Last Chance Summer - Shannon Klare Page 0,64

swallow the guilt and move on. I can’t take it day by day. I can’t take it at all! You want me to grieve and get over it but you don’t understand. No one understands.”

I stood, cramming my hands in my pockets. Sitting was like keeping myself under a current, like trying to breathe while a riptide held me under.

“You’re fleeing,” Madeline said, standing too. “Stay here and talk about this with me.”

“I don’t have to.”

I exited beneath the gazebo’s low-slung rafters, taking a deep breath as midmorning heat hit my cheeks. The grass, still drying from the morning dew, clung to my bare legs as I walked toward my cabin.

I spotted Grant along the way, hauling a set of floats from the storage shed beside the camp office. In this world of complicated choices, where one wrong decision could affect so much, someone’s decision to drink and drive left him fatherless. Forever changed. Scarred.

And I was the reverse. The guilty. The villain for letting someone too intoxicated to think get behind the wheel.

The minute he knew, he would look at me differently. The minute he knew, he would want someone else.

* * *

Later that afternoon, after a long duty shift at arts and crafts failed to get my mind off every terrible thought spiraling through it, I bypassed the mess hall and headed straight for the junction. As the only food provider aside from the mess hall, campers flocked to The Hut from one to five. Kira sat behind the glass window, grinning as I neared.

“If this is where you tell me you’re here to save me from an impossibly boring second shift, I will literally cry tears of joy,” she said.

I leaned against the building’s side paneling, eyeing the crowd. “I don’t think I have the patience to handle this many people,” I said, shaking my head. “But I would be happy to keep you company.”

“The door is in the back,” she said.

I walked the rest of the way around the building and found the small metal doorknob at the back. Inside, popcorn popped in the cooker. The smell of butter was strong, but not as strong as the smell of hot dogs spinning to my right. Gross.

“I couldn’t last more than an hour in here,” I said, scrunching my nose. “Could be the smell of processed mystery meat. I don’t know.”

“Trust me, if I could’ve smooth talked my way out of doing this I would’ve. Better yet, I should’ve made Grant do it. He owes me for covering for y’all last night.”

My stomach did a somersault. I was trying to escape Grant. Or, at least, trying to escape the guilt and anxiety that came with him.

“How did it go, anyway?” she said. “Haven’t seen either of you that much today.”

“I tried to stop by after breakfast but was forced to do something else instead,” I said.

“Well, we had an issue with the guys’ side and Linc ended up needing me to cover his yoga session so I wouldn’t have been there anyway. I swear, watching those kids try to do yoga was hilarious but annoying. There was more complaining than anything. They would’ve rather been swimming. Can’t say I blame them.”

I took a seat on the stool beside her. Her brown eyes wore dark bags beneath them. I probably looked the same, except mine were from a lack of sleep and too many thoughts flooding my mind.

“Sooo, how was the date?” Kira said. “Awesome? Fantastic? The best first date in the history of mankind?”

“We got Starbucks and went geocaching.”

“Sounds fun.”

“Yeah,” I said.

Kira paused, eyeing me as she took a punch card from a kid outside The Hut. Clearly the lack of enthusiasm in the answer wasn’t what she expected to hear.

I shifted beneath her scrutinizing stare. “I had a good time,” I said.

“Because you sound like you had a good time,” she said, standing from her stool. “Girl, I know an issue when I see it. Spill it. Was he not what you expected him to be?”

“Grant was fine,” I said, shaking my head.

“Then what’s the problem here? Lack of chemistry outside of camp? Boring conversations? His crappy sense of humor?”

“I like his humor.”

“But you don’t like him?”

“I do.”

I took the punch card from the next kid, making a concerted effort to look anywhere but at Kira, who was burning holes in my profile.

“I’m the one on duty shift,” she said, bringing a Dr Pepper to the window. “And you’re doing a terrible job answering questions. What’s