Free Nothing Can Keep Us Together by Cecily von Ziegesar Page B

trying to get her attention. Jenny couldn’t help but marvel at how strange it was to have spent a whole day in the country after spending her entire life until now on the island of Manhattan.
    “Where are we going?” she called to Harry as she hurried to keep up.
    Before he could answer, a girl in a fire-engine red bikini stepped onto the path about fifty feet ahead of them. “Hey, Bass!” She shouted so loudly, the leaves seemed to shake in the trees overhead. “You and your new girlfriend better get your asses over here before we finish all the you-know-what!”
    “Coming!” Harry shouted back. He chuckled at Jenny. “Come on. You know you want to.”
    He even sounded like his cousin.
    Now that she was sure she and Harry weren’t going to be alone in the woods, Jenny felt more confident about following him. It was cooler in the shade of the trees and smelled of wet moss. All of a sudden they came upon a group of five guys and four girls, sitting in a circle, wearing bathing suits or shorts and T-shirts, the rest of their clothes scattered at the base of a nearby tree. Some of them were drinking cans of Coors, some of them were smoking cigarettes, and all of them looked extremely happy to be there.
    The girl in the red bikini—skinny and pale, with long, shiny light brown hair and beautiful hazel eyes—held out her palms to them. “One more minute and you-know-who was gonna come along and nab these,” she told them with a bright smile. Jenny stared at the girl’s palms, which were dotted with little white pills.
    “April, you rock.” Harry scooped a tab of Ecstasy out of the girl’s hands and popped it in his mouth. “Go on, Jennifer,” he urged Jenny, pointing at April’s outstretched palms. “The quicker you eat one, the quicker you’ll fall in love with me.” He grinned devilishly. “I mean, our school.”
    Oh, really?
    Jenny had been offered drugs before. She’d even been stoned once, with Nate Archibald, the first day they’d met, in Sheep Meadow in Central Park. She’d fallen in love with him that day and had stayed in love with him until he broke her heart on New Year’s Eve. Probably if she hadn’t been stoned, she’d have understood that she and Nate had only just met and that she needed to get to know him a lot better before she kissed him.
    She reached out to pinch one of the tabs of Ecstasy out of April’s hand with no intention of actually ingesting it. It was so tiny, no one would even notice.
    “Yum,” she cooed, pretending to be delighted as she cupped her hand over her mouth and let the teeny pill fall past her chin and cascade down into her ample double-D-sized cleavage.
    We always knew it would come in handy!
    “We were about to play Duck, Duck, Goose,” one of the Coors-drinking guys announced with a completely straight face, as if he were trying to organize a friendly touch-football scrimmage. He was wearing nothing but a pair of electric blue bike shorts, and he looked like a Tour de France bicycle racer, with ropy muscles, a shaved head, and intense blue eyes. “Wanna play?”
    “Sure!” Harry Bass responded enthusiastically. He wrapped his arm around Jenny’s waist and kissed the top of her head. “My little cucumber,” he murmured affectionately.
    Jenny had the feeling the tab of E Harry had just taken was not his first of the afternoon. She was about to shrug him away when she realized that she was going to have to at least pretend she was on Ecstasy; otherwise, it would be obvious she hadn’t taken it. Problem was, she didn’t even know how long it was supposed to take to start working. “Yay!” she squeaked. “Let’s play!”
    They joined the circle and sat down between a chubby Japanese boy sporting Madras plaid Bermuda shorts and a cute rocker haircut and the muscular boy in the blue bike shorts. Everyone was grinning so hard, it looked like their teeth hurt. “I’ll go first,” April volunteered. “But first I think we’re going to need some