Brandon cut her off with a shake of his head. “It doesn’t matter. Let’s deal with this fresh pile of crap.”
“It’s been years since we went crime solving,” Ben said, a jaunty spring in his step. He wrapped his arm around Trixie’s shoulders and kissed the top of her head. “I feel like we should be wearing uniforms.”
“I feel like we could be wearing nothing,” she said, severely underestimating how carrying her whisper was.
“Are they always like this?” I asked Brandon. “I only ever see them separately.”
“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 pla?t ne pas aller à la Californie.”
31