Bookishly Ever After (30 page)

“Come out here for a few. I need your help.”

I caught his eyes as best I could in this lighting and, after a second’s stare-down, sighed. “Give me a minute.” I threw a hoodie over my flannel pajamas and slipped my feet into
a pair of sneakers. Checking one last time that the girls were all still asleep, I stepped outside.

“Over here.” Dev waved from the walking path and I carefully made my way over. Grogginess plus clumsiness plus random pieces of wood and rocks were definitely a bad combination. As I got closer, I could make out his shorts and sweatshirt combo. Even in the middle of the night he looked gorgeous, especially with the shadow of stubble across his chin and tousled hair. Me, on the other hand…

“Nice pajamas.”

“Uhm. Yeah. Thanks.” I tugged at my Hello Kitty pajama pants with one hand while trying to tame my Bride of Frankenstein hair with the other. All of that, plus my glasses, definitely made me
not
gorgeous. “Why are we out here in the middle of the night?” Where I didn’t want to be. He supposedly didn’t have a girlfriend, which meant I was pretty much a flat-out reject. Now, I was a Hello Kitty pants-wearing reject.

A wide grin spread across his face.

“We’re playing Jersey Devil.”

I knew I had just woken up and was still a bit groggy, but that made absolutely no sense. I stared at him with a frown until he continued. “You know, tradition. The counselors always go around the cabins leaving footprints after the bonfire.” He held up a stick with a shape at the end that looked like a three-clawed foot. “Mrs. Forrester asked me to do it and I thought you might want in on this.”

Right
. The stories at the bonfire. So
that
was where the
footprints had come from when I was a camper. I opened my mouth to say no—my warm sleeping bag and a chance to not expose him any further to my freakish middle of the night look were definitely tempting, but then he caught my eyes. The smile he gave me made it impossible not to agree. I covered my sigh with a yawn.

“What do you need me to do?” Another yawn, then I pulled myself together. If Maeve could battle a
Gancanagh
in her underwear, I could make a few footprints in my pajamas.

“Awesome. I knew I could count on you.” He reached behind a tree and handed me a broom. “Your job is to get rid of our footprints.”

“Got it.” I took the broom from him with one hand while zipping my hoodie up the rest of the way with the other. “I don’t want to ruin our chance to terrify a group of eleven year olds.”

“Tradition, Feebs. You can’t be a piney kid without having at least one run-in with the Jersey Devil.” He yawned, not bothering to cover his mouth. “If we hurry, we can still get an hour or two of sleep before reveille.”

“Joy. Let’s get this over with.” I followed him down the path, my eyes glued to the ground and, occasionally to the back of his bare legs. “Aren’t you cold?” I asked. I had slipped my own hands into my sleeves. A cool wind was whipping between the cabins.

He shrugged, “Nah, I’m hot tonight.”

My eyes wandered upwards for a second and I suppressed the urge to say,
Yes, you are.
I blinked a few times
and forced my eyes back on to the path.

“So, why’d you pick me to help out? Adam or Cassie would love this. They’d probably even figure out ways to put footprints on the cabin roofs or something.”

He looked back at me over his shoulder and his teeth shone in the moonlight. “You’re my counseling partner. It’s my job to bring more excitement into your life.”

My heart nearly skipped a beat and I stumbled. Straightening up again, I ducked my head so he couldn’t see my red cheeks. “Um, I think we need to work on your reading comprehension skills. I don’t think you read the job description right.”

“It’s an added perk of the job. Counsel some kids, make you take your nose out of those books of yours…”

“I take my nose out of books!” It was hard to sound indignant when speaking in a whisper.

“‘Reading comprehension?’ Who
says
stuff like that?”

I stuck my nose up in the air to give myself a snobbish appearance. “People who want A’s in English.”

He poked me with the foot-stick. “Just sweep, book nerd.”

We worked in silence for the next few minutes, Dev laying down trails of “footprints” around the cabins, me sweeping away any trace of our non-devil existence. After we finished with the girls’ cabins, we started the trek around the lake to the boys’ cabins. When we were far enough from any cabin, I tilted my head to stare at the perfectly clear sky above us.

“I love how the stars and the moon are so much brighter
out here. It’s like you can practically reach out and touch them,” I said, when the tension of the silence between us got to be too much. “I never can tell if the moon’s waxing or waning.”

“The moon is a liar,” he said under his breath. Dev had stopped walking and was also staring at the perfect crescent in the sky.

“Excuse me?” I turned my focus from the sky to his shadowed profile.

“The moon’s a liar,” he repeated, this time in his regular voice. “You know crescendo and decrescendo, right? Like, the way they work in music?”

I tilted my head and snorted inelegantly, cringing at my faux pas. “No. I’ve only played flute for seven years.”

“Nice sarcasm.”

“I learned from Em.” I brushed at imaginary lint on my shoulder and fake-polished my nails on my sleeve.

“Why doesn’t that surprise me?” He flashed me a grin before tracing the moon’s silhouette with his finger. “What letter is the moon making right now? C or D?”

That was a weird question, but I gamely played along. “It looks like a C.”

“C, like crescendo. That means the moon is waning. Decrescendo-ing. Because the moon just lied to you.”

“Huh.”

“So now you know.”

He started walking again and I hurried to come up alongside him. Damn his longer legs. “How did you learn
that trick?”

Dev gave me a sheepish smile. “Every time I visited my grandparents on their plantation in India, my grandfather would wake me up and drag me out to the fields in the middle of the night to teach me about the stars. He used to be an astronomer.” He lifted an open palm to the sky. “The sky there was kind of like this, with no artificial lights to fade it out.” This Dev was quiet and serious, almost reverent, while he spoke.

