Highly Suspicious and Unfairly Cute(29)

She takes a breath. Her voice sounds like the edge of a saw. “The way I see it, we weren’t ever meant to be friends. Whatever we used to be was…accidental or circumstantial or…”

It takes me a minute to understand those words, just like if someone punched into your body and ripped out your kidneys, it’d take a while to realize you were bleeding out. So I let her get deep into her bullshit before I manage to interrupt. “What?”

She closes her mouth. The wind howls through the trees.

I repeat, “What did you just say to me?”

She lifts her chin.

Something in the middle of my rib cage snaps. “For fuck’s sake.” I. Am. Too. Hot. I rip the hat off my head and throw it toward the ground. “I can’t stand you.”

My hat hits her in the knee, somehow. She throws it back. Misses me. “Yes! I’m aware!”

“Don’t throw my hat!” I shout, and pick it up from the mud, and then accidentally throw it again.

“Fine!” Before I know it, she’s crouched down, scooped up a handful of wet mud and rotting leaves and God knows what else, and launched it my way. There’s a visceral splat as it hits my chest, and I see satisfaction on her face for about 0.2 seconds before the expression vanishes like a snuffed-out candle. Her jaw drops. Her eyes are wide. She’s a bit like that painting, the one with the scream.

I look very, very slowly down at my filthy clothes.

“Brad!” she says, like she doesn’t know what else to say.

This outfit is pretty fucked now. From head to toe. It’s not as if I’ve never been muddy before—you should see me at Sunday matches—but this isn’t a wide-open, manicured field and I am not in uniform. God knows what’s hiding in this forest. I’ve seen mushrooms in here. Mushrooms are fungus. I am fully contaminated.

“Oh my God,” Celine breathes.

Accept the thought, my common sense reminds me.

Right. Yes. On it. I officially accept that I am tragically doomed to contract rabies from the poop-infected unidentified forest mud Celine just threw, and promptly die.

“I’m so sorry!”

Check for distortions.

Okay, fine: it’s entirely possible that my imminent death is not a reasonable conclusion to this story. It’s also possible that the rabies thing is inaccurate.

Technically. I suppose.

“Brad?”

Refocus.

I tip my head back and count all the branches above me. I must not fear.

“Brad, please say something. I’m sorry.”

I breathe out once, deliberately, through my mouth. Only I will remain.

Okay. Okay. I’m fine.

But Celine looks a bit like she’s going to cry. Or maybe that’s just the rain. “What?” I demand.

Her eyes widen. “I…Do you need…Is it…”

I bend down, scoop up my own handful of mud, and throw it right back. Splat. Now her coat is a mess too.

She stares at me in astonishment for one second, two, three, before her shock fades and the mud fight officially starts.

We abandon the compass and the photo of the map as we chase each other—I don’t know who’s doing the chasing so don’t ask—through the woods. Her aim is better than mine, probably because she played netball for so long. I’m faster than her. She’s sneakier, but she has asthma and I’m worried she might run out of oxygen and die in the woods and I’ll have to break the news to Neneh. By the time I bring myself to call a truce, we’re both caked in mud and I’m really hoping there’s a washing machine back at the cabin, or else we are absolutely screwed.

Maybe Celine’s thinking the same thing because she leans against a tree and starts to laugh. A small colony of giggles is rushing to escape her chest; hiccups tumble over one another. It’s so ridiculous, I laugh, too, and next thing I know we’re propping ourselves up against an oak tree, side by side, and—

She runs out of giggles. She has a spot of dry mud just above her eyebrow and her face is so different now, but it’s still the same.

I used to think Celine was the prettiest person on the planet.

Best not to think about that now, though.

“If we have to do this whole thing,” I tell her, “together—”

She looks away from me when I say that. Tilts her head up to the sky. I keep going anyway.

“I can’t spend days at a time fighting with you, Cel.”

“Why not?” she murmurs. “It’s not like they have TV at the cabin.”

I really don’t mean to laugh. She’s not funny. Can’t stand her.

“Bradley—” she says suddenly.

I interrupt. “You’re never going to forgive me.”

“I’m not the forgiving type,” she replies calmly. “I have a dreadful personality.”

“You’re not supposed to just say that”—I scowl—“like it’s okay. You’re supposed to regret that you can’t be the bigger person.”

“Well, I don’t,” she murmurs. “By the way—”

“I’m not forgiving you either.” It’s important she knows that. And now she does, so I barrel on to the next part before I can overthink it. “Can we forget it, though?”