—C. B. McCallister, A Murder of Crows. Hightower & Jax, New York.
Chapter
TEN
Almost without my noticing it, the summer started to find its rhythm. I had dogs to walk, I had my friends to hang out with, and my dad and I were finding a little more to say to each other day by day. But mostly, I had Clark.
“So Karl and Marjorie duck into a roadside tavern,” he said to me as we walked three hyperactive terriers, all straining desperately at their leashes, like the trees up ahead of us were just so much better.
“But they’re going under false names,” I reminded him, and Clark nodded.
“Of course. They can’t let their real identities be known, not with the bounty on their heads.”
“And it’s raining.”
“Naturally,” he said, taking my hand and squeezing it. “It’s a proverbial dark and stormy night.”
I looked over at him and smiled. “And then what happens?”
It had been two weeks since Clark and I kissed, and things were going well. I had been grounded for the first eight days—dropped down from ten, with some careful negotiation on my part—so he’d started coming with me when I walked Bertie. We’d hold hands while we walked, stopping to kiss multiple times, or as much as we could with Bert yanking on the leash. Clark would sometimes come with me on other walks, which I always appreciated, since a full day of walking dogs by myself led to me talking way too much to animals who were never going to answer me back.
But even though we hadn’t been able to go on another real date that first week, we’d ended up talking on the phone nearly every night, conversations that happened while he took Bertie for his nightly walk and I sat up on the roof and looked out at the stars. I’d never had conversations like that with a boyfriend before, conversations that were easy and free-flowing, hours passing in what felt like seconds.
I was still getting my head around how Clark seemed happy to talk about almost anything, including sharing how he felt about things. The only thing he really hadn’t told me much about was his father. Whenever we got close to the subject, I could sense Clark’s walls—which were so rarely present—start to go up, and I changed the subject quickly.
But I’d begun to fill in the picture of Clark Bruce McCallister in a way I never had with any of my other boyfriends. I knew now that his favorite color was green, that when he was little, he’d wanted to be a wildfire firefighter (“they fight fires from helicopters, how cool is that?”), that he talked to his older sister, Kara, on the phone every Sunday, that he still refused to watch Jaws because it had given him nightmares for weeks as a kid, that he hated cinnamon, and that he had found a spot, just below my earlobe, that drove me crazy when he kissed it. I didn’t know these types of things about any other guy, including Topher, and none of them would have known them about me. It was different with Clark. And one way I knew this, beyond a shadow of a doubt, was the fact that we were getting close to the three-week mark and I had no interest in seeing it end. It was pretty much the opposite, as a matter of fact—it was feeling like something was just getting started.
• • •
“And we’re doing groups this year,” Palmer said enthusiastically, as she pushed up the brim of her sun hat. “Chosen randomly. Which means, since there will be two of you, the challenges are going to be that much harder.”
We had been at the beach since nine, and by my count, Palmer had been talking about the summer scavenger hunt for at least forty-five minutes. She’d sent a group text at eight a.m., saying that it was the perfect beach day, she’d already staked out a spot, and we should join her and bring her an iced coffee. Somewhat miraculously, everyone else’s schedules had aligned—and I’d shifted some walks around to make mine work as well. We’d spread out on the patch of sand Palmer had been zealously guarding and now had a stretch of blankets and towels and snacks and magazines.
“Sounds good,” Toby said, her eyes fixed on the water in front of her. “Absolutely.”
“What are you looking at?” I asked, pushing my sunglasses up and trying to see what was in her sight line.
“What do you think?” Bri asked, shooting me a look. In the two weeks since Wyatt had come back to town, Toby’s crush seemed to be getting stronger by the day. She had calmed down enough that she was no longer acting strange around him, but she’d taken to spending much too much time on her hair every day and trying to devise increasingly complicated ways that they could be alone together. She was sending us long emoji missives about her feelings, and I don’t know if she was getting better at it or if I was just getting used to it, but I’d been able to accurately decipher a message yesterday that detailed her current emotional state, using mostly just dolphins, the weird gourd fruit, and clapping hands. She was so single-minded about this—about him—that I wasn’t sure anymore if her crush was really about Wyatt, the guy who had, by my count at the diner the night before, said only fourteen words. There was a piece of me that wondered—though I would never suggest this to her—if maybe she was just used to the idea that she was in love with Wyatt without stopping to see if it was still true and if he was really what she wanted.
“I’m just making sure nobody drowns,” Toby said, her eyes not straying from the water even when Palmer started to tickle her bare feet.
I looked out to the water and smiled. Clark, Tom, and Wyatt were all on stand-up paddleboards, but not a single one of them was paddling along placidly, like in the pictures hung up in the tiny building where you could rent kayaks, paddleboards, and boats. Instead, Clark and Tom were using their oars as jousting spears, trying to knock each other into the water. And Wyatt was paddling, but sitting down, with one leg over either side, like he’d really wanted a kayak and was doing his best to approximate one.
“Who rented those to them?” Bri asked, sounding baffled.
My phone beeped with a text, and I pushed my sunglasses up to get a better look at the screen, then fumbled the phone when I saw who it was from.
TOPHER
Hey—heard you were staying in town
You around this weekend?
Let me know. It’s been a while
I looked up from my phone, but Clark was still in the water, and none of my friends seemed have to notice I’d gotten a text. I read the message again, then started typing fast, holding my phone off to the side.
ME
Hey—I’m around
But kind of with someone now
TOPHER
Got it. Let me know when you’re free to hang again
ME
Sure. Yeah.
Will do.
I set the phone down, then turned it to silent and dropped it back in my bag, trying to figure out why this was bothering me. It wasn’t like it was that unexpected for Topher to text me—so why did it suddenly feel like another part of my life had intruded when I didn’t want it to? And I didn’t want to compare the two, but the proof of how different Clark and Topher were was right in front of me—in the very fact that Clark was hanging out with my friends.
It wasn’t like it had been great right from the beginning—and that was my fault. Normally I would have planned it better, but I was in full-on early-make-out haze and didn’t think about what it would mean for Clark to meet all my friends at once. This had never been an issue for my other boyfriends, but they’d gone to school like normal people, in regular classrooms with more than just their sister. So when I introduced Clark at the diner, Toby, Bri, Wyatt, Palmer, and Tom were all there, which in retrospect was too much, too soon. Clark barely said a word the whole night, and when he did talk, it mostly seemed to be reciting facts I’d told him about my friends back to them. It didn’t help that Tom was almost equally quiet, stunned into fanboy silence at the reality of sitting across from one of his favorite authors. So all in all, not a huge success.