’s it. She’s not even talking to me, so I’m definitely not thinking about her. I know I asked if we could be normal—which, in hindsight, seems like such a pathetic attempt at begging for friendship—and she said yes, but I bet she regrets it. I bet it didn’t feel like her heart was a fist unclenching. I bet she’s going to come over here and say—
“Bradley?”
My head jerks up. Celine.
“Can we talk?”
I ignore her butterfly eyes and nod. “Okay.”
Raj grins as Celine and I crawl into the tent.
Inside, Celine headbutts the saggy part of our roof like a fault-seeking missile and looks at me. “Um.”
“Don’t judge.”
She rolls her eyes, but the action is more amused than scathing. Weird. Very weird.
“I thought you were pissed at me,” I blurt, then instantly regret it. Why would I mention that? I could honestly sink into a hole.
Celine blinks and echoes my thoughts. “Why?”
“We didn’t talk. Yesterday.”
Her brow furrows, like you could press a fingertip between her eyes and smooth the creases out. In this shadowy, raindrop-stained blue universe, she is very soft and dark, like falling into bed at night after a long, hard day. “I didn’t think we needed to talk. You said…not-enemies.”
So she wasn’t ignoring me—just being infuriatingly literal and pragmatic and other Celine-like qualities. “Typical. I put my pride on the line to negotiate an historic peace treaty and you can’t even tell me good morning?”
“Do you hear yourself?” she asks me curiously. “Like, when you speak? Or is it just noise?”
I’m going to strangle her.
“Why do you look like you’ve got gas?” she asks.
I rub a hand over my face. “You know what I admire about you, Celine? Your class and sophistication.”
She snorts. “Bite me.”
“No, it’s impressive. You’re like a debutante, or something. If I didn’t know any better, I’d think you’d gone to finishing school.”
Her laughter is unexpected and tastes like treacle and it does not implode reality. I wait for something, anything, to come along and sour this conversation, making us utter and abject enemies again, but nothing happens. My palms start to itch.
Her smile fades. “Hey,” she says awkwardly. “Um. So, I want your…advice?”
In my head, I collapse from shock and Celine holds smelling salts under my nose. Out loud, I say, “Makes sense. I am wiser and smarter than you and always knew this day would come.”
“Would you like to see the pictures I took of my tent?” she asks sweetly, tapping her phone. “Holly poked her head in and said it was perfect. I assume she then emailed Katharine Breakspeare about how I’m a shining example of teamwork, leadership, and strategy.”
“All right, Celine, give it a rest.” I tut at my saggy privacy curtain. “Raj says it’s a feature, not a bug.”
“Raj says a lot of things. He’s incurably positive.”
“Just so you know,” Raj calls, “I can hear you out here. Like, you do realize tents are not made of brick walls?”
We ignore him. Celine reaches up and starts fixing my saggy tent. She seems to be hooking bits and pieces together through the fabric. If we were more than distant acquaintances, I might be impressed by her never-ending competence.
She turns her head and catches me staring. My cheeks feel flammable. What’s wrong with me today?
But clearly Celine doesn’t think anything of it, because she just jerks her chin as if to draw me closer. I crawl over until we’re a foot apart. There’s a tiny dot of mascara under her lower lashes, and she whispers to me. “It’s Aurora’s eighteenth on Friday.”
I watch her mouth moving for a second before the words sink in. “What? Oh. Really? That’s rough.” Imagine turning eighteen out here, sleeping on a borrowed mattress in a room with very old carpet that probably hasn’t been shampooed for months or even years. It’s tragic. Like, literally Shakespearean.
“…lovely,” Celine is saying, “so I want to do something for her, but I’m not sure…I’m not really…My ideas all seem…” She fumbles her words in a deeply un-Celine-like manner, and I try not to smile. She’s like a toddler who’s still learning to verbalize feelings. The urge to squeeze her around the middle is therefore completely normal.
“Yeah?” I ask, still not smiling. “All your ideas seem what?”
She scowls in response. The tent is fixed and officially Celine-standard. “Oh, never mind.”
“Go on.”
“It’s nothing,” she snaps, turning to crawl away.
Well, now I feel bad. “Hey, hang on…” I don’t realize I’m touching her until it’s already done. My hand is on her upper arm and I only have a split second to shrivel inside with the sheer awkwardness of it all before I let go.
Her arm is really soft. Silk-soft. Cloud-soft. Honestly, who has skin like that?
I clear my throat and close my hand into a fist. “Just…what were you planning to do? For Aurora?”
She eyes me warily. “I want to throw her a party. On Friday. After curfew.”