“Is this really the best time for you to define the morality of lying?” he asked flatly.
It stung, but I pushed ahead. “If you breathed a word of what I told you tonight to any of your friends or any of the other campers, I would be on the next flight home. If my parents didn’t decide to show up and drag me back by the ear. It’s not the same thing as you letting me believe that you go to a school you don’t.”
His head dropped into his hands. “It’s not something I’m proud of. It’s embarrassing. Almost as embarrassing as having my sister ruin our date.” He half-smiled, but it evaporated when he saw my face. “I did fine for the first two years. I stayed pretty high in the class ranking. That’s the big selling point of the Mess: the monthly class rankings go public so that you and your parents can keep track of your progress.”
I shuddered. I had no idea where I would have fallen in my class and I didn’t need to know. “No offense, but that sounds like a nightmare hellscape.”
“It is. I thought I’d get numb to it. Everyone else seemed to. Sure, sometimes there was crying or fights or people getting pulled into the school psychologist’s office, but mostly people dealt with it. I dealt with it until last year. And then I just … I don’t know. Started suffocating. There was no way to give one hundred percent in all of my classes at the same time. I really tried. I even liked what I was studying. But all of a sudden I was getting Cs in everything. And then less. And then I was getting hauled into a meeting with my parents and the principal and the school psychologist about how I would do better in a less vigorous environment. I didn’t even understand that they were throwing me out until my mom started crying.” He swept away a piece of pine tree shrapnel from the canvas of his shoe and watched as it joined the brush and dirt on the ground. “I didn’t realize how much of my family’s vision of me was as this consummate prodigy, the alpha and the omega of all things academic.”
“Is it your family’s vision of you or your vision of you?”
“Both?” His fingers twined around one of his shoelaces. “When people always tell you that you’re smart, you get used to it. It becomes the thing you are, you know?”
“I don’t, really,” I said. He looked up at me with annoyed disbelief and I shrugged. “Isaiah is the family prodigy. His family moved off base so he could go through a gifted program. He skipped the eighth grade. It was a big deal.”
“Why?” he asked. “No one learns anything in the eighth grade.”
I smiled at him. “I know that and you know that, but the Lawrences were blown away. Anyway, Isaiah’s real sister—Sidney—is the air force poster child, so she’s always been the real favorite in the family. Top of her BMT class. Lieutenant by twenty-four. I’m … I don’t know. The one being raised uppity. I think my aunts and uncles see me as bougie. My dad is kind of a shithead about money. He’s not shy about letting people know that he has it, which on my mom’s side is really verboten. And my stepmom is about ten years younger than him, and white, so there’s plenty for people to talk about.”
“But that doesn’t have anything to do with who you are.”
“Yeah, well. What does you being good in school have to do with who you are?” I scooted over to rest my leg against his. “It doesn’t cover the fact that you’re funny and sort of a grump and use your hair like an invisibility cloak. Or that your voice gets really soft when you speak French.”
“It’s a quiet language,” he muttered. “Elliot Lawrence Gabaroche.”
He gave my last name a throaty flourish that made all of my tendons go limp. I put my hand on his jaw, drawing his face closer to mine.
“Should I even call you Ever?” he asked, his nose inching toward mine. “I can call you Elliot. Or Ellie?”
“Ellie is what my family calls me, so no. But you can call me Elliot or Ever. You’re one of the only people who calls me Ever. I made it up for the Onward application.”
“It suits you,” he breathed.
I curled a piece of his hair around my index finger. “I really enjoyed our date.”
He wrinkled his nose at me. “We didn’t even get to go to the movies.”
“We can stream it. We can sneak out again and use the Wi-Fi in the pumpkin. If you don’t mind hanging out with an impostor.”
“I don’t care what name you’re using.”
“And I don’t care what school you’re enrolled in.”
The fauna underneath us crunched as our lips came together. His kiss was inquisitive, as hesitant as it had been the first time in the sci-fi section. I pushed back against him with certainty. My feelings hadn’t changed. I was as sure as ever that I wanted to be here, to be with him, even if he wasn’t going to graduate from some fancy prep school.
He curved his body toward me, his hands gripping the sides of my sweatshirt. I strained to be closer to him, my legs lifted off the ground like one of Leigh’s complex yoga positions. My heel caught a pinecone and I slipped. I threw out an elbow to keep from bashing my head into the signpost. My funny bone clipped Brandon’s jaw. We both made unnatural, pained sounds as I landed hard back on my side of the dirt.
“I’m so sorry,” I said, scrambling to my knees to check his face for signs of injury. His skin was blistering hot, but seemingly unscathed. “Nature sabotaged me. What a mood killer.”
“It’s okay. I’m a seventeen-year-old guy,” he said, peering up at me as my fingers touched his face. “There isn’t much that kills my mood.”
“You’re kind of a pervy nerd, you know that?” I said. His face fell into panicked lines before I laughed. “Chill. I’m into it. Be less scared of me, please.”
“Be less amazing, then. I don’t deserve to be anywhere near you.”
“We need to work on your self-esteem.” I planted a swift kiss on his lips and hopped to my feet. “We weren’t planning on being back until midnight. Let’s go somewhere else. Somewhere with no pinecones or stabby needles. Also maybe not directly next to the front entrance?”
“Earlier, you said something about a tree house?”
*
We stayed as far away from the main path into the arboretum as possible. We stole kisses between buildings and across the unlit stretches of grass. The sky sparkled with stars like spilled glitter. The air was cool and clover scented.
With every step, I felt buoyant. I hadn’t understood how burdened I’d been with my secrets. Saying them out loud made me feel like a new person. Or like myself, outside of the cage of living up to being either Ever or Elliot. Even if it was just for tonight.
“It was so nice of the counselors to track down a tree house for us,” I said, pulling Brandon by the arm as we approached the fork in the road in the middle of the tree canopy in the arboretum. “I still haven’t seen another one on campus.”
He wrapped his arms around my waist, walking backwards in a clumsy hug. “We could go looking, if you want.”
“There are a lot of trees to examine.”