Unfaithful (24 page)

“You sure we’re not going too far?” Peter asked Ginevra, who was leading the group along a rambling path none of us knew well.

“Afraid of the big bad wolf?” she teased, a feral look on her face. Her lips twisted into a sardonic smile. “Or witches, maybe?”

I shot her a disapproving look. I didn’t know exactly what Peter had done to end up being the butt of all her sadistic jokes, but it wasn’t hard to guess.

“Witches!” Peter snorted. “Aren’t you a little big to believe in stuff like that?”

Ginevra leaned in close to his face. “Aren’t you?” she said in a sinister whisper. Something about the look in her eye made Peter fall silent, almost as if he’d grasped the veiled truth behind her words.

“It was your idea to go for a walk,” Brandon said. “At least we’ll see something new.”

“Yeah, sure we will!” Jeneane shot back, annoyed. “New trees, new rocks. And look down there! A new stream, all our own!” she said sarcastically. “So is it going to take much longer? My feet are starting to ache,” she whined, panting like someone who’s just scaled Mt. Everest.

“Exactly five minutes less than the last time you asked,” Ginevra said.

“Hey, chill! Did you just get stung by a wasp or what?” Jeneane stared at her almost defiantly.

Behind them, Peter laughed. “I don’t think so. I don’t see any dead wasps lying around,” he said. “I doubt there’s anything that could survive after stinging her.” Ginevra glared at him, a challenging look in her eye, surprising the rest of us who had expected a more elaborate answer.

“We’re almost there,” she said, responding more to my thoughts than Jeneane’s grumbling. Her lips curved into a sly smile. “There’s just one last push,” she told us, looking amused, her eyes on a steep slope to our right that led away from the path.

“You can’t mean—” Jeneane’s incredulous voice trailed off.

Ginevra looked her up and down. “You can always stay here and wait for us,” she suggested spitefully, not leaving Jeneane much choice.

“Or,” Peter whispered in her ear as he passed her, “you can come with us and follow the queen of the witches.”

Ginevra turned to look at him. “Thanks. You finally said something nice about me.” Peter didn’t realize he’d just paid her a compliment. I bit my lip to keep from laughing.

“Can’t we follow the path?” Faith asked cautiously as if Ginevra made her nervous.

Surprisingly, Ginevra answered nicely. “That would take a good two hours. I’m offering you guys the chance to get there in fifteen minutes, tops. If that’s okay with you.”

“Hang in there just a little longer,” Jake said to Faith considerately, resting a hand on her shoulder. Looking resigned, she nodded at the tenderness on his face.

As we made our way up, the slope grew even steeper. The ground was covered with leaves, dry pine needles, and gravel. An occasional rock lodged in the ground or a tree trunk jutting out of the sandy soil offered us a foothold.

Peter led the group, followed by Jeneane and Faith who were being helped by Brandon and Jake, while Ginevra and I brought up the rear.

“It’s been over twenty minutes, Ginevra!” Jeneane groaned, looking tired and fed up.

Ginevra smiled and looked at me, shrugging. “It’s not my fault she’s a slowpoke!” I shot her a reproving look. “Fifteen minutes would have been enough time for me,” she said in a low, amused voice.

I stared at her, open-mouthed. “I thought you meant fifteen
human
minutes!” I said reproachfully.

“Nobody asked.”

“You’re unbelievable,” I teased her affectionately. I didn’t mind climbing uphill through the trees at all. I could have kept going for hours. The strong smell of moss in the air relaxed me. My girlfriends, on the other hand, seemed exhausted.

“We’re almost there!” Peter called. He was standing on a large trunk half-buried beneath layers of earth. Faith joined him on top of it and so did Jeneane.

As I trudged uphill, absently staring at the ground beneath my feet, my heart unexpectedly leapt to my throat for no reason at all. Instinctively, I raised my eyes to the trunk that Jake was now climbing onto, then looked back at my feet, moving forward, then again at the trunk, as if something were beckoning me. My instincts were strangely on alert, and yet the tree trunk was a perfectly sturdy foothold. It had been lying there on the ground for who knew how long.

A strange cracking sound rent the air. I looked up, alarmed, but no one else seemed to have heard it.

