12. Clover

My walkie talkie buzzes with static before the voice of one of the campground's employees comes through.

"Clover, do you copy?"

I pause to laugh before answering. I recognize the voice of one of the freshmen, which is our nickname for staffers working their first season at Three Rivers. We get a lot of students who return for summer jobs year after year, and they're always adorably keen during their first season—keen enough to say things like ‘do you copy?' when nobody else bothers with the formal walkie talkie lingo.

"Hey, Sid," I answer when I'm done laughing. "I'm here."

"Sid to Clover. There's someone at the gate asking where you are. Over."

I snort at the ‘over.'

"I'm at the Block B shower building. Can you send them out here?"

I walk to the edge of the shower building. I just finished solving a dispute with a woman who insisted the meter for the hot water was only supposed to cost one shower token, not two, because apparently that's how many tokens it cost last time.

We've had the same shower system for longer than I've been alive, but she wasn't taking no for an answer.

The joys of life as an assistant manager.

I air out the neck of my Three Rivers tank top as I wait for the walkie talkie to light up with a reply. The summer air is extra muggy today, even with the trees blocking out the glare of the early evening sun. A couple minutes tick by before Sid responds.

"Sid to Clover. They, uh, don't know where Block B is. Also, are motorcycles allowed on the grounds? I didn't know if they're restricted vehicles, so I haven't let her in yet. Over."

My breath catches at the word ‘motorcycle.' I yank my phone out of the pocket of my cargo shorts and check the time.

"Shit," I mutter.

Placating Shower Lady took more time than I thought. My shift ended twenty minutes ago, which means Neavh is right on time for our first yurt construction session. There's only one person in River's Bend known for riding a motorcycle, so she must have had Scooter drive her over.

"Shit," I repeat as I stuff my phone in my pocket and start jogging up the path to the campground's entrance.

"Be right there," I pant into the walkie talkie.

I haven't told anyone at Three Rivers about Neavh helping with the yurt. If Scooter comes blaring through the grounds on his bike, there's no way her arrival is going to go unnoticed. I'll be lucky if I even manage to sneak her in on foot without bumping into my dad or Emily.

I'm sweating by the time I get to the gate and find Neavh standing beside the welcome office in her usual jean shorts and an oversized black t-shirt while Scooter waits on his bike. He grins and waves when he sees me coming.

"Apparently we're laying siege to your campground," he calls, nodding towards the barrier arm that's still closed to keep him out.

I continue jogging over to where Sid is seated behind the office's open window.

"They're good, Sid. I know them," I huff, a little out of breath. I turn back to face Scooter. "Do you want to come in?"

I cast a wary glance at the motorcycle, but he waves my offer off.

"Just doing my chauffeur duties." He looks between me and Neavh with an expression that's somewhere between smug and amused. "You two have fun."

Neavh shoots him a death glare. "Goodbye, David."

He blows her a kiss and then puts his helmet back on before gunning it up the road. Neavh and I watch him go, waiting until the roar of the engine is just a distant hum before we turn to face one another.

She's got the front of her hair up in that dopey little ponytail again, and I have to remind myself I do not think she's cute.

"So," she says, after we've spent a couple seconds blinking at each other.

"So," I echo.

Sid clears his throat.

I jerk with surprise. I completely forgot we were standing right in front of the window.

"Should I add motorcycle guy to the green list?" he asks.

I squint at him. He's wearing a Three Rivers t-shirt under some sort of utility vest, and he's got a fuzzy, barely-there fluff of a moustache growing on his upper lip with the oblivious audacity only an eighteen year-old boy can manage.

"You have a green list?" I ask.

That is not part of his welcome office duties.

He holds up a clipboard featuring a set of names and descriptions scribbled in pen. "I keep track of all contacts pre-approved for entry."

I resist the urge to laugh and tell him this isn't a video game; I'd rather he take his job way too seriously than not seriously enough.

"Uh, cool," I say instead. "Yeah, you can put him on it."

He points at Neavh. "And her?"

Neavh props a hand on her hip. "She can hear you."

Sid's eyes widen, but he continues waiting for orders from me. I start to wonder if maybe his parents made a mistake and sent him here for the summer instead of army camp.

"Yes, her too," I tell him. "Her name is Neavh."

Sid clicks his pen. "And her purpose for visiting?"

"She's helping me with—"

I cut myself off before I can say anything about the yurt. I've been limiting how many people I discuss my project with after realizing how truly ridiculous it was to go through with the plan—if you can even call it a plan.

The hours I've spent poring over the yurt instructions have proved I put even less thought into this than I realized.

"She's, um, she's my…"

I trail off again and glance at Neavh.

