I hoisted my overnight bag out of the trunk. With only two weeks left of summer, Dad had insisted I bring four books along for the week I’d be at camp, but he wasn’t the one who had to carry them. Tiffany had no books—and somehow, more luggage than me, even though I’d tried to explain there’d be no occasion for a purse, let alone three.

Tiffany yanked her rolling suitcase from the car until it fell onto the street. “It’s too early to be lifting heavy things.”

“We’ll be up almost this early every day of camp,” I said.

“Are you serious? It’s practically dark.”

“It’ll be good for you girls,” Mom said. “I’m so glad you’re doing this together. Who knows? Maybe Tiffany will find that she—” She stopped and craned her neck, looking across the parking lot. “Is that Manning?”

“No,” Tiffany said, but she couldn’t hide her smile.

I followed Mom’s gaze and took in a small breath. Manning stood next to a black truck, a big, army-green duffel bag slung over one shoulder, the sleeves of his heather-gray hoodie pushed up to his elbows. Gary got out of the driver’s seat. Together, they walked over to the curb where kids and adults were congregating.

“You told your father he wouldn’t be here.”

Tiffany shrugged. “Manning must’ve changed his mind.”

“Damn it, Tiffany. What am I supposed to do? Keep this from him?”

“It’s not a big deal, but he’ll make it into one.”

They argued, and Manning looked over. I finally exhaled as our eyes met. He said something to Gary, dropped his things on the ground, and walked toward us. Even the gray clouds cast overhead couldn’t soften the angles of his face or the purpose in his gait. “That looks about twice your weight,” Manning said, reaching for my bag.

I readjusted it on my shoulder. “I’ve got it. Tiffany’s the one who needs help.”

“You’re leaning so far to the right, I’m afraid you’ll fall over.” He gestured impatiently, so I transferred the bag over to him, and he put it under his arm.

“Don’t you trust me?” Tiffany asked Mom.

“When have you ever given us reason to?” Mom replied.

“Excuse me,” Manning said.

They turned to him. “I’m sorry, Manning,” Mom said. “This might sound like it’s about you, but it’s really about—”

“It’s fine, Mrs. Kaplan. I just wanted to say that I take this position seriously. There are kids around. I’ll be on my best behavior. Also, we need all the counselors so we can start checking campers in.”

“I appreciate that.” Mom ran a hand over her hairline, smoothing some stray pieces back in place. “Tiffany’ll be over in a moment. I just need to make a few things clear.”

Manning signaled toward the grass with his head. I followed him over, staying quiet so he wouldn’t hear the giddiness in my voice. Not only had he not taken Tiffany’s bag, but he was going to be on his best behavior. No hugging, no kissing, no time alone with Tiffany. I trusted him to keep his word, unlike Tiffany. Mom would make things clear, but her lectures were harmless. Tiffany knew, had known coming here, that Mom would never rat her out to Dad.

When the buses pulled up, Manning raised his eyebrows. “This place doesn’t spare any expense, huh?”

They wheezed as they rocked up over the inclined driveway into the parking lot. They were luxury liners, the kinds of buses that were always too hot or too cold with fabric seats that made you wonder who’d sat in them before you. “What do you mean?”

“I thought we’d be going on a school bus or something.”

“This is Orange County. Even camping can be made glamorous.”

“Okay then.” He looked down at me. “You’re not afraid of getting dirty, are you?”

“No way. I’ll be in the mud with the kids.”

“That’s my girl.”

I almost shivered with satisfaction. Manning’s girl—I hoped someday I would be. In his presence, my body loosened. I’d been anxious about this trip. I’d seen Manning four times in two weeks during the counselors training sessions, but between Tiffany, Gary, and everyone else, we hadn’t had more than a couple minutes alone. Did he notice? Did he care? He never gave any sign that he did, but I’d caught him staring at me during a meeting once . . . I’d tried to convince myself the longing in his face was my imagination, or that he was looking at Tiffany, who’d been next to me, but I didn’t really believe that. Some invisible tether existed between us. Nobody could see it, not even us, but I felt it. I was sure Manning did, too. As long as we both knew it, that was enough for me. For now, at least.

