Page 87 of Heart of Mischief

If only they knew about his past.

If only they knew what he’d been through.

If only they knew what he’s done to keep me safe.

She inhaled sharply, shoving aside those thoughts as they reached the back of the bus. Turning into the empty seat in front of Lou and Abigail—Mason was sitting across the aisle with Archie Velasquez—Charlie plopped down next to the window. Elias took the seat beside her.

Before she even had time to place her duffel on the floor in frontof them, Mary Welsch’s face popped up from the seat in front of them, causing Charlie to jump.

“So…” Mary looked between Charlie and Elias, raising her brows suggestively. “Are you two, like, back together, then?”

“No,” said Charlie right as Elias said, “Yes.” She turned to glare at him, but he just smiled sweetly, looking every bit in love.

Mary’s eyes glittered with joy as she dropped back down into her seat. Charlie was sure the story would reach the rest of the bus before they’d even made it out of the parking lot.

30

Identifying the various flora andfauna of western coastal Michigan was exactly as fun as it sounded. Which is to say, not at all.

It took three hours to drive up the coast to the state park where they were spending the night. When they finally got off the bus, they’d taken another hour for lunch, then broke into groups of thirty, each led by a different chaperone. Charlie, Lou, and Abigail had been placed into a group together, but Abigail had marched immediately up to the head chaperone and asked to switch into the group run by the AP biology teacher.

“Is she on drugs?” Lou had whispered to Charlie.

“Quite possibly,” Charlie had said. “But I’m sure she also wants the chance to impress Mr. Gallego with her extensive knowledge of pollination and photosynthesis.”

“Ugh.” Lou crossed her arms in front of her chest. “Why are we friends with her again?”

“Because we adore her.”

Lou sighed. “That we do.”

Their group was led by Mrs. Waterstone, the chemistry teacher who had broken up Mason and Elias’s fight earlier that week. But while Mrs. Waterstone was a passionate—if forgetful, much to the delight of her students when test time came—teacher of chemistry, it quickly became clear that she knew next to nothing about biology.

“This one here…” she said, pointing to a patch of standard beach grass that grew all along the coast of Lake Michigan, “might beDryopteris affinis, the golden male fern.” She flipped a page, squinting at the text. “But this says those grow mostly in southern Europe and southwest Asia, so I don’t know…”

Thankfully, Mrs. Waterstone was so clueless about plant life that she spent most of the day with her head in the book, leaving her group to do as they pleased. For some, that meant scrolling on their phones or taking selfies under trees. For others, it meant gossiping in low tones about the party that night.

Charlie, on the other hand, spent the afternoon flinching every time a squirrel ran past. Catching her breath as the Reddit post flashed through her mind. Hunched back. Yellow eyes. Not being able to tell the difference between an innocent little creature and a beast who wanted her dead was terrifying. Most squirrels moved too fast for Charlie to get a good look at them, so she couldn’t verify if they had the telltale red swirl on their forehead. It was unnerving.

Of everyone in their group, it was almost certainly Henry who had the most fun. He scampered about the forest floor, sampling every type of leaf and fungus he could find.

“Don’t eat that one,” Charlie whispered to him when he picked up a wide yellow mushroom cap. “It looks poisonous.”

Henry stuck out his tiny pink tongue.

NOT POISON

ME KNOW FOREST

“Fine,” Charlie replied. “But don’t come complaining to me when you get magical Asgardian diarrhea.”

After two hours of confused wandering, Mrs. Waterstone finally gave up trying to identify plants and sent them off in groups of two with their handbooks and a worksheet of fifty different flora and fauna to label. They were supposed to write the common name, the Latin name, and describe the area where they found it.

“What a ridiculous list,” said Lou, plopping herself on an enormous stump and flipping through the pages of the worksheet. Henry climbed the stump and nuzzled into Lou’s leg. She absently scratched under his beard. “Totally inaccurate. They don’t even have vittra on here.Ordraugar.”

Charlie snorted. “I don’t think the writers of the textbook could see those things.”

“Amateurs.” Lou sniffed, pulling out a pen and writing in the box depicting a deer:white-tailed deer, Odocoileus virginianus, under a white pine tree.