Paisley laughed.
“Not cool,” Skyler said.
“Well, maybe people shouldn’t keep important secrets,” Isaid.
“Exactly,” Paisley agreed.
“Not a good enough excuse,” Skyler said, standing up and stretching his arms in the air. “Speaking of uncovering secrets. Where is our notebook?” He started walking toward my bunk.
“I’ll get it,” I said, remembering his sweatshirt on my pillow.
“I got it,” he said, a smirk on his face letting me know he suspected I didn’t want him to.
I sprang off the couch after him but he had already been halfway there so he beat me. He threw back the curtain and his eyes scanned my bed, but he obviously found nothing suspicious about his sweatshirt sitting there because he turned and said, “I don’t see it.”
I sidled up next to him, stood on the lower bunk to boost myself higher, and reached under my pillow and to the far back corner. “You’ll be very disappointed to see that we didn’t write down tons of secrets in here. Although, I’ve only read a handful of entries. Maybe I haven’t gotten to all your secrets.”
He raised his eyebrows and took the book back to the couch. I joined him there, sitting close so I could read over his shoulder.
He turned back the cover and quietly read through the first entry.
***
It was way more fun reading the book with Skyler. We’d been laughing and talking about every entry for the last several hours.
“We were so obnoxious,” he said after reading several entries about how we kept moving Ezra’s phone charger to different places around the house. We would write in detail about how Ezra had reacted.
“He swore he was going to set up video cameras to prove he wasn’t the one losing it,” I read out loud, and laughed.
“Don’t get any ideas, Paisley,” Skyler said, but then put his finger to his lips. I turned and saw that Paisley had fallen asleep on my mom’s bed. He closed the notebook and set it aside. “We’ll read more later.”
I was sitting sideways on the couch, my elbow on the back, practically resting on Skyler’s shoulder. Now, without the notebook as an excuse, it felt intimate. As if that thought was written all over my face, Skyler met my eyes. My breath caught in my throat and I averted my gaze to the window. Yellow hills dotted with bright green pines greeted me as we drove through the mountains of Montana. A creek ran along the highway. “We had some good times.”
“We did.”
I shifted the bracelet on my wrist and then rememberedsomething. I stood and went to my bunk again and to the little shelf where I had stored the new set of friendship bracelets. I untwisted the tie that was holding them in place, then carried one back over to the couch. “I bought something for you in Yellowstone.”
“You bought me awish you were heregift? Is it because you were pretending I wasn’t there?”
“Pretty much,” I said. I held up the bracelet.
“I thought you bought those for Willow.”
“No, I bought it because it looks like the one you gave me and a friendship bracelet isn’t a friendship bracelet without a match.”
He lifted his arm and I sat next to him again and slid the bracelet on. I let my fingers glide along the beads, unable to avoid brushing his skin in the process.
He smiled. “I was going to steal the other half of yours from my grandma’s old best friend, but I guess this works.”
“You were not.”
“I was not,” he agreed, and put his bracelet next to mine. They really didn’t match, but they had a similar feel. “So you’re saying we now have official best friend powers?”
I tapped my bracelet against his several times. “Yes.”
“What do they consist of?”
“The power of inside jokes and being able to read each other’s minds and, of course, backup power.”