"She's my…friend," I finish.

Neavh's eyebrows shoot up, and we continue staring at each other as Sid mumbles to himself and scribbles away at his green list.

"All right, friend," Neavh says after a few moments. "Lead the way."

I know she's just teasing me for lying about the yurt, but that doesn't stop my cheeks from getting warm at the way she makes the word friend sound almost flirty.

She used to be able to do that: say just the right word in just the right way to make me blush. I'd never had a girl do more than give me a few shy smiles at a party before I met Neavh. I'd never known what it felt like to have a woman make it so clear that she wanted me, that she'd do anything just to get me alone.

I shiver at the rush of memories and spin on my heels away from her.

She's not flirting. We don't flirt anymore.

I duck under the barrier arm, and Neavh follows after me. We walk side by side along the dirt road that leads to the yurt site. I keep swiveling my head to look out for any of my family members, but we only pass by a few campers near the gate.

The spot I picked for the yurt is remote enough that we don't see any more guests for the rest of the walk. I figured a quiet and secluded location would be a good selling point for when I set up a booking page, and we have the added bonus of a lack of interruptions while building.

"Wow," Neavh says when we get close enough to see the site. "You've done a lot. It looks great"

I've barely even started, but I still grin at the praise.

"Those markers are where we need to dig for the foundation," I explain, pointing out the stakes I've driven into the ground. "We put posts in and anchor them with concrete, and then we build the platform that will be the base of the yurt."

Neavh nods and comes to a halt next to one of the stakes before pointing over to the two shovels I've left leaning against the storage shed.

"So today we're digging?"

I walk over and grab the shovels.

"Yeah," I say as I hand her one. "Today, we dig."

Dig we do. For the better part of two hours, we sweat our way through digging out the foundation in the muggy air. My tank top clings to my back, and my hair gets so frizzy I must look like a puffed up cat. My back and arms ache from heaving shovel after shovel of heavy earth, and my legs are caked with dirt all the way up to my knees.

"Oh my god!"

Neavh's shout pulls me out of the hypnotic rhythm I'd settled into. I lift my head to find her crouching down over the new hole she's just started on, her eyes wide as she stares at the dark brown earth.

"What is it?" I demand, abandoning my shovel and sprinting over to crouch down beside her.

"It's a little…lizard…thing!" she says, pointing at a mottled green and brown creature wriggling around in the dirt.

"A salamander!" I whisper-yell before hunching forward to get a better look.

The salamander's round little toes scrabble at the loosened dirt as it blinks in disapproval at the rude disturbance. I peer at it from different angles to get a full assessment of its colouring.

"It's a wandering salamander," I say, excitement buzzing through my body as I slide my phone out of my pocket to snap a few photos. "I've only seen these guys a few times. They're very interesting because of their disjunct distribution between here and California. There's still debate over whether or not their population here is due to human intervention or natural causes. There's some evidence to support the theory that they floated all the way here on logs in the ocean. Isn't that adorable?"

I switch to taking a video as the salamander begins crawling towards the shelter of the nearest clump of underbrush.

"Aww, look at him go," I coo. "Did you see that gold stripe down his back? That means he's a juvenile."

I pocket my phone again and look over at Neavh. What I see knocks the wind out of me.

She's watching me with so much softness, so much tenderness, that I almost topple over from the force of the sudden intimacy. She's watching me like she knows me, like she cares for me, like she wants to wrap me up in her arms and hold me tight until the whole rest of the world melts away and there's nothing left but the two of us.

She's watching me like nothing's changed, even though everything has.

I only get a glimpse of her expression before she realizes I've seen her. Then everything snaps shut like blinds over a window. Her shoulders curl inward as her mouth curves down into a frown. She presses her lips together and stares off after the salamander while two creases form between her eyebrows.

My fingers twitch with the urge to reach out and smooth the lines away.

If I could do that, maybe I could smooth the past four years away too.

Just for a moment.

"You, um…you know a lot about salamanders."

Her voice is hoarse, and the sound makes something deep in my chest ache.

"Which doesn't surprise me," she adds. "You know something about every damn leaf in the forest. I always used to wonder how you hold it all in your head."

I try to laugh, but all that comes out is a soft exhale.

"Sometimes I wonder that too," I murmur.

I reach up to brush some of the frizzy flyaways out of my face and then regret it as soon as I realize my hands are shaking.

Neavh squints at me, and my skin pricks with embarrassment before I realize she's looking at my bracelet.

"You still wear that," she says.

I stretch my hand out in front of me. The silver Canada goose charm glints in the light.

"Of course," I say. "I hardly ever take it off."

"I finally watched that movie, you know."