Manning got a clipboard from Gary and flipped through the pages. “You’re paired with Hannah Burke,” he told me. “Do you know her?”

“She’s new this year, but we talked a little at the meetings.” I pointed to a short brunette in a polo shirt and knee-length shorts. Hannah’s brown hair brushed as far down as her elbows as she gathered our girls and fielded questions from their parents. “I better get to work.”

“I’ll come with you,” Manning said, tucking the clipboard under his arm and falling into step beside me.

“Why?”

“Make sure it’s a good match.”

“She seems pretty nice,” I said, unsure what he was looking for.

He didn’t respond.

Hannah had one hand on a girl’s head as she spoke to a parent. She glanced over as we approached and smiled. “There’s Lake now. She’ll be my co-counselor for the week.”

I recognized some girls who’d attended last year. They squealed, some jumping up and down and some running over to hug me. I had hoped to get this age group. Everyone knew the nine-year-old girls’ cabin was easiest. They were old enough to know better and young enough that they still listened. Around age ten, one or two girls’ priorities began to change. They’d talk back or sneak around, which the others in the cabin picked up on quickly. At sixteen, it wasn’t as if I could really be in charge of twelve-year-olds like Tiffany could.

Katie, one of my girls from the year before, ran and hugged me, catapulting me backward into Manning.

He caught me by my upper arms. “Whoa there.”

The warmth of his hands hit me first, then the firmness of his grip, his large body at my back. He was solid, his hold on me protective while I caught my footing and then for a couple seconds after. I could run at him full force, and I doubt he’d stumble when we collided.

As Hannah pulled Katie away, I caught her wide-eyed glance at Manning. I thought I noticed her blush before she turned around.

“I have to get back,” he said, releasing me. “Will you be all right with Hannah?”

I looked up over my shoulder at him. “I’m pretty sure. Why?”

“I just want to make sure you’re okay. She seems nice, though.”

She was around Tiffany’s age, but I’d found her easy to talk to so far. “She is.”

“Okay, then. Just know you can come to me with anything you need, all right? Gary and I are cool.”

“You like him?”

Manning nodded. “I like him.”

Coming from Manning, that meant a lot. He didn’t seem easy to please in the people department, but I’d introduced him to a new friend.

“So you’ll come to me?” he asked, tapping the clipboard against his palm. “If something’s not right?”

“Are you okay?”

“I’m fine. But we’ll be away from home. From your parents. So you can come to me. Everyone should have someone looking out for them, and I am. For you.”

“Who do you have?” I asked.

He swallowed audibly, his long neck rippling. “I said everyone should—not everyone does.”

“I’ll be that someone, Manning,” I said.

He put his large hand on my head, making me feel about half his size. “You’re going to protect me?”

I always wanted him to be safe. Cared for, fed, happy. Maybe it was naïve, but I felt I could do that for him, even if it had to be from afar for a while. “Maybe not physically. Protection comes in different forms.”

“That means a lot to me,” he said. “I’d rather you worry about yourself, though. And I’ll worry about you, too.” He took his hand back, and some of my hair went with it, falling over my face. He started to fix it but stopped himself. “Don’t worry about your stuff. I’ll get it on the bus.”

I watched him return to Gary’s side. He had no reason to worry about me. To keep me safe or happy. I didn’t owe him that either, but I’d do my best to give it to him.

Hannah and I sat together on the way to Big Bear. I tried to listen to the conversation happening between Manning and Tiffany across the aisle, but Tiffany, turned inward toward Manning, did most of the talking and anyway, Hannah had other ideas.

“Should we talk about how we’re going to do this?” Hannah asked.

“It’s kind of hard to plan for.” I leaned a little more into the aisle. Tiffany was listing her favorite music videos while Manning stared straight ahead. “Once we get there,” I said, “it’ll fall into place.”

“But it’s my first year,” Hannah said. “I don’t want to screw it up.”

She’d soon discover the resilience of kids—and counselors. “You’ll do fine.”

“I graduated with your sister, you know,” she said. “She doesn’t know me.”

I looked over at Hannah. “She’s self-involved.”

“She can probably hear you.”

“Probably. But she won’t.” We exchanged a mischievous smile.

“Is that her boyfriend?” Hannah asked. “He’s so fine.”

