“So,” Wyatt said, sitting down on the bench and taking a slice of his own. “What did we miss? We need details.”
• • •
“So tell me something,” Clark said to me a few hours later. We were lying on a blanket in the back of his SUV, taking a brief kissing break, the back door open and a breeze intermittently blowing through the car.
After we’d brought the items back to our own cars and cleaned up the impromptu pizza party, and Wyatt and Clark had affixed Tom’s bow tie around Winthrop’s neck, everyone had scattered, and Clark and I had headed to his house to “watch a movie.” Even if there were a movie playing, it would simply be in the background, a pretense for fooling around. We’d been doing this for a while now, so even the pretending to need the movie was starting to get old. But Clark had just gotten to the gatehouse when he’d slowed, then put the car in park. We looked at the time, did some quick calculations, and realized that if I was going to make it back for my curfew—which, since my grounding, I did try to stick to the general vicinity of—we were going to lose most of our time getting to his place and then back to mine. So after a brief discussion, Clark had turned the car around and we’d returned, parked to the side of the road near the statue of Winthrop, beneath the section with no streetlights shining in on us.
Clark’s second row of seats was already down from hauling the mountain bikes, and I was glad they weren’t currently there, taking up precious space. Clark had raised the back and we’d stretched out there for a few minutes, looking up at the stars though the open door, listening to the low hum of the cicadas in the grass.
“What’s that?” I asked. He must have gotten some sun today—the skin on his neck was warm, and I rested my lips there for just a moment before putting my head on his chest. I felt the soft cotton of his T-shirt under my cheek and just breathed in that Clark smell I loved so much but hadn’t yet adequately been able to describe to my friends. It was just him, and it made me feel wide awake and really peaceful, all at the same time.
“You guys,” Clark said, turning to face me a little more fully, moonlight and reflected streetlight falling across his face. His glasses were carefully folded and placed against the window, and he reached for them now and slipped them on, then smiled when he saw me, like I’d just come into focus. “Your friends. This is what you guys do.”
I looked at him. “I’m going to need more than that,” I said after a second of trying to figure out what he was talking about. “I thought you were supposed to be good with words.”
“Sorry,” Clark said, giving me a quick, embarrassed smile. It faded, and I realized in that moment that this was actually something more serious—probably not something I should be teasing him for trying to ask about.
“No, tell me,” I said, propping myself up on an elbow. “What do you mean?”
“Just . . .” Clark gestured to the bag propped by the wheel well, the one that contained half of the scavenger-hunt items, including eight blue gum balls that were all his. “You guys. You do things like this. It’s like the coin of the realm with you.” I smiled at that. “You create quests—”
“Scavenger hunts.”
“You hang out together all the time. You have these games and inside jokes and nicknames and adventures. . . .” Clark looked down at his hands, and I got the feeling he was weighing every word before he spoke, trying to find the one that would let me understand what he was feeling.
“Well, not all the time,” I said, not wanting him to get a false impression of things. “During the school year, there’s a lot more homework and a lot more of Tom attempting to grow a beard so he’ll get cast in the Chekhov play.”
“I guess I just . . . ,” Clark said as he adjusted his glasses. “I’ve never had a group of friends, so I didn’t . . .” He shook his head. “I didn’t know it could be like this.”
“Oh,” I said quietly, finally understanding what he meant. I didn’t want to tell him that it wasn’t always good, or wasn’t always like this, because the fact is that most of the time it was. I’d sometimes look at other people at my school—the girls who seemed to thrive on drama and were always fighting with their friends, the ones who didn’t even seem to like their friends that much—and know just how lucky I was. But I wasn’t sure that was what Clark needed to hear at the moment. “Well,” I said, as I moved closer to him, laying my head back down on his chest and hooking my foot over his, letting our legs tangle together. “Maybe you missed having a group before,” I said. “But you’re part of one now.”
Clark didn’t say anything for a long moment, and it was like I could practically feel him turning over these words, thinking about their implications. Finally, I felt him kiss the top of my head and rest his chin there. “How about that.”
“So next summer,” I said, “you’re going to want to refine your strategy early. If you want a chance of winning, that is, because—” It was like my brain caught up to what I was saying just a moment too late. Clark wouldn’t be here next summer. He’d be back in Colorado, or he’d be somewhere else, but he would not be in Stanwich, doing a scavenger hunt with my friends.
“Oh,” Clark said, pulling away a little so he could look at me and dashing my hopes that he had just not been paying attention to the last thing I’d said. “Um. Are you—”
“Never mind,” I said quickly, feeling like this was a conversation I really didn’t want to have. We had been having a nice moment, and the last thing I wanted to do was spoil it. I stretched up to kiss him, wishing I could rewind the last minute and delete it. “We’re good.”
We had to get moving not long after that. Clark finally gave me my keys back, and we kissed good-bye when he insisted on walking me to my car, even though it was only parked a few feet from his. After we’d kissed as long as we could without me really being in danger of staying out past my curfew, Clark got into his car and kissed me one last time through his open driver’s-side window, and I watched him drive away, his taillights growing fainter until he rounded the bend in the road and I lost them. Then I headed home, yawning.
I let myself in, and stopped in the kitchen for a glass of water. As I was drinking it, I saw a note taped to the kitchen TV, in my dad’s neat, slanted handwriting.
Well?
DID WE WIN?
I smiled at that, then looked down at the phone in my hand. I normally just texted my dad when I got home, so that even if he was sleeping, he could see the time stamp. But I was pretty sure I’d seen a light on as I’d driven up to the house, and as I glanced down the hallway, I saw that there was a light on in my dad’s study and that the door was cracked open.
I walked down the hall and knocked once before pushing the door open all the way. My dad was lying on the leather couch in his study, reading some papers that he was holding above his head. He pushed his reading glasses up and smiled when he saw me.
“Hi,” I said, leaning against the doorway, giving him a small smile back. “I’m home.”
Chapter
THIRTEEN
“So Karl and Marjorie are on the run,” I said, as Clark, lying next to me on the couch, pointed the remote at the movie we’d been totally ignoring, silencing it. “But,” I said as I ran my fingers through his hair, “Karl doesn’t know Marjorie’s sold him out. Told the highwaymen about him.”
Clark tossed the remote in the general direction of the coffee table and started kissing down my neck. “Oh, are there highwaymen now?”
“Of course,” I said, twirling my fingers in his hair, leaning in to kiss him. “Every good story has them.”
• • •