I could just picture little Dev in his pajamas staring at the sky. “It sounds beautiful.”

“It is. I love going there—it’s kind of magical. It has the biggest, clearest sky on the planet. The poinsettia bushes lining the drive to their house are as tall as you. Butterflies are everywhere. And when the bougainvillea is in bloom, it’s like snow is swirling around you as you walk up to the house.”

“You should write that down. I’d definitely love to read about that.”

“Nah, I’m not good at writing. I’m good at making words and music come to life.”

“The acting thing. That’s why you and Lexie get along so well.”

He faltered a step and tried to cover it up with a cool expression. “And me and Em and all the other theatre geeks.”

“Yeah, but aren’t you and Lexie closer than you and Em?” I asked, forcing my tone to stay light. I picked up a rock and tossed it into the lake so it made a satisfying plunk. Like my
heart in a minute.

“Lexie’s cool, but she can get kind of needy. I don’t really know why she invited herself over to our lunch table like she did.”
Our
lunch table. I froze midway through throwing another rock. Dev’s expression smoothed into something that was frustratingly impossible to read again. “Why are we talking about Lexie?”

This time, I shrugged.
Remember, no matter what, you still didn’t interest him enough to ask you out,
a little voice warned me. But the tiniest bubble of hope rose up in me. “I’m not sure. C’mon, we have kids to scare.” I kept my eyes on the lake so he couldn’t really see my face or the tiny smile that threatened to break through.
Maybe he really is just shy.

The energy from the night before still danced across my skin. Dev and I had finished putting out the footprints and he walked me back around the lake. We had fallen into this weirdly comfortable silence that he would sometimes break to point out a constellation. He had even grabbed my hand to steady me when the moonlight wasn’t enough to see all the ruts in the path, and hadn’t let go until we were close to the girls’ cabins. And all of that happened despite the fact that I’d completely forgotten to be Maeve or Marissa or anyone out of my notebook. I hadn’t been able to sleep after practically floating back to bed and spent the night flipping through it and taking more notes. There had been something about the easy way that we were able to talk that almost made me feel like it was okay that I forgot for one night, but I wouldn’t forget again.

I absently curled and uncurled my fingers, the ghost of his touch still there a few hours later. After working so hard to push him out of my head, now this whole camping thing brought me right back to December. I was in so much trouble.

“Phoebe, are you paying attention?”

I looked up sharply to see Dev gesturing at one of the campers who was trying to position herself on the crawling rope bridge.

“Sorry.” I reached out to steady the two ropes that hung in parallel above the small creek and almost jostled the camper still making his way across. Smooth.

That camper climbed off of the bridge and threw a dirty look my way before high-fiving Dev and heading off to join his classmates in the next challenge.

The girl on my bank, watching the whole exchange, looked at me with a little bit of fear before starting to cross. While I was useless and a potential danger to them, Dev was so good with the kids, encouraging them and treating them as if they were the same age as us. The guys fist-bumped him as soon as they reached the other side, the girls blushed and giggled as he reached out and lifted them off of the ropes and onto solid ground. He really was a little bit like Evan from
Cradled
. Actually, a lot, if Evan played clarinet and didn’t farm and was Indian instead of ScotchCanadian. The absolutely perfect love interest.

“Last one!” Dev called out as I steadied the ropes for one of the boys.

“Thank goodness.” As soon as the camper was most of the way across the creek, I stood and checked behind me. He was right, no more campers. “What was that supposed to teach them, anyway? How to get muddy?”

Dev glanced up from his clipboard with barely concealed amusement on his face. “Concentration and balance.
It’s really not bad. Haven’t you ever gone across a two rope bridge before?” In the noon sunlight, his teeth were bright white against his tanned skin, already darker from our days outside.

I looked down. The dirt that had collected on my sneakers became endlessly fascinating. “Uh, no. I got ‘sick’ when we had to do it in sixth grade and skipped to the next obstacle.”

His grin grew wider. “Well, we have a few minutes before they expect us at the mess. Give it a try.”

I stared in horror at him. “No.”

“I tried archery.”

The heat rose again in my cheeks as the memory came rushing back. “Well, that’s different. You can’t get hurt doing archery.”

“Tell that to my arm. That string hurt.”

“Wimp.”

He bounced the ropes in a way that was probably supposed to make them look inviting. “I know you’ll regret it if you don’t try. Do it for me?” He waggled his eyebrows in a way that made me want to giggle.

His grey-green eyes caught mine and I sighed. Why was it that I could never say no to this guy?

“Fine.” I eyed the bridge warily. The ropes were low, like floppy parallel bars close to water that had mostly churned to a few inches of pure mud at this point. I bent over, getting a closer-than-usual whiff of the earthy decaying plant smell of the creek. “Seriously, Dev, I don’t know about this...”

“C’mon. It’s easier than starting a fire.”

“Ha. Very funny, Nature Boy.” But as I spoke, I leaned over until I was almost horizontal to the creek. I arranged myself on top of the ropes the same way we had taught the kids, those two ropes the only things between me and an instant soaking. I closed my eyes and took a deep breath—I was Maeve, strong and beautiful and, just like in Chapter Thirty of
Glittering
, ready to face anything.

“You know, you have to move if you want to make it across the bridge,” Dev called out with a chuckle.

“I was just getting my balance.” I said before starting to pull myself across the bridge. I got about a yard in before the ropes wobbled under me, and my leg splashed into the creek, water seeping into my sneaker. “Oh, frak!”