Page 19

It takes me precisely ten minutes of sprinting with thirty pounds on my back to come to the conclusion that I so don’t got this.

In addition to layers of clothing, food, and camping equipment, I have a handful of charms from Petra that, with any luck, will buy Kiara some time, including a fresh four-leaf clover that hasn’t yet started to wilt secured safely in the pocket of my fleece jacket.

Panting, I come to a standstill and point at the figures standing at the tree line—all of Kiara’s exes, casually sipping from their own thermoses and decked out in camping gear. “What are they doing here?”

“That’s what I said!” Austin throws up his hands and matches my scowl. “They were here when we got here, and you’re late, by the way, and also why are you so red?”

“I had to run part of the way,” I say with a huff, dumping my backpack on the grass and passing my thermos to Caroline to hold. “There’s no way they think they’re, like, joining us, right?”

“Considering they’re standing there like a special forces unit, I’d say that’s definitely what they’re thinking,” Caroline says.

Yeah, there’s no way. After the squash avalanche and my chat with Petra, I had texted Kiara about Radhika’s tree house ambush and that I could, after all, help her.

But it was imperative that we keep our trip a secret.

If any adults found out we wouldn’t just be camping but actually hiking into the Blue Ridge Mountains to find the wishing well, the plan would be screwed.

All three of us stomp over to where Kiara’s waiting with her friends.

Tayla’s cool gaze travels from the top of my head to the tips of my brand-new hiking boots, looking supremely unimpressed.

A yawning Radhika and Keiffer are studiously scrolling her phone, but he looks up and offers me a small smile of welcome.

Evan studies me with curious brown eyes from under the brim of their sage-green cap.

“Hi, Nova,” they say, taking the cap off to run their hand over their freshly shaved head. Devoid of their usual teeny afro, their new look shows off their amazing bone structure. “Kiara was just about to text you.”

I stare. “What are you all doing here?”

“Well, we’re coming with you,” says Tayla. “Obviously.”

“The more the merrier!” Keiffer takes the pulse of the group then sighs. “Or not. I can tell this trip is going to be real fun.”

“It’s not supposed to be fun,” I say, frowning. “It’s not a vacation.”

With an embarrassed little scratch of his nose, he agrees, “Yeah, you’re right.”

Oof, now I’m the one who feels like a jerk.

Despite Keiffer being a handsome jock, I’ve never witnessed him do anything mean, like shove a kid into a locker or start a nasty rumor about a girl, and he started an antihazing campaign when some seniors on the football team took it too far with a new guy.

He actually got them suspended, and he’s been everyone’s hero ever since.

He’s the kind of nice that puts a Disney princess to shame, but c’mon, his whole life is a party.

There’s a rumor he’s getting straight Cs in everything except biology.

He barely scrapes by with the grades to stay on the football team because he studies with Radhika, and as a freshman, he earned the nickname “Kegger Keif” after throwing a party that was supposedly so legendary most of us didn’t hear about it until school on Monday.

The only thing you can even fault him for is that weird little fuzz above his upper lip, like he’s trying to grow a stache, but that’s kind of a reach since he still looks hot.

The burning pinpricks on my forehead is probably Radhika noticing me noticing him.

She curls into his side, jostling him a bit to accommodate her. “Well, since it was my idea in the first place to ask Nova to join our journey to the wishing well,” she says, “I get to decide who comes.”

“We’re not in school this week, babe,” Keiffer says, smiling as he turns just enough to brush a kiss on her temple. “You don’t need to claim the credit.”

Evan’s shoulders shake with laughter as they pour tea into their thermos cup, amber liquid sloshing.

Of all of them, I like Evan the best, followed by Keiffer, but that doesn’t mean I want to be responsible for the well-being of so many other unprepared camping virgins. They all have so much stuff with them.

I nod to their gear. “We don’t have time for this. Kiara and I already went over the packing list. We don’t have the supplies for four more.”

“Don’t worry about us. We came prepared.” Tayla narrows her eyes at Austin and Caroline.

Austin tugs two walkie-talkies out of his backpack and brandishes them. “So did we.”

“See?” I can’t keep the annoyance out of my voice. “You don’t need to come. We’ve got this.”

“No way,” says Keiffer. “I respect that you know what you’re doing, Nova, but only two of you alone in the woods?

That’s dangerous as shit. And before you say anything, it has nothing to do with you being girls.

” He casts an uneasy look over his shoulder.

