“We’ve been given a second chance.”

- The Best of Me, coming to theaters Friday

Chapter 4

Even once the sun began to disappear behind the horizon that evening, the stifling heat lingered. We packed ourselves back into Matt’s Volkswagen, all grunting and groaning about how we were sweating in places people shouldn’t be allowed to sweat and how our feet felt like they were about to fall off our legs, and drove to one of the nearby campgrounds that dotted the rim of the canyon.

I still had Tucker’s water bottle.

I’d shoved it into the front pocket of my backpack, along with the note my best friend Mariam had written for me and my copy of the Grand Canyon map from the Visitor Center.

Tucker and I’d ended up passing his water bottle between the two of us all throughout the day—much to Lindsey’s amusement. I still couldn’t figure out why she kept smirking at us, but it was starting to worry me. That, and the fact that I’d caught Matt staring at her at least nine times over the course of the day.

We parked beside a large plot of grass, in the center of which a fire pit had been dug into the ground and lined with large stones.

Matt and Tucker tugged two large collapsible tents out of the trunk and got to work assembling them on the lawn. Meanwhile, Lindsey knelt in the dirt beside the fire pit and tried to figure out how Phineas Jones had managed to get a flame going using only his teeth and a handful of twigs. I plopped down on a mangled log and watched her for a couple minutes before I lost patience.

“Hey!” Lindsey exclaimed as I tossed a lit match into the pit, igniting a burst of flames in the tinder she’d gathered. “I almost had it!”

“No you didn’t,” I scoffed.

Lindsey pouted, but didn’t argue.

“I’ll figure it out eventually,” she mumbled, joining me on the log beside the fire pit. We stared out across the grass to where Matt and Tucker had resorted to fencing each other with two tent poles.

I kicked off my sneakers and peeled my socks from my feet, then shoved my toes into the cool grass.

“I’m gonna sleep like a rock tonight,” I murmured.

Lindsey hummed in agreement.

“Cheater!” Matt bellowed, his deep voice carrying across the expanse of lawn and echoing through the campground, “This is a swordfight! You can’t use nun-chucks!”

Tucker, it appeared, had found a tent pole with an elastic string attaching two of the segments. He laughed and trotted sideways, his long limbs as awkward and graceless as a baby deer’s. Matt lunged after him with all the muscular sleekness of a panther. Lindsey and I winced in unison at the sound of aluminum smacking against skin, followed by a shouted word that I hoped none of the families staying in the RV camp across the road heard.

“Should we stop them?” Lindsey asked me.

“Well, since you volunteered…” I trailed off.

Lindsey huffed and pushed herself up from the log. I could tell her feet ached, too, because she seemed to alternate between waddling and skipping across the lawn.

I let my heavy eyelids flutter shut for a moment.

My skin was still warm from a day baking beneath the brutal Arizona sun, and even though I’d chugged most of Tucker’s water along with my own, my tongue still felt dry and rough in my mouth. My arms ached from bouldering and my feet throbbed in tempo with my heartbeat, silently begging me to stop walking so damn much.

A warm breeze came billowing across the campsite, rustling the leaves of the nearby trees and tangling my hair across my face.

I smiled, content.

When the wind settled, I heard a single set of footsteps, the crunch of grass beneath sneakers growing louder as the owner approached. Opening my eyes seemed like too great of an effort, so I just waited. Eventually, I felt the log shift beneath me as someone dropped their weight onto the empty spot beside me.

“You’re like a horse.”

It was Tucker, of course. Who else?

“Are you trying to insult me?” I asked, cocking one eyebrow.

I peeled open my eyes and turned to face him. Tucker’s dirt-brown hair was all swept up to one side in the largest cowlick I’d ever seen. It should’ve bothered me that it was lopsided, just like everything else on Tucker’s face, but I was too tired to care.

“No,” he frowned, “Horses just sleep standing up. I mean, you’re sitting, but still. That’s pretty impressive.”

I felt the corners of my mouth twitch upwards.

“I wasn’t sleeping,” I mumbled.

“Yet,” Tucker added.

“Yet,” I conceded, breaking out in an unattractively large yawn. Mid-yawn, I remembered something. “Oh, before I forget. Do you want your water bottle back?”

I’d leaned over the side of the log and reached into the front pocket of my backpack before Tucker had a chance to respond. When I yanked out his water bottle, Mariam’s note got stuck to a bit of condensation on the bottom of the canister. I shook the bottle and the folded up piece of notebook paper tumbled into my lap.

