Palmer nodded and started cleaning up, putting empty plates and crusts into the pizza box, spending time making sure she got the lid on just right. “So who won?” Bri asked, her voice a little more cheerful than usual, and I wondered if she was picking up on the same thing I was—that Palmer was disappointed, that the fact they hadn’t participated at all was draining some of the joy from the whole thing.
“Tie,” Toby and Tom said in unison.
“Really?” Wyatt asked, as he loped over to the table and started looking at what was there. “Wow, they just gave you these diner menus?”
“Please tell me there’s some pizza left,” Bri said.
“Only if you want weird toppings,” I said, opening up the box that was in front of me, the one that still had a few passed-over slices in it. Wyatt, no doubt drawn by the prospect of food, came to stand next to Bri as I tried to figure out what three toppings Clark and Tom had gone with. “So I think this is . . . pepperoni, jalape?o, and . . . pineapple?” I asked, staring at the slice and feeling myself recoil. “Ugh, why would you guys do that to yourselves?”
I glanced up and saw Wyatt nudging Bri as she tried to take a bite of the terrible-sounding pizza and Bri turning away, taking her pizza, and going to sit next to Toby.
“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.”