Bookishly Ever After (Ever After #1)(75)

Dev followed, looking down at me with a quirky smile. “See? I told you it would be okay. We make a good team.”

Something in my chest warmed at that last line, but I tried not to let it show on my face. “Except for the whole falling thing.”

“I was the one that fell, not you. You’re better at a lot of things than you think you are.”

I picked at a mushroom-y thing growing out of the log. Hopefully it wasn’t something poisonous that would go through my skin and kill me on the spot. “Not fire making.”

“We can work on that,” he said.

“Or I can just carry around matches all the time in case I’m ever stranded in the wilderness without,” a flirty line popped into my head, reminding me to be more like Marissa, and I threw caution to the wind and said it before I could chicken out, “a big strong scout like you.” I fakebatted my eyelashes, and put my hand to my chest in a mock-swoon. Marissa always threw those kind of harmless, cute, funny lines to Dan after they became just friends. Friends could totally flirt-joke with each other.

“Ha. Nice.” He sat down next to me with only an arm’s breadth of space between us and propped his elbows on his knees. “I actually used to suck at wilderness things, if you’d believe it.”

“You?

“Don’t let my perfect veneer of confidence fool you.” He shrugged, then continued, “This is going to sound stupid, but I had to trick myself into believing I could actually do things like build fires.” He looked down at his hands, his fingers picking apart a piece of bark, his lips turned up the tiniest bit. “One thing I’m really good at is acting.”

I rocked on the log, curious to see where this was going to go. “Now you’re starting to sound like Em.”

He twisted his nose in faux-disapproval until I made a zipping motion across my lips. “I decided that maybe I could try acting like I knew what I was doing. I wasn’t Devthe-guy-who-couldn’t-hike. I was Dev-the-outdoor-guru. And after a little bit, it actually worked.” The bark fluttered in pieces from his hands down to the ground. “It doesn’t work for everything, like calculus, but it helps. I’m not so afraid of messing up, you know?”

Me-as-Marissa leaned sideways and bumped him gently with my shoulder. “Actually, I do.”

He tilted his head to smile at me and I smiled back, forgetting about rope courses and possibly poisonous mushrooms and Lexies for a few moments.

“Dev, I’m sorry, I know I told you to take a break, but can you help spot these two?” Ms. Forrester’s voice broke the silence between us, and Dev popped up to standing so quickly, it jarred me back into reality.

“Sure, Ms. Forrester, on my way.” Dev looked over his shoulder at me and said, “Be right back. Don’t let any strange counselors take my spot,” before bounding off to help with two of the tallest kids in the group.

“I…won’t,” I said, lamely, but he was already hard at work smiling and charming the campers. He definitely didn’t hear me.





45


Flames licked the night sky as Dev and some of the teachers added more logs to the giant bonfire. I had a front-row seat, which meant that my face was starting to feel hot and I had to duck flying embers every time another log was added to the pile. At least it kept me from creepily staring at Dev.

“I cannot wait for this week to be over,” Cassie said as she slid onto the rough log next to me. “The only bright spot to this entire thing is that Mike’s also counseling here and he switched so we could be co-counselors.”

Her sudden appearance and rapid speech gave me whiplash. “Mike?” I asked dumbly.

Cassie laughed like I had asked her who the president of the United States was. “Mike Lyons? You know, our football team’s fullback? My boyfriend. The guy I mentioned the first night?”

“Oh, yeah.”

“Every time I want to strangle one of these brats, he talks me down. God, I have a cabin full of terrors.”

“Really?” I looked over at the group of girls a few logs over comparing the gimp lanyards they’d made during break that afternoon. None of them looked menacing. “They seem pretty nice.”

“That’s because they’re in public.” She waved away some of the smoke that came our way with a cough. “They pranked one of the girls the other night so badly, I spent half the night cleaning up shaving cream from her bunk. And that one over there,” she pointed at a girl wearing a daisy crown, “is a mouth-breather. Oh my gosh, I just had to leave the other night to go hang out with Mike because I couldn’t take her breathing anymore.”

“You don’t have a girl named Mary in your cabin, do you?” I asked, remembering what Bethany One had said the other night.

“That’s the mouth-breather. Why?”

“I think she’s friends with some of the girls in my cabin.”

“Do you want to take her?” She asked with a contagious grin.

“Sorry, I’m all out of bunks.”

“Earplugs for the rest of this camp it is, then.”

Thinking about what my campers said about the other counselors, I said, slowly, “Have you tried talking to them on the same level as, like, me or Mike?”

“You mean act like I’m their friend? Because that doesn’t exactly scream ‘responsible camp counselor.’”