A Blind Spot for Boys by Justina Chen

Author:Justina Chen
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Juvenile Fiction / Love & Romance, Juvenile Fiction / People & Places / Caribbean & Latin America, Juvenile Fiction / Family / Parents
Publisher: Little, Brown Books for Young Readers
Published: 2014-08-11T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter Fifteen

All along the Inca Trail, we’d stood in awe at the stark beauty of ancient ruins. The barest suggestion of stone buildings could stop us. Yet it was the first sight of the sickly green Trekkers’ Hostel that made me tear up, and not because the eyesore of modern architecture was long overdue for a date with a bulldozer. I wasn’t the only one grateful for this last official campsite before Machu Picchu.

“Thank you, Lord!” cried Grace, so ecstatic I was a little worried she was going to kiss the building. But she only leaned her forehead against the concrete walls. “Thank you!”

The backpackers inside squeezed tighter to accommodate us. If they hadn’t, we would have been stranded out in the rain, huddling and shivering through the night. Everyone insisted that Stesha and Grace take two of the beds. Dad muttered a single halfhearted warning about bedbugs, too worn out to do much more. (And yes, for the record, bedbugs can thrive at high altitude.)

I couldn’t sleep. Every little sound made me think that we were being hit with another mudslide. Sick of feeling this claustrophobic panic, I crept around my sleeping parents to head outside, which made no sense at all. I was no safer out in the open. Plus, the ground was sopping wet, but at least it had stopped raining. The air smelled cleaner than anything I’d ever experienced, even while hiking in the Cascades back home.

A crunch of footsteps crept up behind me. Stupid, why had I ventured alone into the dark? I spun around to face Quattro, my cry strangled to a quiet gurgle.

“Sorry. Didn’t mean to scare you,” he said, holding out his hands to steady me.

At his touch, I felt scared for an entirely different reason: I was fighting the inevitable. Tell myself that all I wanted was to be focused on my photography. Tell myself that I wanted to be relationship-free. Tell myself that I was done with commitment and expectations and compromises. But here I was, wanting Quattro to want me right back. It was so hard not to know where I stood with him, firm ground or mudslide zone. But now I knew I had to know.

“I didn’t know you were here,” I said in a low voice. Dude, do you like me, or what?

“We had our tents. So we thought we’d let everybody else stay inside,” he answered. “You couldn’t sleep either?”

“No,” I whispered, and told him sheepishly, “I keep imagining being buried under mud. Lame, huh?”

“Not even.”

Moonlight bathed us through a parting of clouds. I was good at the chase, even better at the breakup. No depth required. And I knew how our story would go unless I made a decision: Boy ruins Girl’s photo shoot. Boy chases Girl on the Inca Trail. Girl loses Boy because she’s too much of a coward to ask him one question: How do you feel about me?

For crying out loud, this was a guy who’d searched for me when disaster struck.

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