“No.” I sounded defensive so I added, “I’m not really sure. Maybe for the moment.”

Tiffany stood and looked around the bus before her eyes lasered in on something behind us. “There are two kids with seats to themselves. Shouldn’t counselors get that?”

“I don’t think they planned it that way,” I said.

“I’m exhausted. I need to sleep before we get there.” She went down the aisle to a boy with headphones on. “Hey.” She pointed to the other lone camper. “Go sit with that kid so I can have this seat.”

The boy, eleven or so, didn’t argue. He would’ve argued with me, but Tiffany had boobs and some kind of power over the male species. Apparently, no age group was immune.

“Wake me when we get there,” she said to Manning, who remained facing forward through the whole thing. “Manning. Did you hear me?”

“I heard you.” He winked at Hannah and me. “I’ll do my best, but no promises.”

We giggled. Tiffany must’ve gone to sleep, because she didn’t speak again.

“So about our cabin,” Hannah said. “I think we should be firm with them. Yes, we’re here to have fun, but we’re authority figures first, friends second.”

I watched Manning as he looked out the window. Most riders who weren’t talking to their seatmates had headphones on or played handheld videogames. “Sure,” I murmured.

“I brought some stuff I think the girls’ll love, like makeup and CDs.”

I expected a week of rough-and-tumble sports and exploring, but I knew they’d love girl time as well. “We can sneak a boom box from the rec room,” I said.

“And the campfire skits,” Hannah said. “We have to come up with some ideas. Should we do that now?”

“Better to brainstorm with the girls,” I said absentmindedly and stood. I had no idea what I wanted to do or say. With a sideways glance at Hannah, I said, “I’ll be right back.”

I crossed the aisle to Manning. It took him a moment to turn and look at me, but when he did, he gestured for me to sit. “Hey, Birdy.”

Birdy. I wished I hadn’t been so self-conscious about bringing a stuffed animal to camp, because I already missed it. It made me feel close to him when we were apart. I turned my shoulder into the seatback, angling away from Hannah and the rest of the bus. “Hi.”

“What can I do for you?” he asked lightly.

“Nothing.” I tucked some hair behind my ear. He smelled faintly of cigarette smoke mixed with aftershave. The bus driver turned the music up a little for Aerosmith’s “Crazy.” “What do you think so far?” I asked.

“Lots of things.”

“Good things?”

“Good things.” He glanced at my knees and then away. “Are you cold? You have goosebumps.”

I did, but not because the air conditioning was too high. They were from being close to him, from having a secret nickname, from Steven Tyler’s “c’mere, baby.” I shook my head. “I’m fine.”

He looked back out the window. Our beloved beach had been replaced with desertscape and rundown towns. Soon it’d be mountains, pine trees, curvy roads.

“Do you want to be alone?” I asked.

He didn’t respond right away. He had a hard profile, darkened against the bright window. Always brooding, with his pitch-black hair and heavy eyebrows. Would he tell me what he was thinking about if I got up the courage to ask? I didn’t think so. I’d never met anyone so private, and it only fueled my curiosity.

If he wanted me to go, I figured he was too polite to say so. I went to get up, but he said, “No.”

He had a funny way of acting like he wanted me around since he didn’t look at or speak to me. But I hadn’t been alone with him in weeks, and I had questions—about nothing and everything.

I chose a safe topic. “Are you finished at the house?”

He turned to me. “Not yet. We’re waiting for some permits to come through.”

“Then what?”

“We’ll be there another couple weeks or so.”

Hearing he’d be around a little longer wasn’t much of a relief because summer would be over in two weeks anyway—and I had no idea what would happen next. “Then what?” I pressed.

“I graduate in December, and I start training to be a police officer.”

“Where?”

“Wherever there’s a place for me.”

My face flushed, my blood suddenly rushing. The idea of him leaving made my heart thump painfully hard. I was stuck in every sense of the word. I had two years left of high school. After that, I’d be in Los Angeles for at least four years for college. What if he didn’t want to go back to L.A.? I couldn’t even get in a car and drive anywhere until I got my license. Manning could leave at any moment without even telling me. No warning, no way for me to follow him.

I gripped the edge of his seat cushion in a fist, as if that’d keep him here. “You’d move?”