The woods look innocuous in the daylight, but he still says, “People of all ages and experience levels have—well— you know .”

“Like we’d let the two of you fuck off in the woods together,” says Tayla. “Alone.”

Oh my god, this girl is so annoying. She makes it sound like I want to be here. Like it’s my sole purpose in life to engineer creepy first-date situations with a girl who spurned me and then spent the next two years blithely stealing crushes and turning them into her best friends.

There are easier ways to get the girl. If, you know, I wanted that. Which I don’t.

“Actually, guys, Nova’s in the woods solo all the time,” says Radhika.

Everything screeches to a standstill. I stare at her. “What?”

“What,” says Austin.

“I’ve seen her,” Radhika says. “Sorry, did you not want people to know?”

Austin spins toward me. Worry makes his voice higher than normal. “Why would you—”

“My…I…I thought that maybe I could…” My brain catches up to my mouth. This isn’t how I wanted it to come out. More to the point, I don’t have to explain myself in front of everyone just because someone outed me. I glare at Radhika. “Seriously? You were spying on me?”

“Hardly.” She holds herself a little straighter. “I was in the area.”

“Doing what ?” I spit. “There’s nothing there except an empty parking lot where people go for hand jobs.”

“We’re losing daylight,” says Evan, in what’s possibly an attempt to get us back on track and head off this fight. They turn to me and say, “Kiara sent us the packing list you gave her. We have everything we need.”

“And then some, it looks like,” Austin mumbles.

“Nova, they’re my best friends.” Kiara throws out both arms to include all four of her exes. “It can’t hurt to have backup. Like, a proper team. We may not have your knowledge, but together we can do this.”

When I speak, it’s with Dad’s words: “The more you know, the less you have to carry.”

“Don’t worry about us,” Tayla snaps. “You can quit it with the superiority, by the way. All the knowledge in the world couldn’t save your—”

“Hey,” says Kiara. “No. Don’t do that.”

“Fuck you,” I say. My blood feels like it could spew out of me, hot and itchy.

“Don’t you dare say a word about our dads,” says Austin. I’ve never seen him so furious.

The rest of Kiara’s exes are just as disgusted.

The looks on their faces make Tayla flush, staring down at her hiking boots.

There’s a reason I call her Machete Mouth in my head, a nickname that I accidentally let slip after she hacked apart some poor kid in speech and debate, an English elective we’d both taken last year.

It caught on, though nobody knew where to attribute the source, and I wouldn’t put it past her to have spent every day since homing in on the culprit.

It would certainly explain those looks she gives me.

Tayla doesn’t apologize.

“Do whatever you want,” I say, the words clipped. I can’t even look at her.

If it gets us moving faster, I’m not going to waste precious daylight hours arguing that Keiffer doesn’t take anything seriously except football plays, Radhika’s an annoying know-it-all, and Evan is dreamy enough to go off the path chasing butterflies.

Which actually, now that I think about it, is actually a thing they did on a middle school field trip to the Longing Woods that got all other field trips canceled for the rest of the semester.

“Thanks for the permission,” Tayla says.

Her words have lost most of their bite, but there’s still an edge of sarcasm that makes Kiara frown and me seethe.

“And what about them? I see that you brought your friends,” Tayla continues.

“Unless Austin and Caroline are just standing there for decoration.”

Austin ignores her, but Caroline looks like she’s not sure if she’s just been called pretty or not.

“That’s why we have walkie-talkies. My friends are base camp.” I hesitate, raking my teeth over my lip. “Um, I looked up phone coverage in this area, and we’re going to lose it, like, twenty miles in.”

Keiffer visibly gulps, looking back at the woods. “What if one of my buddies sends me a message?”

“What if our parents want to get a hold of us?” asks Evan, a worried scrunch to their face.

“Yeah, mine will flip if they can’t get in touch,” says Radhika.

Austin shuffles his feet. “Yeah, my mom wasn’t thrilled about it, either, but my grandmas convinced her. They all insisted Nova and I take the walkies just in case we run into trouble or get split up.”

“Bet your mom has seen some weird hiking shit in the ER,” Keiffer says to Austin, now looking even more worried. “I heard on the news this morning that some kids from the next town over haven’t been seen or heard from since the first night of the festival.”

I bite my lip, hoping it wasn’t Aaliyah and her friends making a second attempt. Hopefully they’ve had enough of the woods. “Do you know who it was?”

He shakes his head.