“It’s okay,” Tucker said, “You can have it.”

“You’re not giving me it,” I insisted, setting the water bottle down on the log between us. “Besides, I’m going to transfer after the first semester, anyway. What would I do with an NYU water bottle?”

I realized, a beat too late, that I hadn’t meant to tell anyone about my plans to transfer.

“You’re transferring?” Tucker repeated, incredulous.

I winced.

“You haven’t even started school yet,” he protested, eyebrows furrowing, “and you’ve already decided to transfer out? To where?”

“Well, Matt’s going to—”

Tucker’s face darkened before I’d even finished the thought.

“You’re kidding,” he snapped, cutting me off. “Community college? You’re leaving one of the best schools in the country for community college? Just so you can stare at Matt Everest all day and watch him be completely uninterested in you?”

It felt like he’d slapped me.

“Matt and I get along really well,” I argued, “You don’t know—”

“I’ve been going to climbing camp with you guys for five years,” Tucker interrupted. “I’m telling you right now. I’d know if he was keeping any of his feelings for you a secret. He talks to me more than he talks to you, Camille. I’m sorry, but Matt thinks of you as a friend. Just a friend. He’s never going to want you like that.”

I was shaking from head to toe, consumed with anger and something else—something hollow and dark. I went to fold my arms across my chest, but my hand knocked Mariam’s note onto the grass.

Tucker bent down to snatch it up before I’d even seen it fall.

“Wait, Tucker—that is confidential, Tucker!”

He’d already shot up from the log, evading my attempts to snatch the paper out of his hands, and unfolded the note. I saw his eyes land on the Bucket List at the bottom of the page.

“This, right here,” he said, tapping the paper, “is your problem.”

“Oh, really?” I asked, my voice as shaky as my hands.

“Yeah,” Tucker nodded, “You’ve got one bullet point too many.”

He shoved his hand into the pocket of his athletic shorts and withdrew his The Grand Canyon: It’s Just Gorges pen. Tucker sat back down on the log and flattened Mariam’s note against this thigh, then went to work scratching out some of the words.

“There,” he announced, holding out the sheet of paper.

I ripped it out of his hands.

Camille’s Bucket List

1. Climb Mount Everest

Then there was a line of dark, heavy scribbles that were so thick I couldn’t make out the original text underneath, even though it’d been written in Mariam’s distinctive purple gel pen.

“This is vandalism of private property,” I spluttered in outrage, waving the sheet of paper in his face.

Tucker propped his forearms against his knees and tilted his chin skywards, gazing up at the cloudless Arizona sky, where the first stars were beginning to appear, tiny white dots on a navy canvas. I huffed in frustration and collapsed onto the log beside him, my feet too sore for me to stomp off like I so wanted to. I refolded Mariam’s note and shoved it into the front pocket of my jean shorts.

Across the grass, Lindsey and Matt were working on our tents.

As I watched them, my heart started to sink lower and lower inside my stomach. Matt was on his knees in the grass, a tent pole in one hand and some sort of tarp in the other. Lindsey hovered over him, a white sheet of instructions in her hands, trying not to laugh as Matt become increasingly frustrated with his own incompetence. Matt glanced up at her, and the furrow between his eyebrows dissolved when he saw the smile plastered on her face.

I had to look away.

Flames danced in the fire pit, licking at the sides of the rocks that someone had probably moved into place long before any of the four of us had even been born. Beside me, Tucker still had his chin titled skyward, completely oblivious to my inner turmoil.

“She’s really pretty,” I huffed absentmindedly, rolling forward to prop my elbows on my knees and my chin in my palms.

A beat of silence passed.

“Who’s pretty?” Tucker mumbled.

His eyes remained locked on the dark violet sky above us.

“Your sister,” I said.

Tucker shot a glance across the grass at Lindsey and Matt. He scrunched up his nose comically and turned towards me.

“Eh,” he said, “I don’t see it.”

I couldn’t help it. I laughed.

And when I realized Tucker had made me laugh, I reached out to smack him on the arm for it.

“She’s pretty,” I asserted, crossing my legs and cupping my hands over my right knee, which still had an oval-shaped scar on the side of it from a nasty tumble I’d taken in Yosemite three years before. “She’s got nice hair, and a great smile, and her skin is flawless.”

Tucker snorted.

“Her skin isn’t flawless,” he told me. “I’ve seen her picking at her blackheads in the bathroom mirror.”

