Her hand brushes my shoulder. “Thank you.”
“No problem.” I follow her back onto the beach to her towel, grabbing my own in the process, and I sit with her. Close enough to be able to talk but not so close that she would feel uncomfortable. “Is this your first year here?”
“Second,” she says, grabbing her towel off the blanket she’s spread out and wrapping it around her shoulders. “But first without my best friend. Probably why you don’t remember me if you were here last year.”
“Yeah, I was.”
“We were pretty much doing anything and everything together. It’s weird to be here without her.”
I run a hand through my hair, using the water already in it to keep it out of my eyes. “Where is she this year?”
She almost rolls her eyes but catches herself. “Vacationing in France with her family. Being glamorous. It’s hard not to be jealous, but I’m trying. I really want to travel. But,” she says, pausing, “Leena really is amazing, and she deserves it. She’ll come back from her trip and I know all the stories will be great.”
“I’m sorry you miss her.”
Seph shrugs. “Not much I can do about it, but when you spend that much time with someone it’s hard not to feel like you’ve lost a limb when they’re not there. But it’s fine, because senior year is going to be fantastic. We’re going to make it amazing together. Her and me against the world, you know?”
“I wish I did,” I say, grinning. “But if you want to make me jealous then you’re well on your way.”
Seph goes quiet for a moment and looks down at her hands. “Why would you be jealous?”
“I think I’d be jealous of anyone you talked about like that. I don’t have any friends like that. “Us against the world.””
She blushes and smiles a little, but doesn’t meet my gaze. Crap, I don’t want her to feel awkward.
“Any chance you want to go for a walk? The woods are beautiful right now.”
She looks up at me now, and the breath is knocked out of my chest when those green eyes meet mine. I really, really, like this girl.
“Sure. Let me change really quick.”
“Meet you back here?”
She nods, and I have to make it look like I’m not sprinting to my cabin. It doesn’t really matter though because I’ve never changed faster in my life. Jeans and one of the better t-shirts that I brought. I’m back at the tree by the lake first, just like I wanted to be. I want to sit and look cool like those guys in the movies, even if I know that I can never, ever come close to that.
I hear Seph’s laughter before I see her come around the tree. “You were fast.”
All I do is smile. “Which path is your favorite?”
There are several cool wooded paths, and they all have their own benefits. I like them all, and I know them like the back of my hand since I’ve been coming here for years. But I have a favorite, and I want to know hers.
“The waterfall path,” she says, and that makes me smile wider. “It’s mine too,” I tell her.
We pass some of my friends on the way to the trailhead, and they look at me with questions on their faces. I ignore them entirely. I don’t give two shits about what they think of Seph.
The path entrance is taped off, which is weird. I didn’t realize that it was closed. I’ll have to ask Mom and Dad later if there’s some kind of maintenance going on.
“That sucks,” Seph says. “I hadn’t been down this one yet this year.”
I lift up the tape. “Don’t worry about it. We can still go.”
“I think we might get into trouble doing that,” she says.
I barely even debate telling her. It’s true that I don’t want special treatment, but I’m not about to let this ruin the moment that we could potentially have. “I don’t tell everyone this because it sometimes makes it weird,” I say, “but my parents are the camp directors. We won’t get in trouble.”
She looks shocked and then laughs. “You’re their son? I’m amazed they don’t blast that all over the camp.”
“We’ve come to an agreement.” I duck under the tape and hold it up to her. She follows.
“Well I’m glad we still get to do this. I love this path.”
“It’s the best.”
She smiles, and I see that she still has that notebook with her, tucked against her chest as she walks. “Probably the one thing about this summer that Leena will be jealous of me for. This was one of our spots.”
I nod. “Sometimes there’s just as much good about being somewhere that’s familiar.”
“That’s true, but I want to travel. I want to see everything and go everywhere, and so being stuck wasn’t on the top of my to-do list.”
I hold a tree branch out of her way as she brushes past it. “Where would you go first, if you had the choice?”
“Greece.” There’s no hesitation in the answer. “My mom obviously loved mythology enough to name me Persephone, and even though it’s always been kind of a strange name, I do love it. So I want to visit the place where all the stories come from.”
“That’s the myth where she gets kidnapped and has to spend half the year in hell, right?”
She laughs softly. “Yeah, that’s the basic version. But there’s a lot of re-imaginings of it that make it less…harsh than that.”
“What version of it would you write, if you got the chance?”
She stops in her tracks and looks at me. “No one’s ever asked me that before.”
“Have you thought about it?”
“Yeah,” she says, her fingers running across the cover of her notebook. “In my version she wouldn’t be kidnapped. She would be in love. So overwhelmed with it that she would run away to hell to be with that person. But she still has responsibilities to the rest of the world, and so she splits her time between them.”
I nod. “That’s a nicer version.”
“That’s the good thing about the myths. No one minds if you change them up. It’s completely fine.”
We reach the section of the path that opens up into a glade with a waterfall. There’s a giant rock that sits at the edge of the pool, and when the path is open, this place is usually pretty busy. This is one of the only times that I’ve seen it completely vacant.
“For what it’s worth,” I say, “even if it’s selfish, I’m glad you’re stuck for the summer.”
Looking over at me, Seph breaks into a shy smile. “Maybe it won’t be so bad.”
She climbs up onto the rock, and I take a moment before I follow her, watching her take it in. Seph has a way of observing the world that is entirely new to me. She seems to soak in everything around her. She’s present. It makes me want to pay more attention to absolutely everything.
When I join her on top of the rock she sits down, and she’s smiling even though I don’t think that she realizes it. “I love this place. It feels like being in a place where time is standing still, and the only thing that’s moving is the water, and that’s because it doesn’t have a choice. This is a place that the universe forgot and now it’s only ours.”