Free Eleven Things I Promised by Catherine Clark

legs were so conditioned to riding a bike that they’d forgotten how to work without one.
    Cameron was being so nice—riding with me, giving me a leg massage, making sure I got enough to eat. If other members of the team didn’t like me because I was a much slower version of Stella, then at least Cameron was on my side.
    It almost made me wonder if Stella had hired him to takecare of me. Or maybe my mom had slipped him a few twenties and asked him to look out for me.
    Of course, one other option was that he was actually interested in me.
    Since the leg massage, I’d found myself wondering if maybe
I
was interested in
him
.
    It was the kind of thing I’d want to talk over with Stella, if she were here. We usually overanalyzed anything involving crushes and boys—or at least, I did. When I was wavering about breaking up with Oscar, Stella got so sick of listening to me that she nearly broke up with him
for
me.
    Cameron was nothing like Oscar; there wasn’t anything about him that screamed sleazeball or even cheeseball. He was kind, slightly goofy, a slouchster but a good athlete who didn’t act conceited.
    But I was here on a mission, and it wasn’t to hook up with someone on the team; even if I did need to have an epic kiss, I’d try to have it with someone not from Sparrowsdale. Having one more romance on our team would make everything incredibly awkward—or
more
awkward. I could keep getting to know Cameron better without putting a label on it for the next little while. For all I knew, he had a girlfriend. That was the weird thing about this trip with a bunch of relative strangers; our lives at school hardly intersected, but suddenlyhere we were, relying on one another.
    I grabbed my duffel, Cameron got his, and we headed for the campground showers. We separated at the locker room entrances.
    Naturally, Margo was walking out of the locker room just as I was walking in; she’d probably been done for hours. She was wearing a short-sleeved tee, shorts, and flip-flops, her long, dirty-blond hair was swept into a braid, and she had full makeup on, with her cosmetics bag hanging from her wrist. I didn’t spot a single drop of sweat on her. She smelled like perfume and hair spray. I, on the other hand: indescribably rank.
    I tried to walk past her with a brief nod, but she stopped in front of me. “You’re not looking so good.”
    â€œThanks so much,” I said. “That’s always nice to hear.”
    â€œAre you okay?” she pressed. “You’re limping.”
    â€œA little sore, that’s all.”
    â€œHold on a second, I have something.” She unzipped her cosmetic bag and pulled out an unmarked orange prescription bottle. She shook a couple of red pills into her palm and held them toward me. “Here, have these. They’ll make you feel better.”
    â€œUm . . .” I studied the bottle as well as I could.
    â€œRelax. It’s ibuprofen. What did you think, that I was going to give you something prescription or illegal?” Sheacted as if this was the first time anyone had ever doubted her. About anything.
    â€œWell, you have to admit. ‘Have these, you’ll feel better’ is the phrase they warned us about in seventh-grade health class. Plus, you could be pulling a Lance Armstrong–type thing,” I said.
    She pressed the ibuprofen tablets into my palm. “Take these or don’t take them. You are an idiot.” She zipped up her little bag and sashayed away, leaving me with two melting pale-red pills in my hand. They looked like budget M&M’s, the color nobody wanted that failed.
    I went to the drinking fountain and washed them down with a couple of sips of freezing-cold water. If she was trying to poison me, I wasn’t sure I cared at that exact moment. And if it was something to give me a competitive edge, wasn’t that exactly what I needed?
    â€œAll right, Franny!” Oxendale