Read Proof of Forever for Free Online

adjusted to the darkness. While she waited, watching the stars blink their way into existence, she heard the crickets’
chk-chk
, and believed it was actually the noise stars made when they clicked on at night, one after the other.
    But now, with the many floodlights and blinking red and blue bulbs lining the rides, and the smoke from various food vendors filling the air, the night sky just looks like a blackboard, starless, smudged gray with a lifetime’s worth of chalk. A little girl runs past Joy, trailing a bunch of streamers, which brush lightly across Joy’s face as she pushes her way forward, their damp ends dissolving away like tears.
    â€œSo you want to tell us where we’re heading?” Tali says, after they’ve left the crowd behind and crossed down to the sandy part of the shoreline.
    â€œAlmost there,” Joy says, wishing she didn’t sound so pathetically urgent, wishing she weren’t the only one for whom this night
actually
means
something. “Just trust me.”
    There’s a deep ache in her chest, as if she has just smoked too much, too fast. These girls, with whom she once shared so many of her most significant moments—getting her braces off, learning to ride a bike, that time she almost drowned by Forest River Falls, countless slumber parties, the first time she got her heart broken by a boy, the list could go on and on and on—these girls are barely more than strangers to her now.
    Her fault. All her fault.
    They finally get to the Wellness Cabin, Okahatchee’s optimistic name for its infirmary. Joy pulls them behind the boxy unit, leading them to the small wooden structure tucked into the edge of the woods next to the Agro Club’s garden, which is really more of a sad, square patch of rotting squash vines.
    â€œRemember?” Joy says now, turning around to face herfriends. This close to the lake, the air is cooler, the darkness thicker.
    Zoe gets down on her knees on the forest side of the shed and overturns the pile of rust-colored rocks next to the leaning birch. From underneath the rocks, she unearths a silver key. “How could we forget?” she says, her face looking ghostly in the darkness.
    â€œThe Stevens,” says Luce, laughing softly, placing a hand on the shed wall as though to verify it’s still solid. Tali used to sneak in giant bags of the candy Luce’s mom kept in the main offices for the younger campers when they inevitably got homesick. Then they’d gather at the shed and tell secrets they didn’t want the rest of their bunkmates to hear, and they’d divide up all the candy evenly. Luce would insist that they share “even-stevens,” which became their secret code.
    â€œThis is so surreal,” says Zoe, straightening up. “God, I haven’t thought about the Stevens since we were, like, Bunk Coyote.”
    Tali raises an eyebrow. “I hope you’re not going to suggest we gather around on the floor like we used to. I’m wearing white.”
    â€œI think the shed is actually
used
now, for storage,” Luce says thoughtfully. “According to my mom, Agro is actually becoming a
thing
recently. They just got some major funding.”
    â€œMaybe Camp OK is finally becoming Camp Fantastic,” Zoe says wryly.
    Joy smiles. It’s the thing she always used to say. It never even used to seem optimistic—that things would get better, that those summers at camp were only okay compared to what would comenext, compared to
fantastic.
It always just seemed like a given, a fact of the universe. Things are constantly spinning toward better and better outcomes, is what she thought. Now, as she thinks about the idea of fantastic, she can’t help but shake her head, unable to believe she’s the same person who once thought that. Unable to believe she was that naive.
    She opens her bag, determined not to lose her nerve. “I brought some things . . . you