Don't Ever Change (26 page)

When we get to the playing field, I pause. We don’t need to play kickball—this summer’s already kicking us around. We have an hour to kill, but Foster’s boys are covered in paint and won’t be done for a while. There’s no place else to go really, except up to the lookout at the top of the hill, with all the brambles and the dead shrubs and the holes in the ground where furry groundhogs pop out and little ankles get caught and twisted.

“Up?” I ask, but the girls don’t realize it’s a question—they just obey. So up we go.

Soon we’re outside camp; we’re above it. Up here it feels like I’m no longer the counselor and they’re no longer my campers. The transformation does us both good. We hold hands while we hike, carefully picking a path through the desert bushes and spiky plants. We bypass the hostile, alien cacti and the huge boulders that look poised to tumble down the hill and crush everyone below. We’re being active for a change. But we’re also
escaping
.

“Somebody say something,” Alyssa says.

“Something,” I say, and the group laughs.

“No, say something
besides
that.”

“Something besides that.” Everyone laughs again.

Higher up, the hill ramps at a sharper incline. I wonder for a moment if what we’re doing is safe.

“Maybe we should turn back,” I suggest, and the girls immediately agree, making me wonder if this was a forced march. We’ve only just begun slow-stepping our way back down when we see him: a gray-brown coyote, scraggly and skinny, facing us, panting in the heat.

I throw my arms out in the same motion my mother does when she slams the brakes at a sudden red light, her arm whipping across my chest to keep me from flying through the windshield. An involuntary protective impulse.

“Don’t move,” I whisper. “Don’t move and don’t run.”

“And don’t look it in the eye,” Alyssa adds.

“Why?” Zoe asks. “What happens if you look it in the eye?”

“You get cursed.”

“Alyssa, shut up.”

“It’s for reals,” she whispers, serious. “It’s like a Southwestern thing.”

The coyote just stares at us, its tongue lolling out like a dog when it’s hot. Alexis whimpers, faintly. I coo to her, “Shh, shh.”

“Hey,” I shout at it. “Go away!”

“That’s not going to work,” Billie says. “You have to really scream.”

“Please don’t scream,” Jessica pleads.

“You gotta jump up and down and throw stuff,” Billie says. “Coyotes hate people.”

“If we were a puppy, it’d eat us,” Lila says, her voice shaking, and then Renee says, “Or if we were a cat like Mr. Baggy Jeans, we’d be dead.”

“Don’t say
dead
,” Maggie says.

Then the coyote cocks its head slightly, staring at us sideways, and I get an eerie, creeping, familiar sensation:
deadja vu
. I’ve been feeling and refeeling it for weeks.

“Let’s all scream at the same time,” Billie says. “Let’s jump around like we’re crazy.”

It’s our best—though admittedly
only
—idea, and it’s Billie’s, not mine. I knew I wasn’t cut out to lead these girls. I don’t know any more than they do how to stave off evil coyotes and cruel summers.

“Yeah, let’s act crazy,” Jenna agrees.

“Someone count down,” I say.

Maybe seventeen is just one of those years during that annoying phase of life called Immaturity when you haven’t experienced much more than a nine-year-old but you’re supposed to act like you have.

“Three,” Rebecca says.

I’m smart, but I have no firm philosophies. Not like I did when I was ten, when I had it all figured out, and not like I will when I’m twenty-five, when I’ve lived through everything.

“Two.”

When someone calls you a Know-It-All, it’s only meant in a negative way. It sounds like it should be a compliment, knowing so much that you
know it all
, but in fact it’s a terrible thing.

“One and three-quarters.”

Man vs. Nature. Man vs. Self. I can still picture the words scrawled on Mr. Roush’s whiteboard, concepts to help us make sense of the writing we’re reading, and to make sense of ourselves, too.

“One and a half.”

Eva vs. Coyote.

“God, Becca, c’mon already,” Zoe says.

Eva vs. Eva.

“One!” Rebecca screams.

