Boyless: A Summer Romance Read online

  Contents

  Free book offer

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-one

  Twenty-two

  Twenty-three

  Twenty-four

  Twenty-five

  Twenty-six

  Twenty-seven

  Free book offer

  Acknowledgments

  A Thousand Faces Trilogy

  Everything's Fine

  Long Dark Night

  Giftchild

  Skipped

  About the Author

  Thank you!

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  Boyless

  Kindle Edition

  © 2016 Janci Patterson

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, printing, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the author, except for use of brief quotations in a book review.

  This book is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual persons—living or dead—events, or locales, is entirely coincidental.

  Cover by Melody Fender

  Cover image from istock.com

  Back cover image from istock.com

  Author Photo by Michelle D. Argyle

  For Megan,

  Who makes everything fun again

  One

  Nothing was going to ruin my boyless summer. Not the early heat that slammed down on Camp Timberpine during the second week of June, before a single camper arrived. Not the corrugated metal roof of the art shack, which magnified that heat tenfold, until I was cooking inside like a tinfoil dinner. Not Pebbles, last year's Art Counselor, who'd left the walls of the art shack papered with pressed leaf collages and chalk drawings clear up to the apex of the roof, so every draft all winter long had scattered the decaying pieces onto every horizontal surface. Not whoever decided to store the camp's ladder in the mess hall, so I had to cart it up a hill and squeeze it through the art shack doors before I could climb up and tear them down.

  I could have asked Celeste to help me carry the ladder, but she'd have complained the entire way. I could have gone up to the camp office and asked Evergreen to help me herself, but I didn't want anyone thinking the fat girl couldn't heft a ladder up a hill by herself when the opposite was true—the softball season had just ended, and my arm muscles were at an all-time peak. I could carry the ladder by myself, thanks.

  Now I teetered on the top step, my shins pressing into the final rung, which was labeled in big red letters—not a step! I wished I'd checked the ladder's stability before I'd hauled it up the hill. It was missing one of its plastic feet, so the slightest shift of my hips made it tip precariously from side to side.

  My face was still flushed from my ladder-toting adventure, and my arms stretched as high as they could reach so that my belly hung out of the bottom of my lavender Camp Timberpine t-shirt. Last week, I would have felt like the fattest slob on the planet. But even the thinnest, prettiest, most charismatic boy-magnets on the staff wouldn't be wearing makeup or tight clothes or low-cut shirts this summer. They wouldn't be trying to outdo one another—clawing for the golden spots at the top of the attractiveness ladder. I hadn't even brought makeup, and my hair accessories were limited to a brush and a package of elastics. All but the vainest counselors did the same.

  That was the beautiful product of boylessness, and my favorite thing about spending my summers at Camp Timberpine. With no boys, I was no longer the bottom head on the totem pole of desirability. I was only River, Art Counselor. Or, when the campers were gone, just Bryn. Still fat, but without all the reminders that my body took me right out of the spawning pond, like a salmon who couldn't swim upstream.

  So, even though my clothes clung to me like I'd jumped in the lake, and my skin was turning redder than if I'd baked in the sun, I smiled, and tore down all the last year's art I could reach. The final leaf rubbings were hung so high that I had to stand on my tip-toes, extending my whole body toward the ceiling, so my shirt pulled up to my ribs.

  And that's when I heard it.

  "Hey," a voice said behind me. I froze, my arms still high in the air.

  The voice was male.

  A trickle of sweat dripped down my forehead and into my eye, making it sting from the salt. I looked over my shoulder and found the owner of the voice standing in the doorway. I'm not going to tell you the guy standing there was the hottest thing I've ever seen, because he wasn't. I hadn't been at camp long enough for that, though even I get a little stupid when I haven't seen a man in a month.

  This guy had a kind face, with a chin that was a little too pronounced, and a forehead a little too high. His hair was the kind of curly that provokes drool when it's long or short, but he'd let his grow in-between until it feathered funny over his ears in a way that might have been cool when my parents were kids. Maybe.

  But he was tall enough that the wave of his hair grazed the top of the art shack doorway. And I have to admit, I've always been a sucker for tall.

  But tall or not, my boyless summer was no place for him. "What are you, lost?" I asked.

  "No," he said. "My mom sent me to help you. You look like you need it."

  A hiker could easily get lost out here and end up with heat stroke, so I was pretty sure he was delusional. "Who's your mom?"

  "Patricia," he said. "Evergreen, I guess."

  I raised my eyebrows, and a streak of sweat broke through one and seeped into the corner of my eye. Evergreen was the camp director. The campers didn't interact with her much, but she did all the hiring and staff meetings. She'd been running the program every summer for as long as I'd been coming here—four years as a girl, one as a counselor. And then this year, my sixth, when Evergreen herself had picked me to run the art shack. "I didn't know Evergreen had a son," I said.

  "Yeah, I usually spend the summers with my dad."