He must’ve heard the panic in my voice, because he studied me. His expression smoothed. “Only if I had to. I like Orange County, and I don’t plan to leave. But I have to go where the work is.”

“Will you tell me if you do?” I asked.

He wrinkled his nose. “Of course.”

“Can I have your phone number just in case?”

He laughed a little and rested his head against the back of the seat. “You make me smile, Lake. Nobody else does. How could I walk away from you?” His joy, if you could call it that, eased as he stared up at the ceiling. He kept his voice down. “I’ll promise you something better. Wherever I go, I won’t abandon you.”

“What does that mean? I can come with you?”

“It just means we’ll always be friends. As long as you want that.”

I held onto his seat even more tightly. I believed him, because it was the same for me. If I had to be away from him a few years, if I had to make long distance phone calls or write letters—no cost would be too high to keep him in my life. And maybe down the line, that would pay off. One day, he’d look at me and see a beautiful, sexy woman instead of the awkward, inexperienced teen I was now.

“Where would you go?” I asked.

“I honestly don’t know.”

“Home?”

He shook his head, still looking up. “I don’t have a home.”

I refrained from transferring my death grip from the cushion to his hand. I could give him whatever it was he was missing. I knew I could. “How is that possible?” I asked softly.

“Some people just don’t. It’s not always a bad thing.”

“Tell me about your family.”

“No.”

“What about your sister? Is she with your parents?”

With his head back, his throat was exposed, so I could see and hear him swallow. “No. I don’t talk about my family.”

“Even with me? I won’t tell anyone.”

“It has nothing to do with you. I just don’t.”

I knew I shouldn’t take it personally, but I did. Nobody made him smile like me—wasn’t that worth something? Didn’t he trust me? Feel close to me? I’d trusted him from the moment he’d held my bracelet in his palm and asked me to come get it. All this time, I’d thought he was asking me to read between the lines, to hear the things he couldn’t say.

“We’re friends, aren’t we?” I asked.

“I already told you we were. I just said we’d always be.”

“You don’t know that. Are you embarrassed to have a friend my age?”

“No,” he said flatly. He looked about to add something and thought better of it. He spoke slowly, as if choosing his words carefully. “You’re not that much younger than your sister.”

“But we’re different.”

“I know.” He blinked. “How do you think you two are different?”

“She’s pretty.”

He shut his eyes and inhaled a deep breath. “She is.”

It wasn’t the reassurance I wanted. Maybe he thought I was fishing for a compliment, and I was, so why couldn’t he just tell me I was pretty, too? Was that so bad? I wouldn’t read anything into it. I was ninety-nine percent sure about that.

“Someday,” Manning said, almost to himself, “when you’re older and wiser, looking back on this, you’ll understand.”

“When?”

“I can’t tell you that, because I’m not even sure I understand.”

That wasn’t fair. Maybe he didn’t know exactly what he felt about me, but he had some idea, and he expected me not to wonder about it. I would wonder and think hard about it now—not ‘someday’ when it might be too late. When he was already gone. I wasn’t convinced Manning wanted Tiffany, or even that she wanted him. So what was the link between them? When one didn’t want the other, what had kept them together the past month?

“I said someday,” Manning said, breaking the silence. “Not now.”

“I can’t wait that long.”

He grinned at me. “There’s no hidden prize or anything. Just understanding that comes with time and age.” He looked at my bare legs and quickly away again, as if it were a habit he was trying to break. “You know our conversations—they stay between us. Right? You know that?”

I nodded. Our time together was precious and not to be shared. “I know.”

“All right. Let’s talk about something interesting.” He sat up again and scratched his chin, thinking. “If you won a contest on the radio to go anywhere in the world and you had to leave tomorrow night, where would you go?”

“Big Bear,” I said.

He laughed. “But you’ll already be there.”

So will you. I wasn’t brave enough to say it. Instead I asked, “What was Tiffany’s answer?”

“I didn’t ask her.”

A thrill ran up my spine. This was mine. “I have to think about it.”

“That’s fine.” He turned to me, giving me his full attention. “We have time. I want to know.”

“Why?” I asked.

“Because I care,” he said. “I care very much.”