Turns out coyotes
do
hate people—especially screaming girls throwing sticks and pinecones and acting like lunatics.

It also turns out you don’t have to look them in the eye to get cursed.

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins Publishers

..................................................................

LATER THAT NIGHT
Shelby texts me to meet for coffee drinks. We always order the exact same thing—her a chai iced tea, me a blended soy mocha—but that sounds kind of comforting right now. At this point it feels like I should try and do all the stuff I usually do at least a few more times before I’m gone and can’t do it anymore. But then Shelby changes her mind, tells me about a vegan place in the city called Café Gratitude, and she’s not exaggerating or implying something, it’s actually called that.

I make it to Larchmont right on time, at 7:58. Shelby’s standing by the hostess, her phone to her ear.

“I’m calling you,” she says.

“Why? I’m here.”

“They wouldn’t give me a table until the rest of my party arrived.” She rolls her eyes at the inhumanity of it.

The hostess leads us to a two-top by the door and leaves a pair of menus. Cool air breezes in every time a waiter enters or exits with dishes for the diners on the patio, and soon I’m shivering. Shelby passes me her cardigan without even asking if I’m cold, a move so smooth and intuitive I assume she picked it up from Zack.

“You’re cold in August—in
L.A.
,” Shelby says, laughing at me. “Good luck making it to Thanksgiving in Boston. You’re going to hate it.”

“Thanks a lot.”

“I just mean it’s going to be
cold
.”

“Yeah, I don’t know. You might be right. Maybe I’ll hate it,” I say. “It’s possible.”

Shelby’s been to Boston, and New York, of course, and she’s even been to Maui multiple times. Zack took her to Palm Springs twice, and one weekend he rented them a suite at the Luxor in Vegas. They used to weekend down at his grandmother’s beach house in Redondo too, and once in a while they’d invite me to come along, but I always declined. I don’t remember why; I think at the time it just seemed like something I wasn’t interested in doing. I guess if they were still together now I’d be interested, but now’s too late.

“Everything looks good,” she says, scanning the menu. Every dish is named like an affirmation:
I Am Open, I Am Adventurous, I Am Transformed
. “Writing anything?” Shelby asks, flipping the page to teas and desserts.

“No,” I say.

“That’s what you always say when you’re in the middle of something really good. You are humble,” she says, reading a dish: Indian curried lentils with spicy mint chutney.

“You think my writing’s good?”

Shelby looks up from her menu, smirks, and puts a hand on my hand. “I know what this is. This is about Foster, right? Now that you’re at camp together, he’s messing with your head. You’re starting to think you’re not as good as him.”

“Pretty off base,” I say. “About as off base as Alexis Powell during pretty much every sport.”

“Who’s Alexis Powell?”

“One of my campers. She’s fat.”

Shelby gives me a look.

“What?” I say. “She’s a fat little kid.”

“One archenemy at a time, okay?”

“Who’s my archenemy?” I ask, loud enough for the woman behind Shelby to swivel around and glance at me.

“Foster.”

“Hardly. And don’t say
archenemy
—it makes it sound like I’m in a comic book or Greek myth or something.”

Shelby shrugs. “How are Michelle and Steph then?”

“Fine, you can say archenemy.”

Finally the waitress approaches to take our order. I watch Shelby as she explains what she wants extra of and what she wants on the side, and try to soak in her whole aura so I have a mental image to refer to when I’m away. She actually looks really great, maybe better than she’s ever looked: tan, her bangs growing out in a chic way, her eyebrows elegant and manicured. I’ve always thought of Shelby as my best-looking high school friend. That’s not the
sole
reason she got Zack, but it’s part of it.

“What do you want, Eva?” she asks.

“Is it too late for I Am Satisfied or I Am Free?” I ask the waitress.

“Sorry, we don’t serve those for dinner.”

“I Am Happy is fine then.”

“You are happy,” the waitress confirms, writing it down.

“Oh, and an I Am Loved, too, please,” Shelby says, pointing to the tea selection, “Iced.”