I watch her out of the corner of my eye. She's still staring at the bracelet.

"Fly Away Home," she says. "They had it on VHS at some hostel in Poland. In English too. I don't know how the hell it got there, but I watched it, and…well, you said you were going to show it to me someday, but we never got around to it, so I…I had to watch it, you know?"

She remembered. I'm pretty sure I only mentioned the story behind my bracelet one time, but she remembered.

Even after she left.

"I can see why little Clover was obsessed with that movie," she continues, both of us still pretending to be fixated on the sight of the bracelet. "You would totally try to raise a bunch of baby geese in a drawer and then fly them down to Florida."

My heart swells, and this time I manage to laugh out loud.

"I used to make Dad take me out to Kennedy Lake to look for abandoned Canada goose eggs. We'd wander around in the reeds for hours, and he never once complained," I tell her. "I also asked him to build me one of those weird little airplane things like in the movie. You know, so we could hypothetically teach my hypothetical geese how to migrate. He never got around to that part, though."

Neavh laughs with me. I twist the black leather band of the bracelet around so the clasp lies against the middle of my wrist.

"I haven't watched in a few years," I say. "I hadn't seen it in forever, actually, but then after Mom…after Mom died, I watched it every night for a week."

I don't know why I'm telling her this, but now that I've started, I can't keep the words from spilling out. My knees press farther into the cold, damp earth while I speak.

"Honestly, that's kind of what got me through it all," I admit. "If Amy could handle losing her mom, so could I."

There was an eeriness to it, watching the same opening sequence I'd seen dozens of times as a child: a rainy windshield. The glare of headlights. A girl waking up in a hospital bed with her mother nowhere to be found.

I may have had months to realize I was losing her, not just moments, but I still ended up the same way my favourite character did years before.

I still ended up without a mother.

"It's hard when it's so fast."

Neavh's voice is flat, but she's got her arms squeezed tight around her knees while she presses them to her chest like she's curling up in pain.

"Sometimes I wonder if I'd rather have known years and years before, so I could have made every moment count, so I could have made it all perfect, but then I wonder if that would have hurt more because there's no way life ever could have been as perfect as Charles deserved." She squeezes her legs tighter and shakes her head. "I don't know. I still can't figure out which is worse."

I blink at her, and then the full weight of her words slams straight into my chest.

We could both see ourselves in that scene: the mother for me, the car crash for her.

All these years later, there's a new part of us that's the same, that we reflect back at each other in a way no one else can.

We've both lost someone now.

"Neavh." I reach my hand out towards her arm but then snatch it away at the last second, just before she turns to look at me.

"Yes?"

"I'm sorry."

A range of emotions too convoluted for me to read shift over her face before she settles on asking, "For what?"

My hands are still shaking. I don't bother trying to hide it now.

"For what I said, when you…when you reached out to me after my mom died. It's not just that I was harsh. I…I lied."

The creases form between her eyebrows again, but she doesn't say anything.

I take a deep breath, the rich scent of damp earth filling my nose.

There's no going back from here.

"That summer…it meant everything to me."

I'm whispering now. If I keep talking, I can ignore how close we are to each other, how I'm just a few inches away from the heat of her breath on my skin. All I can see are those deep brown eyes, shifting between black and gold like sunlight through the treetops.

"You made me feel like I could do anything. You made me feel like...like nobody else ever has."

The words leave my mouth on a sigh.

She's so close, close enough to clamp her jaws around me and drag me down somewhere I'm not sure I want to go.

A fox in the henhouse.

Only I don't feel caught. I don't feel trapped. I don't feel like she's got me backed up against a wall.

I feel like all the walls have fallen away. I feel like all my rules and limits are gone, evaporated, like mist clearing from the edges of the forest to reveal a bright new day.

I feel like anything could happen.

I haven't felt that way in a long, long time.

"Do you mean that?"

Her voice seems to fill the whole clearing, even though she's barely speaking above a murmur.

She's motionless as she waits for my answer, like she's bracing for the shot of a starting gun to echo through the woods.

I nod my head, but still she doesn't move.

After so much time and so much hurt has passed between us, she needs to hear me say it.

Maybe I need to hear myself say it too.

My whole body trembles as I answer, "Yes. I mean it."

She's on her feet in an instant.

Before I've even realized she's grabbed my arm and pulled me up beside her, I'm standing too. She slides her grip down to intertwine her fingers with mine, and then she grins at me.

It's that fox's grin, the one that makes promises dripping in honey spiked with the bite of salt. It's the same grin that launched me into a summer of endless afternoons and countless nights filled with the sound of her, the smell of her, the taste of her.

"Then come on."

She tugs on my hand, and then we're running.