“Are you going to shoot the video at night?” I interrupt, and everyone’s eyes swing to me. I don’t even know why I open my mouth, except that something about sharing the same bloodline as Danica forces me to protect her from putting her foot further into her mouth. “To make it more ghostly?”
Shawn stares at me while I use my nonexistent powers of telepathy to beg him to go along with my subject change, and finally, he says, “Yeah.” He scratches his fingers over the stubble on his jaw. “But the film crew is going to bring up all sorts of high-tech lighting to help light the dock so we’ll be visible.”
“It sounds like it’s going to be really amazing,” I offer, and an easy smile finally returns to Shawn’s face, lighting his forest-green eyes.
“Thanks, Hailey.”
“Whose idea was it?”
The guys and Kit start telling me who came up with which ideas, and I listen. I smile back at Shawn, my attention skipping between him, Adam, Joel, Kit, Mike, and even Rowan and Dee—until it accidentally lands on Danica.
She should be happy I changed the subject. The guys weren’t going for her idea, and I was just trying to keep her from looking fame hungry. Or from offending anyone. Or from . . . I don’t know . . . causing Kit or Dee to fly across the dock and strangle her with their bare hands.
But she isn’t happy. Not when she locks eyes with me. Her tight lips and her hard gaze make me an unspoken promise.
She is going to kill me.
Chapter 11
When Danica decides later that afternoon, after the guys have fully scouted the woods surrounding the meadow, that she needs to pee and that she needs me to go with her—which requires a private trek into the trees, just the two of us—I’m fully certain I’m never leaving this forest alive. I know she’s still stewing about the way I derailed her “I should be the star of your music video!” campaign, and I also know that the only punishment for such an offense is certain death.
But instead of clubbing me with a fallen tree branch or pushing me off a conveniently located cliff, Danica simply tramps her designer boots through the tall field grass alongside me and complains, “I hate having to hang out with his friends all the time. I hated it in high school, and I hate it even more now.”
“Why?” I ask, and she gives me a poignant side-eye.
“They hate me.”
“They don’t ha—” I start, but Danica rolls her eyes.
“Don’t lie, Hailey. You’re terrible at it. You always have been.”
She’s right, of course. Whenever we got into trouble when we were younger, I’d always have to let Danica do the talking, because if I attempted to spin the truth, our parents would be able to tell in two seconds flat. I’d end up giggling, or worse—crumbling under the pressure and spilling every tiny detail, even ones they didn’t ask for. Once, when Danica and I got caught driving my dad’s tractor, I ended up selling us both down the river and confessing that we had done the same thing a week earlier but never got caught. We were both grounded for three lonely, boring, miserable weeks.
“Okay,” I admit as we finally reach the tree line and I muscle a thick bush out of my cousin’s way, “they hate you.”
“I’m aware,” she mutters, walking through the passage I make. “They don’t hate you though.”
In the shade of bloodred leaves that stubbornly refuse to fall, Danica treats the wilderness like she does everything else in her life: she holds her head high and tramples it beneath her feet. She somehow marches easily over branches and bramble and grass that seem to come to life just to coil around our legs, while I hop and skip and trip behind her, cursing under my breath like a pint-sized sailor the entire way.
“Did you think my idea was stupid?” Danica asks just as I get ensnared in a pricker bush. She pauses to look over her shoulder while I carefully attempt to dislodge a thorn from the baggy sleeve of my orange zip-up hoodie, and I stop fighting with the bush to look up at her. She must be able to tell that I’m deciding whether or not to try lying again, because she immediately scolds, “And don’t you dare lie.”
I cast my eyes back to the thorns stuck in my hoodie, removing them one by one with surgical precision. “No, but I think that the way you suggested it was.”
“How?”
I don’t need to look at her again to know that her eyes have narrowed into her signature mascara-lined slits. But she told me not to lie to her, so I’m going to follow her orders for once. “You didn’t think of them. You didn’t think of all the time they put into their idea before you started telling them everything you thought was wrong with it. And you didn’t wait to hear what they thought of your idea before you insisted on changing their whole video and starring in it. You made it all about you.”
“I—” Danica opens her mouth to protest, but I finish before she can.
“You bulldozed them. You’re a bulldozer, Dani.”
I think about continuing my lecture—about unleashing all of the feelings I’ve bottled up since I moved in with her two months ago, back in August—but I don’t. Just like the band’s video wasn’t about Danica, her question wasn’t about me. If I can get her to understand this, if I can get her to see why she was wrong in this one, tiny situation that doesn’t even involve me, that would be a humongous step in the right direction.
Danica stands there for a long time, her arms crossed tightly as she digests everything I said. Her long hair dances around her shoulders with the breeze, the rest of her prettily statuesque. With my sleeve finally freed from the brambles, I face her, listening to time tick in the space between us.
“But you did agree with what I said?” she finally asks.
“Huh?” I’m not sure what I expected—a revelation?—but her question throws me off guard.
“You think the video would be better with a lead ghost?”
“Yeah,” I stammer. “I guess. I mean, I think—”
“Okay, good,” Danica interrupts, a smile settling in her happy brown eyes. “Then maybe you can help me.” She links her arm with mine as we continue walking through the forest, and I lose all sense of direction as I chase her train of thought.
“Help you?”
“Help me convince them to go with my idea. I know I went about it the wrong way, Hailey. You were right.” She bumps my shoulder in a disconcerting show of affection. “But it is a really good idea. It will make the video more popular, which will help the band. And I bet they’ll listen to you. Plus, I’ll owe you one.”
I trip over a rock, but Danica catches me with our linked arms and helps me find my balance. “Why would they listen to me?” I ask as I find my feet.
“Because you don’t lie,” she says, turning her head to smile at me.
“But you do?”
“Of course not,” she says with a too-big smile just as we step from the tree line. The afternoon sun crashes into me, and my gaze swims over waves of golden grass to a large dock in the middle of a pond, where all of my friends are still laughing and carrying on.
“I thought—” I thought you had to pee? I start to ask, but I never get the chance.
“Come on,” Danica peeps, dragging me toward the dock and, consequently, toward the confused looks I get once we arrive there.