Page 81 of Our Forever Starts Tonight

I snapped my fingers. “Foiled again.”

She tapped my leg. “Yeah, move over. I’m not going to see an actual treehouse and not sit in it.”

Repositioning myself, and sticking my leg clear out of one of the makeshift windows, I made enough space for Aria to squeeze into, which she did by pushing her legs into the corner parallel to my head and laying her head in my lap. “Hey. Careful of the weed,” I hissed.

“Sorry,” she giggled.

I finished filling the paper and lifted it to my lips to perch between, then I fished my lighter out of my pocket and lit the end, letting the dusky taste and smell of the weed fill my head and help relax me a bit.

“So. Did you get the treehouse in as cliche circumstances as most treehouses came to people?” Aria asked.

“Yup. My dad built it for Hannah and me when we were like six. It was our big clubhouse. We called it Mount Ardannah.”

“Cute,” Aria said with a chuckle.

“Well, sure, if you don’t count the fact that he built it while reciting several passages from the Noah’s Ark area of the Bible and then made me pick and carve my favorite verse into the wood.”

“Obviously, Arden. What is childhood playtime without some intense Christianity?” Aria replied.

“That’s what they say.”

“Do you come up here often?” she asked.

“No. This is the first time I’ve been up here in a long time. Just got a lot on my mind and I figured at the most it would help, and at the worst, I could smoke without my parents smelling it and lecturing me for the next two and a half hours.”

“Did it help?” Aria asked.

“Smoking without lectures? So far so good. Clearing my mind? Not so much,” I said. “It’s just making me think of Hannah, but I don’t really know what to make of her right now, so it’s really just making my mind more muddled if anything.”

The longer I sat there, the more I was reminded of the games we used to play as kids. From pirate adventures, to the domestic bliss of playing house, there wasn’t a story Hannah and I couldn’t tell when we played together. We’d so carefully built a foundation, and though I believed it was as well-constructed as the treehouse that could hold two, fully-grown, eighteen-year-old women without cracking, it was crafted much more like my first invention, a makeshift zipline which snapped and sent me crashing to the ground the second I put my weight on it.

The feeling of having the wind knocked out of me was the same, but the pain of losing Hannah was much worse.

“How was your date with Tris last night?” I asked.

“It was wonderful. He took me to that flea market downtown and we had a battle for who could find the silliest thing to buy as a gift for the other. I really thought I was going to win with this rank, old doll I found that had a hanger through the head for hanging displays I guess, but he found a bedazzled throw pillow that, when the sequins were pushed one way was Mahatma Gandhi, and when pushed the other way was Snoop Dogg.”

I coughed on the current puff of my blunt. “What, why?”

“I don’t know that I want to know,” Aria replied. “The mystery of it is kind of what makes it so incredible. Tristan thinks it has something to do with achieving higher enlightenment. I think someone just had bizarre tastes in men.”

“Those two things are not mutually exclusive,” I said, and Aria laughed.

“You are not wrong.” She let her laugh die down, then she turned and looked at me with a sad expression in her eyes. “I feel like I owe you an apology.”

“For what?” I said with my brow furrowed. “We’ve been over this, Aria. I don’tactuallyhave a crush on you. Unless it’s something you’re receptive to, is it?”

“Not that,” Aria said. “For… bringing Hannah into our lives through Tristan. Don’t get me wrong, I’m so happy that her and Capito and some of his other friends chose to stay by his side after Ceradi dumped him, but I can’t imagine how hard it must be for you.”

I took a long drag of my blunt before responding. “It’s a tough one, but I’m upset with her, not you.”

“Do you think you could ever forgive her?” I asked.

“For the first offense? Maybe. For the more recent one? That’s the toughie.”

Aria tilted her head. “What do you mean?”

“Well, yeah, she completely cut me off when she became a Pop, which was painful, but I suppose that could be forgiven. I mean, Tristan has told me about how she said she did it for me, because she knew she wasn’t strong enough to stand up for me andblah blah blah. Maybe we could work our way through that because high school politics are shitty, but you know, that’s not the thing that bothers me the most lately.”

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