CHAPTER 1
“There’s a unicorn on this.”
Grinning, I take the letter out of Jude’s hands, leaning back on the nest of sleeping bags and pillows we’ve built inside the little orange tent I’ve set up in the backyard. The sun set about an hour ago, and the only light left comes from my Coleman lantern, which is affixed to a little hook on the ceiling of the tent. We haven’t done a backyard campout since we were in fifth grade, but it’s summer, and we were bored, and setting up the tent seemed like a fun thing to do.
“Now you see why I wanted to go to school there,” I say, stuffing the letter back into its envelope. “Anyplace that uses unicorns in its official correspondence is a good place for me.”
“Obviously,” Jude echoes, leaning back, too. Her long blond hair is dyed turquoise at the ends, and as she gets situated on the sleeping bags, those bright blue strands brush against my arm, setting my pulse racing and a whole fleet of butterflies loose in my stomach.
Propping herself up on her elbow, Jude looks at me, the freckles over the bridge of her nose bold in the lantern light. “And you got in!”
Nodding, I look back at the envelope from Gregorstoun, a fancy boarding school in the Highlands of Scotland, fighting the urge to pull the letter out and reread the heading.
Dear Miss Amelia Quint:
We are pleased to offer you a place at Gregorstoun . . .
The letter has been sitting in my bag for over a month now. I haven’t even told my dad about it. And I hadn’t planned on talking to Jude about it, either, but she saw it while she was looking for lip balm.
“So why aren’t you going?” she asks, and I shrug, taking the letter and tucking it back in the front pocket of the beat-up canvas satchel I bring everywhere with me. A light breeze rattles the nylon of the tent, carrying the smell of summer night in Texas—freshly cut grass and the smoky scent of someone grilling.
“Millie, you’ve been talking about this school for, like, a year now,” Jude presses, reaching out to push me with her free hand. “And now you got in, and you’re not gonna go?”
Another shrug as I sigh and fiddle with my bangs. “It’s super expensive,” I tell her, which is true. “So I’d need to apply for financial aid. And it’s pretty far away.” Also true, not that that stopped me from dreaming about it all last year. Gregorstoun is up in the Highlands of Scotland, surrounded by mountains and lakes—sorry, lochs—plus all the cool rock samples a geology freak like me could want.
But last year, things were different with Jude.
We’ve been friends since we were nine, and I’ve had a crush on her since I was thirteen and realized that I felt the same way about Jude as I did about Lance McHenry from Boys of Summer (look, everyone liked Boys of Summer back then, it wasn’t as embarrassing as it sounds now).
And my crush on Jude had just as much a chance of being requited as the flame I’d carried for a floppy-haired boy bander.
Or so I’d thought.
Now she scoots closer to me on top of the sleeping bag printed with daisies she’s had since that first fifth-grade campout. Unlike me, Jude isn’t much for camping.
She trails her fingers over my arm, nails lightly scratching my skin, and my breath comes out all shaky as I break out in goose bumps. Each fingernail is painted a different shade of purple, her thumb a pale lavender, her pinky a violet so deep it almost looks black. There in the tent with the summer night all around us, it feels like we could be the only two people in the world right now.
“You’re not turning it down because of me, are you?” she asks, and my heart does a neat little flip in my chest. This . . . thing between me and Jude has been going on since the beginning of the summer, but I’m not used to it yet. Being with her still makes me feel like I’m on some amusement park ride, heart pounding, stomach dropping.
“What?” I ask, trying to huff out a laugh, but I’m the worst liar in the world, and the word basically comes out a squawk.
Jude is really close to me now, so close our knees bump on top of our sleeping bags.
“It’s okay if you want to admit you can’t stand being away from me,” she teases, and I go to shove at her, but she catches my wrist, tugging me closer so she can kiss me.
Her lips taste like my cherry-vanilla lip balm, and in that moment, there’s only Jude and her mouth and the way she tucks my hair behind my ears as she kisses me.
When we pull apart, she’s smiling at me, cheeks pink, our legs tangled on the sleeping bags. “I’m not going because it’s too expensive,” I tell her. “Like I said.”
“They’d give you a scholarship,” she counters. “You’re, like, the smartest person in our school.”
“That’s not saying much.”
My high school isn’t terrible or anything, but it’s massive, and sometimes my classes feel more like an exercise in crowd control than anything else. That’s part of why I started looking at fancy schools far away.
That and my dad taking me to see the movie Brave when I was ten. And the fact that geology, my favorite subject, was practically invented in Scotland. And the way I felt when I’d looked up pictures of all those massive, rocky hills surrounded by green, like something out of a fairy tale. There was this one place called Applecross that I—
Okay, no. No more thinking about that. I’ve made up my mind to stay because even though I got in, running off to Scotland is insane, right? And not a thing people do. I’ll be perfectly happy finishing out my senior year at Pecos with Jude and our other besties, Darcy and Lee. There are tons of good colleges here in Texas that I can get into, and some fancy Scottish boarding school won’t count for more than my killer ACT scores and awesome GPA. It’ll be fine.
But Jude is still watching me with a funny look on her face, three little wrinkles popping up over her nose.
“I’m serious, though, Millie,” she says. “If this is about me or us . . .”
She sighs, her breath warm on my face and smelling like that lemon-mint gum she always has on her.
“It’s not,” I tell her again, pulling a thread from my plaid sleeping bag. “And we’re not really an us, anyway. I mean, we are in that I’m a person, and you’re a person, and together, that makes two people, which means the common grammatical definition of ‘us’ technically fits, but—”
Her hand clamps over my mouth, and she laughs. “No nervous-talky Millie,” she says, and I nod behind her palm with a muffled, “Sorry.” There’s this fun thing that happens sometimes when I get nervous where words just come out, but not in the right order, exactly, and half the time, not the words I want to be saying, but there they are anyway, a flood of words between me and Jude, yet again.