I was quiet for a moment. The mental image of Lindsey looking anything but put together eased the turmoil inside me, if only a little.

“She doesn’t have any freckles, though,” I realized aloud.

My hand drifted up to my face. I felt my fingertips brush over the expanse of my cheek, but they seemed foreign—like a stranger was stroking the wind-chapped skin where I knew, from eighteen years of looking in a mirror, that a smattering of freckles would mar my face.

I looked over at Tucker.

He was watching me, a funny look on his face. His eyebrows were drawn together, a little wrinkle formed between them.

“What’s wrong with freckles?” he asked.

They’re stupid, I wanted to say. They make me look like a kid.

Instead, I shrugged and said, “Nothing.”

Tucker let it rest for all of three seconds.

Then he leaned forward, so even when I focused my gaze on the glowing flames in front of us, I could see him narrowing his eyes at me.

“What’s wrong with freckles, Camille?” he asked again.

“Nothing,” I insisted.

Tucker didn’t look convinced, but he let the subject drop. He settled back in his seat, shifting the log beneath us, and tilted his head towards the sky again.

“Andromeda,” he said, suddenly.

“Huh?”

Tucker lifted a hand and pointed up into the sky.

“That one, right there,” he said, closing one eye as he tried to steady his finger, “That’s Andromeda, the one shaped like an acute angle, right next to Cassiopeia. It’s one of my favorite constellations.”

“Why?” I asked, because I had a feeling there was a reason.

“Well, the story goes that there was this hero, Perseus, and—” Tucker stopped, abruptly. I could’ve sworn I saw his cheeks tinge pink in the moonlight, but maybe he was just sunburnt. He turned to me, then ducked his head. “It’s kind of a long story, actually.”

I realized, suddenly, that Tucker was trying not to bother me with the so-called fun facts Lindsey had teased him about. I should’ve been relieved that Tucker had finally stopped spewing random information, but the way his head hung made my chest tighten.

I nudged his arm with my elbow.

“You already started it,” I pointed out. “You can’t just start a story and then stop, like, mid-sentence. Besides, I want to hear it. I don’t know anything about astrology.”

“Astronomy,” he corrected.

“See?”

Tucker chuckled.

“Okay then,” he said, clearing his throat. “So, Perseus—the hero—was out sailing. He spotted this princess, Andromeda, chained to a cliff out over the sea. Her dad—or maybe it was her mom, I forget—did something to anger Poseidon, so he’d put Andromeda there so this big sea monster could eat her. But then Perseus fell in love with her—”

“Without even talking to her?” I frowned.

“Yeah, of course. This is Greek mythology. So, Perseus falls in love with her, and he tells her parents that he’ll kill the sea monster as long as they let him marry her. So, he killed the monster. But her parents didn’t keep the promise—or they forgot about it, or something. Andromeda remembered her parents’ promise, though, so she ran off to be married to Perseus. And the gods put her in the sky for that.”

“For marrying someone she’d never talked to?”

“For keeping her parents’ promise.”

“Ah,” I said, nodding.

Tucker watched me for a moment as I narrowed my eyes toward the sprinkling of stars across the sky. I’d always loved stargazing, because I only ever got to do it when I went on a trip that took me more than a couple hours outside of the Bay Area. But I was definitely no astronomer.

“You don’t see it, do you?” Tucker asked.

“Nope,” I admitted.

Tucker laughed and glanced up at the sky, then back to me.

“Here,” he said, reaching for his free souvenir pen again.

“What are you—”

Before I could flinch out of his reach, Tucker had cupped a hand over one of my cheeks. His palm was warm and a little bit damp, and his skin was calloused from years of climbing, but his touch was gentle.

“Hold still for a minute,” he told me. “And close your eyes.”

My eyelids fluttered shut.

I felt the tip of Tucker’s pen press against my cheek seven times, then drag across my skin in two long, slow sweeps.

“There,” he said, his voice quiet.

I opened my eyes again. Tucker was so close, I could’ve counted his eyelashes if he’d held still for long enough. His breath brushed against my nose. I inhaled, hoping for the scent of spearmint to shock me into action—but there was something warm about the smell, something that made me feeling like leaning towards him.

“Go look,” he urged.

I rose from the log, onto my aching feet, and started towards Matt’s Volkswagen, the cool grass tickling the soles of my bare feet. I squatted by side mirror.

There it was.

Andromeda.

A tiny constellation outlined on the freckles on my cheek.