  Usually. But not this summer? I eyed him again. He'd probably graduated. "And instead you decided to come up here for the weekend?"

  He shifted uncomfortably. "Something like that. Anyway, my mom sent me to help you. She said she saw you hauling a ladder up here by yourself from the mess hall."

  "The ladder and I arrived intact," I said.

  "You did," he said. He looked impressed, which might have been a compliment if it hadn't meant he'd doubted my ability to carry a simple aluminum ladder.

  I hadn't felt the slightest tickle of a breeze for the last two hours of art shack cleaning, but at that moment, a gust wafted in the window, cooling the small of my back which, I have to tell you, wasn't actually small, and was at this moment bared to the world. Or, in this case, to a boy. I reached down to tug on the gapping hemline, and the ladder wobbled.

  "Let me get that for you," he said, and before I could protest, I felt the ladder steady as the boy anchored it in place. I didn't have to look over my shoulder to know that h
e was getting a faceful of my ass at this moment, and I didn't know whether to apologize or protest. I might have cried right there at the top of the ladder, but I was pretty sure I'd already sweated out all the moisture in my body. I honestly wished for heat stroke so I could just faint and fall off the ladder and onto the boy, squashing him flat and probably killing him, so we'd both bake to death there on the dirty floor of the art shack.

  All my instincts told me to hold onto the hem of my shirt to keep it down, but since he was already looking straight up at my butt, I knew it wouldn't help. Instead, I reached both arms over my head, praying he wasn't eying the wet circles under my sleeves, and tugged down the remaining leaf-rubbings from the highest part of the roof.

  "Got it," I said. "Thanks."

  But he just kept holding the ladder until I took the first few steps down, until I'd backed so far into him that his arms brushed the sides of mine, and my sticky back ran right into his chest.

  Then he let go.

  I stepped away from the ladder as quickly as possible, but there was limited standing room in the art shack, so I was only able to put a few feet between us.

  The boy leaned against the frame of the art shack doorway. "So what can I help with?" he asked. "Looks like you got the wall cleaning covered."

  I couldn't imagine he wanted to hang out in the shack, smelling my sweat. And I sure didn't want him here—in the art shack, or at camp. "I'm fine," I said. "Really."

  He held out his hand. "I'm Logan, by the way."

  I kept my hands to myself, and eventually, he dropped his. In my head, I could hear my mom's voice. You could at least be nice. Logan's existence tested that theory, but I could try. "Bryn," I said. "But around the girls, I'm River."

  He glanced at the ladder in the center of the shack. "You know," he said, "you probably shouldn't stand on top of a ladder like that without a spotter."

  I squinted at him. Was that a comment on my weight? "I can handle it," I said.

  "Yeeaah," he said. "Until you slip and fall and bake to death in here."

  I laughed, despite myself. At least I wasn't the only one who'd thought that was a possibility. "Yeah," I said. "I guess with camp so empty, no one would hear me scream."

  Logan nodded solemnly.

  Despite the heat, the back of my neck prickled. I probably was out of screaming range of the mess hall, and the camp office was even farther than that. I didn't actually have any proof that Logan was Evergreen's son, and he had appeared out of nowhere in the woods, just like in a horror movie.

  "Um," I said. "Not that you should get any ideas about murdering me or anything."

  Logan laughed, his voice reverberating off the trees. "Do murderers usually help you out with ladders and then warn you about your unsafe workplace practices?"

  I smothered a smile and narrowed my eyes at him. "Maybe. I heard serial killers have weird habits, sometimes. You seem a little too interested in keeping me safe."

  Logan laughed again, and I had to admit, the guy had a killer smile. But not the smile of a killer. I hoped.

  "And here I was," he said, "thinking I'd be bored up here. Who needs a phone or the internet when there're girls who'll accuse you of wanting to murder them? Maybe this summer won't be so bad after all."

  And despite the sarcasm, Logan kept smiling at me, like I was actually a pleasant addition to his afternoon.

  But I could feel my smile fading.

  This summer?

  He couldn't be here for that long. Evergreen wouldn't let her cute son within a mile of the buses of boy hungry girls that were about to descend on us. "How long are you here, exactly?" I asked. I tried not to sound too eager to get rid of him, but I mostly failed.

  He shrugged. "Until the end of the summer," he said. "I'm staying up at the office with my mom."

  The remnants of my smile dropped completely.

  No. No way.

  I tried to play it off casually, raising one suspicious eyebrow at him. "They let boys into camp now?"

  Logan kept smiling, like he hadn't just dropped a bomb on me. "Just me. At least the office has air conditioning."

  Rub it in. "It's not usually this hot," I said. "We do okay without it." But as I said that, I could feel my face flushing to the point of overheating. My tongue scratched at the roof of my mouth, and if I didn't get some water soon, I might actually faint.