“You are loved, iced,” the waitress says, then walks away.

“What should we talk about?” Shelby wonders aloud, which reminds me of a reason I like her so much: she speaks her subtext. She’ll say, “Well, this is awkward,” or “I shouldn’t have said that,” and then pop an olive in her mouth or flip her hair, like
oh well
.

“We can talk about you,” I say.

Shelby’s fine with that. She tells me she’s dating someone new but doesn’t offer details on who or how or why. This is one of the things I
don’t
like about Shelby: she prolongs her gossip.

“You know him,” Shelby says.

Shelby’s been having sex longer than any of my other friends, and when I used to ask her about it in tenth grade she’d tell me everything. Then one time I asked her about when she lost her virginity, and she shoved me against some lockers, said it was none of my business, and didn’t speak to me for a full semester. Ever since then I’ve been a little hesitant to ask her about sexual stuff. So I sip my drink and listen quietly, trying to focus my thoughts on this new guy instead of her old one.

“His name’s Anthony,” Shelby says, blushing. “You know him—
Anthony
.”

But I don’t know an Anthony. I tell her this, but she insists. She keeps saying his name: “Anthony, it’s Anthony . . . you
know
, Anthony!”

I can’t picture an Anthony at all, but partly because I’m picturing Zack.

The third time we all hung out, Zack tried to persuade me to ride on his motorcycle. “Eva, you’d look great on the back of my bike,” he said—but not in the way it sounds. He had his arm around Shelby when he said it, and when he turned to her to be like,
Right?
she nodded and laughed wildly. Then they kissed. Right in front of me. They kissed and kissed.

“Does Zack know you’ve got a new boyfriend?”

“Why do you care if Zack knows or not?”

“He’d probably be sad, that’s all,” I say.

“You only care if
I’m
sad, okay?” she says, basically commanding me. “Because—and it goes without saying, or at least it should— you’re
my
friend.”

“I’m not saying not to date anyone, I’m just saying Zack would probably be hurt if he found out.”

“And how exactly would he find out?” Shelby asks, eyeing me suspiciously.

“Come on, Shel.”

“You saw Zack,” she says, with such witchy certainty it’s pointless to deny it.

“Yeah, I
saw
him,” I admit.

“What’d you do?”

“I didn’t tell him anything. I didn’t even know you had a new boyfriend.”

“No,” Shelby says slowly, closing her eyes for effect. “Not ‘what did you say?’ What did you
do
?”

“Nothing,” I say, but it comes out hollow. Not just a lie, but a quarter-assed, lazy lie.

Then the waitress interrupts to inform me I can’t be Happy because they’re out of cashew feta, but how about I Am Present with a complimentary extra side of buckwheat crackers? I’ll settle for that.

“Go back to Anthony,” I say, hoping she’ll move on.

For a moment she does: “Anyway,” she says, “Anthony’s a brother.”

A brother of who? Michelle has one sister, Shelby two, and Steph has a half brother, but everyone else—every single other person I know—is an only child.

“Whose brother?” I ask.

No, she shakes her head, then leans in closer. “Like a
brother
,” she says, enunciating the word in a slangy way, her manicured eyebrows arching higher.

“
Oh
,” I say. “You mean like a black guy?
That
Anthony—why didn’t you just describe him? Use another adjective.”

“God,” she says, downing the rest of her iced tea, sliding the empty glass to the center of the table. “It’s called reading between the lines, Eva.”

“If you’re going to bother with a cliché,” I say, “try ‘the truth is in the details.’”

“The truth is it’s going to be crazy cold in Boston,” Shelby tells me, abruptly pulling out her phone to text someone—maybe Zack, to cross-examine my lie, maybe Anthony. Shelby’s never more than a send button away from cooler plans. “And you’ll probably hate it. But you really
do
need to travel.”

She pauses, raising her glass at the waitress, shaking it for a refill, before finishing: “And, you know”—
clink, clink
—“grow up.”