Free Proof of Forever by Lexa Hillyer Page A

for hours, getting lost and eating ice cream and rambling about nothing and everything. Once, in eighth grade, they bought a fifty-cent bottle of red glitter and decided to sprinkle it all over the benches along Main Street, so that anyone who sat down would have glitter on their butts. It was dumb, but the two of them cracked up about it all afternoon, despite the fact that Zoe kept giving away their secret and apologizing to various people with sparkly rear ends.
    It’s crowded enough around the bonfire that Tali can’t really get a grasp at first of who’s there and who isn’t. All thethirteen-year-olds are vying for the best s’mores angle, their roasting sticks clashing like they’re at one of Zoe’s fencing tournaments. She takes a step backward to avoid getting skewered by one of them.
    â€œHey,” a male voice says, touching her arm. “Careful.” It’s Jacob, broad and built like a jock, one of Blake’s closest friends. Tali’s heart thrums in her chest. Blake
must
have come if Jacob’s here.
    And all at once, she spots him, directly across the fire, laughing broad and easy while pounding another guy on the back, his dirty blond hair tousled and damp as though he’s come directly from a shower, his white T-shirt accenting his deeply tanned skin.
    Tali realizes she’s sweating.
    â€œThanks,” she says distractedly to Jacob. He has barely registered her—this is the curse of the twin As—and is already about to make his way over to Blake and the rest of his friends. “Hey, where’d you get that?” she asks, her voice sounding awkward even to her as she nods toward what
appears
to be a Dixie cup full of something very likely spiked.
    Jacob raises an eyebrow. “Blue cooler behind the sprinklers. Blake brought a stash. Benefits of being a day camper. Help yourself, if you want. Just don’t tell anyone.”
    Before she has a chance to thank him, he’s gone. But it doesn’t matter. This is her
in
.
    â€œCome on, guys,” she says, turning back to her crew. “We are going to need some liquid courage.”
    Tali tries not to catch Joy’s eye, but it happens, and what passes between them wordlessly makes Tali’s pulse still for a second. It’s like Joy
knows
, just from a look. She knows Tali’s nervous. It’s possible she knows even more than that; knows about Blake. But in that same moment, it’s also completely understood that Joy won’t say a word.
    Tali always used to take this quality of Joy’s for granted—that she understood people in a way no one else did. That she would keep your secrets for you even when you didn’t realize you had them. But now Tali wonders how Joy does it, how she can hold so much of other people’s dirty laundry. She wonders what happens to
Joy’s
emotional hamper.
    She wonders why Joy left them. But part of her doesn’t want to know the answer.
    The four of them find the barely concealed blue cooler, and Tali gives a silent prayer of gratitude to whatever gods control underage drinking at camp. They always seemed to take a particularly lenient view of Okahatchee. Inside the cooler, melting ice sloshes from side to side as she plunges her hand into the achingly cold water and retrieves a three-quarters-empty liter of Russian vodka. She sees a bottle of cranberry juice as well, but upon further inspection discovers it to be empty. Straight vodka it is, then. She pulls four flimsy Dixie cups apart from the rest and begins to fill them each to a centimeter below the top, but Luce makes a face. “I’m not drinking that without a mixer.”
    Tali shrugs and keeps the fourth cup in her hand—she can bring it to Blake. “Suit yourself!”
    Then she swivels the cap onto the bottle and stashes it back in the cooler, glancing over her shoulder to make sure she hasn’t been spotted by any of the counselors.
    Zoe