  I moved out the door of the art shack, even though I had to practically shove by him to do it. I'd left my water bottle in the shadow of one of the stumps outside. But while I'd been messing with the ladder, the sun had shifted, heating my cool water up to roughly the temperature of the art shack roof. I poured it in my mouth anyway, and sat down on the stump. "So your mom's going to keep you locked up in the office all summer? Why'd you sign up for that?"

  "I won't be locked up," he said. "I'm here to build a new outdoor stage."

  The camp's original outdoor stage had burned down two years before I started here. The legend was that two campers had decided the stage was a good place to light fireworks. From what I heard, that legend was wrong. The fireworks were set off by counselors. It might even have been true, because the forms we signed at the beginning of the summer listed the prohibition against fireworks five different times, even though you couldn't even buy sparklers in our part of California.

  "Are you cleaning out the old stage?" I asked.

  "No," Logan said. "They're leaving what's left of the old one down by the lake. I'm building the new one near the trailhead instead."

  "Good," I said. "I'd have been sad to see it go."

  He gave me a puzzled look. "It's nothing but charred wreckage."

  "That's what's awesome about it," I said. The ruins stood along the shore near the waterfront, a dark and ominous reminder of what happened when campers didn't follow the rules. The legend had grown darker since my first year. Last I'd heard, three girls died in the fire, trapped beneath the stage.

  Logan was looking at me like maybe I had heat stroke. Which I might have, but I still didn't appreciate the scrutiny.

  "Do you have a camp name?" I asked.

  "No," Logan said. "Mom says that would give the campers the idea that I'm part of their experience here."

  I tried not to laugh. He would be part of their experience all right. Even the occasional sighting of the guy-in-camp would be enough to send boy-starved campers into giggles. "You're going to be a legend."

  Logan laughed nervously. "I doubt that."

  At least he had the sense to be nervous. "Groups of girls pass the trailhead all day long," I said. "I hope you like an audience."

  Logan actually looked scared. "They're just little girls."

  I laughed. Man hungry little girls could be worse than piranhas. Besides, our oldest campers would be seventeen, even if we didn't get many that age who didn't want to be counselors instead. Good thing, too. I had a seventeen-year-old camper in one of my groups when I was a sixteen-year-old counselor, and she wouldn't listen to a word I said. "How old are you?" I asked.

  "Eighteen," he said. "I just graduated."

  "Same here," I said, even though that only applied to the graduation part. I wouldn't be eighteen until August. But even though I was only seventeen, I'd spent the last two days packing everything I owned out of my parents' house and stuffing it in a storage unit a block from the apartment I'd be living in come fall. My younger sisters wanted the room; I wanted not to have to move home again, ever. Things worked out.

  Logan looked at the pile of torn-down leaf rubbings in the art shack doorway, while I tried to figure out what I could say to make him go away. I was pretty sure most of the other counselors would love to talk to him. I should send him down to the mess hall to see if Celeste needed help. She'd be thrilled, no doubt.

  But before I could speak, Logan picked one of the rubbings up by its dirty edge and waved it at me. "What are you doing with these?"

  "Tossing them," I said. "To make room for the new ones."

  He scrutinized it. "So y
ou're spending your summer teaching kids to rub a crayon over a leaf?"

  Not if I could help it. "I'm the art counselor," I said. "I teach art."

  Logan reached into the art shack, picked up a jar of tongue depressors, and shook it. "This is art?"

  Okay, so I'm not a huge fan of leaf rubbings, myself. And I remembered complaining the year before that Pebbles gave the girls stuff to keep them busy, but didn't teach them a thing. I might have said that in earshot of Evergreen, and that might have been what landed me the art shack gig for this year.

  But that didn't mean that everything we did at the art shack was crap.

  I stood up off my stump. "What are you, an art critic?"

  He chuckled. "Thankfully not, or I'd be out of luck this summer, wouldn't I?" He glanced up at me like he wanted me to share in his joke.

  I snatched the jar of tongue depressors away from him. Bad enough that he was a boy in my man-free zone. Did he have to be condescending as well?

  I could have argued with him. I could have let him see my sketch book, which was sitting on the table behind him, full of pencil drawings. I could have told him I was going to start college in the fall, and I'd already been accepted into an art education program. Pebbles might have given the girls busy work to do, but I was going to really teach them something.

  But I was used to dealing with people who liked to put down other people's art. There was no reasoning with them. "Well, I won't tell you how to swing a hammer at your stage thing, and you don't tell me how to teach, okay?"

  Logan held up his hands, as if to protect himself. "Fine," he said.

  I took a step toward the art shack, but he was still standing exactly in my way.

  I took another step, closing the distance between us.

  He still didn't move.

  "Would you get out of my way?" I said. "The girls show up tomorrow and this place is still a mess." I stalked back into the art shack, forcing Logan to step to the side. The heat hit me square in the face, and I wondered if Logan would take the ladder back for me, if I asked.