Unknown (The Secret Life of Cassie Martin #1)(31)

“You’ll have to do it without me.” Climbing out of the hammock, I walk away from him.

Lucca lunges to block my path before I can pass, stopping me from leaving. “We can’t do a trust exercise without you. Why don’t you want to do it?”

“How am I supposed to do a trust fall with you guys? I have no doubt you guys will catch me. We don’t even need all of you to do that, though. You’re all almost a foot taller than me, though.” My throat tightens and prickles fill my eyes. “I won’t be able to lock arms with you in a safe place to make a sturdy landing. I don’t want to be the reason one of you gets hurt.” Tears slip down my cheeks. The stories had me going already, but the thought of me being the one to hurt one of them crushes me. “I can’t do it.”

Lucca locks his arms around me. “We’ll make sure everyone’s safe. I promise.”

I stare up at him. “How?”

He wipes the tears off my face. “We’ll have you stand on something that will put you at the same height as the person across from you. We’ll put you closer to the person falling, so you’ll catch his legs while the other two of us catch the upper body, which is heavier. We can make this work.”

Lucca makes a good argument. But I want to see this setup before I agree. “Okay, Mr. Fix-it, show me your plan in motion. Then, I may agree.”

He grabs my hand and walks us over to the picnic table. “Noah, come stand opposite Cassie. We’ll use you opposite her so we don’t have to switch out what she’s going to stand on.”

Noah walks over to stand next to me. Lucca eyes the height differences and walks over to some rocks close to the lake. He yells for Jay, and each of them brings back a rock. We only need the larger of the two, though. He sets it up, and I stand on it. Worried about stability, I wiggle my butt to make sure it stays in place, and laughter comes from behind me.

“Stop laughing at my non-existent butt!” I yell at them over my shoulder.

“Ha! Parker, up on the table, you can go first,” Lucca directs.

I hold my arms out to Noah and curl my fingers around his forearms in a death grip. Parker counts down and falls backward into our arms. They hold.

We put Parker down, and I jump around chanting, “We did it!”

“Of course, we did, because we trust each other.” Parker takes Jay’s place.

Each turn is successful, including mine.

With the completion of the trust fall, all six of our tasks for the week are checked off. It makes me feel good, the perfect mood for happy stories. “Okay, kids, back to story time.”

This time we sit on top of the picnic table so we can all sit together.

Parker goes first again. “When I was about ten, we went on a family vacation to the Grand Canyon. My parents decided to take the scenic route, which was the most boring time of my life. Fallon and I were stuck in the backseat of my mom’s mini-van for hours. On day two of the trip, I was in desperate need of something to do. Fallon was ignoring me. She always seemed to have a book in her hand, or she was writing something.” He rolls his eyes at the memory.

“By the time we were in New Mexico, I had enough so I started singing. At first, I was making up songs, but then I moved to singing along with my iPod. Both were irritating Fallon because she couldn’t concentrate on her reading.” He laughs, poor Fallon.

“I like all sorts of music. I downloaded a bunch of miscellaneous, free songs. I listened to one and used it to torment Fallon.” His eyes glow, fully in the moment of his story.

“What song was it?” I ask. “Sing it for me.”

The other boys groan but smile at the same time. They most know this story already.

“You asked for it. It has to be sung in a proper, fake Cockney accent.” With that, Parker starts to sing and the others join in immediately.

After they run through the chorus three time, I put my hand over Parker’s mouth. “Okay, okay. I get it. Poor Fallon,” I say through my giggles.

“Oh, it was even worse because I kept going, and my dad joined in. The song only had the ‘second verse, same as the first’ line, but we must have done it a hundred times. Fallon was so mad she wouldn’t talk to us that night.” He laughs hard enough to clutch his stomach.

I poke him in the side. “I loved your story, but you better never sing a hundred verses of that to me.” An evil grin spreads across his face, and I backpedal quickly. “Let me clarify and say no more than five verses.”

“You’re no fun.” He pokes me back as he glances around. “Who’s next?”

“I’ll go. Mine’s short,” I tell him. “When I was fourteen, my foster sister, Mia, wanted to hear a local band perform for free at a party in the park. Since the park was only a few blocks from our house, we had permission to go.

“Mia was seventeen. She had a huge crush on the bass player, who was nineteen. She wanted to wait for them after the concert. I agreed, and we waited off to the side for them to pack up.” I suppress my laughter as my brain jumps ahead of my storytelling.

“She wanted to watch for them, so my back was to where they come out. I was talking to her about this puppy I’d seen earlier that week. I was being animated, and she didn’t notice them walking out. They also didn’t notice us standing there. While I was talking, I threw my hands back and smacked the bass player in the face.” The laughter escapes, and I struggle to regain enough control to finish the story.