It was Brandon’s turn to climb onto the trunk, a dozen yards up the slope from me. My eyes darted to his foot as he rested it on the trunk and the blood suddenly drained from my face. Before I could open my mouth, the trunk tore itself violently from the earth and began to roll downhill, dragging Brandon with it. He clutched at the ground, his fingers sinking into the earth. Shouts came from above but they were lost among the trees.

The blood froze in my veins as I watched the trunk barreling toward me, out of control. Panicking, I stepped back and lost my balance. The trunk bounced off the ground and came flying at me. As I fell someone yanked me out of its trajectory. It crashed against a tree and rolled down the hill. I suspected Ginevra had diverted it from its path and I hoped the others were still too much in shock to have noticed. Shaking from head to toe, I forced myself to take a breath. Ginevra had saved me again. Our eyes met, mine still filled with terror, and I saw she was petrified too. The others raced down the hill toward us as the trunk hit the bottom and smashed into a thousand pieces.

“Are you okay?” Peter shouted, breathless with worry as he rushed past the others. The question was starting to become a constant part of my life. Before I could answer him, he smothered me in a desperate hug as Ginevra looked on uneasily. “I thought you were done for,” he whispered into my hair. Peter couldn’t imagine I’d already survived far worse situations.

“Gemma!” the girls cried in concern when they finally reached us.

“It’s okay, I’m fine,” I reassured them, still looking at Peter. Of all of them, he looked the most shaken. I locked eyes with Ginevra in an attempt to let her know how thankful I was. “Well?” I exclaimed, trying to appear nonchalant though my heart was about to burst out of my chest. “Are we planning to put down roots here?”

Jake surprised me by resting a hand on my shoulder. “Girl, either you’re jinxed or this is totally not your lucky day!” he kidded as my brain processed what he’d just said. My instinct had tried to warn me. I forced a smile and said something in reply.

Meanwhile Jeneane had stopped to stare at Ginevra, who looked back at her out of the corner of her eye. “Nice move. I didn’t know you were so strong,” she said, almost accusingly.

“Just lucky, that’s all.” From her tone, Ginevra seemed to have lost her sense of humor.

The minute the others turned around we exchanged a knowing look. Ginevra had to be careful not to attract attention like that.

After a few more minutes a small clearing surrounded by trees opened up before us. It didn’t look much different from the one I was used to, but Ginevra insisted that the trees around it formed a perfect circle. No one seemed convinced it was a good enough reason to have dragged us all the way here.

I rummaged in my backpack for
Forbidden
, a novel by Tabitha Suzuma that I hadn’t been able to put down for days now. “Book!” Brandon’s warning cry made me flinch and I looked up. “Hey, hey, hey! No books allowed! Confiscate that book from Gemma!” I felt like a cornered animal. Before I knew it, Peter had pounced on me.

“All right, all right, I’ll put it away!” I protested cautiously, a little alarmed by his impulsive behavior.

Peter fixed his eyes on me and said in a mock-threatening voice, holding back a grin, “We don’t need some you-might-see-me-but-I’m-on-another-planet zombie version of Gemma!”

“It’s bad enough having to put up with that at school,” Jake chimed in sardonically.

I’d planned to finish the novel but had no choice but to hide it before my friends actually took it away from me. Instead, I pulled out my camera and took snapshots of them. Then we tossed our backpacks on the ground, split up, and went into the woods to gather firewood.

“Hey, Gemma!” Peter walked toward me.

At my side, Ginevra rolled her eyes. “Such a pain in the neck,” she murmured in exasperation. “He needs to
talk
to you.”

Do you mind?
I asked her with my eyes so Peter, who hadn’t reached us yet, couldn’t hear.

It was clear from the look on Ginevra’s face how irritated she was. “But he wants to be
alone
with you!” she exclaimed, surprised by my openness toward him.

“He’s my friend,” I reminded her.

Ginevra clenched her jaw and quickened her pace. Catching up to the rest of the group, she strode past the boys with a toss of her head, her wavy hair cascading over her shoulders like molten gold.

“Close your mouth, Brandon,” Jeneane warned, seeing his expression. “You’ve got all day long to drool.” Ginevra smiled to herself and I shook my head.

“So she finally gave you some room to breathe.” Peter walked up to me. “I was starting to think your boyfriend had appointed her as your bodyguard. She never leaves you alone for a second!”

