I couldn’t help but chuckle at the sight of him so stressed while being so totally filthy. “Oh, sure,laugh.” Beck shot me a glare. “I’m going to lose my convertible privileges all because I taught you a lesson, and you’relaughing.” He started sulking his way back to his car.
I limped after him, wincing at the pain shooting through my ankle. “I appreciate you taking one for the team.”
“I didn’t realize I was on your team,” he muttered, almost like he was speaking to himself.
I stared at his broad, mud-covered back, biting down on the corner of my lip. “Me either.”
But I’m glad you are.
CHAPTER 17
We found a water fountain at the start of the trail, and even though we were able to rinse off most of our bare skin, Beck took one look at me—and my white-turned-brown sweater—and shook his head. “Absolutely not,” he’d said. “I’ll call your brother. I can handle him. My aunt, on the other hand… absolutely not.”
So Beck ended up pulling out his phone to text Jamie, and we camped out at a picnic table a few feet from the mouth of the trail. The bugs hiding in the switchgrass were chirping, filling the awkward silence that had fallen over us while we waited for my brother.
Beck checked his phone for the tenth time. “You think he got lost?”
“This is his way of punishing me,” I said, picking at the half-moons of mud underneath my nails. “He’ll come, but he’ll take the long way.”
“Because it’s a punishment to be alone with me?”
Beck sat across from me, elbows braced on the table,shoulders slumped now that the adrenaline had worn off. The sun had ducked fully under the horizon now. In the dim light, the mud on his face and arms looked almost like war paint. His hair had dried stiff, sticking up in little points.
I pressed my lips together at the ridiculous sight. It was sonormal. It reminded me of the little ovals on his nose from his sunglasses; something small that cracked the perfecttoo coolimage he tried to craft. Now, he looked like a child who’d been living in the woods for the last ten years.
My heart tugged, familiar and not at the same time. “Yes,” I said finally.P-U-N-I-S-H-M-E-N-T.
Beck made a face.
“When did you start bleaching your hair?”
“A few months ago.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know.” He began tracing the wood grain on the table with his fingertip. And then, blurted like a secret he couldn’t hold in, he said, “It made people look at me. When I bleached it.”
I felt my forehead crease. “And you wanted that?” Having people look at him seemed sooppositeof what Beck would want.
“Sometimes it felt like I needed the reminder. That peoplecouldsee me.”
This time, a glimmer of pain poked at my chest. I stared at his hand that rested on the table, wanting to reach for it, afraid to move. “Did you dye it at college?” I asked him. “Your semester ended already at Stanford?”
Beck’s answer came instantly, like muscle memory. “Stanford runs on a quarter system. Fall, winter, spring, summer.”
“Oh.” Right. Jamie had said that their spring quarter hadn’t been over yet. “The spring quarter is over, then?”
“I’m here, aren’t I?”
Even though Jamie said otherwise. The edge in Beck’s voice made me blink. “Stanford’s not boring?”
Beck turned to stare off at the dark trailhead. “Horribly.”
“When did this wholeboringthing start?” I asked him, trying to lighten my voice. Something had shifted, except I couldn’t tell what. “Who told you life needs to be fun all the time? Because they were lying.”
“F-U-N.” Beck spelled the word out on a slow exhale, forcing his fingers to cut through the crunch of his hair. Flecks of mud flaked off, like pieces of a shell. “Fun. It’s an easy word to spell. Why is it so hard for life to feel it?”
I waited for the punchline, the smirk, the eye roll, anything to hint at a joke, but nothing came. It was the way he’d said it that had me stilling, paired with the blank look on his face.
