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“It’s better to be spaced out,” I say. “And this way we’ll get to things first.”
“Mhm,” Carter says. “But why don’t we pause and look around for a minute.”
“No,” I say, and press onwards, stumbling a bit over a rock jetting out of the ground. “Fuck,” I mutter.
“Ange, come on,” he says, and reaches out to steady me.
The warmth of his hands, making contact with my bare forearm jolts me. I have to stop myself from jumping back. He’s only trying to keep me from falling on my face. He’s just beingnice.
But I can’t—I can’t remember the last time Carter Steel touched me.
No. That’s a lie. I remember it perfectly, it was just years and years ago.
“You haven’t stopped to look at where we actually are,” he says, spreading his arms.
Most of the others have all now pushed past us, with just Drew and his annoying girlfriend still behind, making out against a tree.
“I don’t like the outdoors.”
“That’s not true,” he says.
“Well, I spend most of my time indoors, in the hospital. So it’s been a while since I was in nature,” I say defensively.
“You loved being outside as a kid, though,” Carter says, almost too quietly for me to hear. I ignore the comment, because nothing good comes from us discussing when we were kids.
Back then, I didn’t hate him. Back then, we were friends. Not best friends, like Jamie and Cat, but we liked each other’s company. We had honors classes together, and Carter always sat next to me in English class.
I don’t respond to him. I just stand there silently. And I start to look at what’s around us. It’s beautiful—similar to the landscape I’m familiar with in Harborview but quieter. More peaceful. Almost untouched.
We’re surrounded by pine trees of various types, some tall and arching towards the sky, and some still saplings poking through the earth. The ground is covered in a soft bed of dry needles, with gray stones here and there and knotted tree roots crossing the path. The air smells like the ocean, and I swear I can even hear it if I strain my ears.
I may never be an outdoors-woman despite what Carter thinks, but I know beauty when I see it. I don’t say this to Carter though, I just turn on my heel and march up the path towards the others.
He follows behind me, sighing audibly, and I relent and say, “How about this, I’ll do the first half of the scavenger hunt, and you work on the second half. That way we’ll complete it in less time and win.”
I’m competitive and I do like winning, but I mostly just want to get away from him.
“No,” he says. “You’ll need my help. I know where all of this stuff is. And the first half includes puffin droppings. No matter how many things you know, you don’t know that, Ange.”
He has a point. I have no clue what puffin shit looks like, nor am I interested in finding out.
“Fine,” I say, not looking back at him. “You can just do all of it then, and I’ll take a nice hike.”
“Angela, please,” he says, reaching out and grabbing my arm gently, stopping me in my tracks. His voice has a note of pleading in it, one I’m not used to hearing.
“No, Carter,” I say, pulling out of his grip. “I don’t know what puffin shit looks like so what help could I possibly be?” I feel myself being an asshole to him, but I can’t get myself to stop. It’s a reflex at this point, one I’ve cultivated for years. The guilt I’m feeling, though, is new.
I shake it off and chalk it up to the fact that I’m not used to interacting with him this much. I pull my headphones out of my pocket, put them in my ears and head off down the trail, Carter’s calls for me to wait up drowned out by Mozart.
4
CARTER
An hour or two later,when the first cloud pops up into the sky, my gut twists in foreboding.
I have no idea where Angela is. She forged ahead on her own, following one branch of the trail. But she clearly took a wrong turn somewhere, because I went down the same trail, which winds along the coast, and she’s nowhere to be found.
I’ve found most of the stuff on the scavenger hunt, but that’s besides the point. This activity was supposed to be fun—and I warned Jamie that Angela would chafe at being paired up with me, but he didn’t listen. He’s determined to match-make but I can see right through him because it lacks the subtlety of some ofmybest match-making. I nagged him about how cute Cat was for years, poking and prodding him to tell me about her, giving him the chance to gush about how great she was, before he finally took the bait and asked her out.