“We’re really close,” I said, bothered by his sarcasm.

“Like you and I used to be?” he asked bluntly.

His question hit me straight in the heart. I searched his gaze, feeling a pang in my stomach I couldn’t express, then looked away, focusing on the path we were following. “It’s different,” I said in a small voice.

“Right.” His tone was resentful. “But what we had was special too.” I said nothing, but Peter wouldn’t take my silence for an answer. “You think so yourself, don’t you? Tell me you do.”

“Pet . . .” I couldn’t find the words. “You’re a big part of my life. An important part, and that’s never going to change.”

He pressed his lips together in a bitter smile and said, “But I’m part of the past. That’s what you’re trying to tell me.”

Since when had he become so straightforward? I hesitated. “I’m with Evan now. Don’t be upset about it. That’s just how things turned out. I don’t want to lose your friendship, but I’ll understand if you don’t want me around any more. Don’t misunderstand me: you’ll always be a part of my life. I want you to be, even in the future,” I reassured him. I felt guilty for being so direct, but I needed to be clear with him. “But only as a brother—like it’s always been for me.”

The look on his face finally expressed what he’d never managed to say in words: Peter didn’t feel the same way about me. My confession seemed to have crushed his heart. I took comfort in the knowledge that the flame of false hope was more devastating—because it burned stronger and longer—than the flame of cold, hard truth, which flared up initially, but was soon extinguished by resignation.

 “You’re wrong.” The sudden change in his expression confirmed it. “I’ll
always
want you around.” Peter tried hard to keep his disillusionment off his face, understanding how pointless it was to insist. Then he smiled at me as if the conversation had never happened. But a person’s smile can be called sincere only when it’s their eyes doing the smiling—and his were dull. “So what did you do over the summer, you and . . . your boyfriend?”

I looked at him sadly, unsure whether I should follow his lead. He’d changed the subject so abruptly it worried me. Rubbing salt in the wound I’d just inflicted didn’t seem like a good idea, so I dodged his question. “No, tell me about you. I mean, you guys spent three whole months camping while I was stuck back here. Tell me everything! Was it fun?”

“It would have been more fun if you’d been there.”

“Aw, I bet it wasn’t all that bad.”

His smile broadened as he tousled my hair. He knew I hated it when he did that. “Don’t let it go to your head! We had a blast even without you.” He grinned.

I gasped, feigning shock. For a moment I was glad of how easy it was to talk to Peter, just as if nothing had changed between us. But then he turned serious again. “It was just what I needed, to get away from . . . Lake Placid,” he murmured, casting me a sidelong glance.
To get away from the sight of you and Evan together all the time
was what I read on his face, which was more honest than he was.

“Oh, man!” I shook his arm. “I leave you alone for one summer and you turn so serious! Where’s the Peter I used to know? He would be dying to tell me every detail. What have you done with him?” It was my desperate attempt to get through to my friend, hidden somewhere behind this new Peter I barely recognized.

Unexpectedly, it seemed to work. He laughed at some memory that crossed his mind. “Would you believe it if I told you Jake managed to shoot spaghetti out of his nose?”

“Oh my God, how disgusting!” I exclaimed, grossed out.

“The guy would do anything to get Faith’s attention.”

“I doubt it worked. They should offer courses for guys like him who don’t know how to pick up girls.”

“Well, he
did
manage to make her laugh. In fact, she was laughing so hard she could barely breathe,” he said.

“Good thing Brandon didn’t have a brilliant idea like that. I don’t think Jeneane would have reacted quite so well.”

“You’re probably right.” For a moment I recognized my old friend, the one I missed so much, in his carefree expression. “But then again, Brandon got a laugh out of Jeneane too,” he said.

“Oh, I’ve got to hear this.”

“You’d better sit down first,” he warned. “I’m not sure you’ll be able to stay standing.” He doubled over in laughter. “One night there was a party at the campground and Brandon picked up a girl.” Peter was laughing so hard there were tears in his eyes. It was contagious; my lips curled into a smile. “She was gorgeous, no doubt about it, and he was strutting around because she even seemed older than us. They . . . they started dancing . . . and he found out . . .” Peter gasped out the words between laughs, “he found out it was a dude!”

“Brandon picked up a transvestite?!” I asked, astonished.