Just Fooling Around: Darcy's Dark Day/Reg's Rescue\Cam's Catastrophe/Devon's Dilemma by Julie Kenner, Kathleen O'Reilly

special. After, though, he was The Man.
    He’d be lying if he didn’t admit he’d enjoyed therole, but after a while, he wanted to simply be himself. But the mythology was there, and there’d been nowhere to hide.
    That’s what happens when you play hero in a small town. When you follow your best friend to the river during a storm on April Fools’ day.
    When your cursed best friend decides to swim the width of the river, despite everyone in town knowing how dangerous that river was when the water rose.
    And when you haul him back to shore, and then lie to his mother and say that Cam wasn’t trying to defy the curse by swimming across the damn river. That he’d fallen off the bridge—the curse, sure, but not him defying it—and you’d jumped in to rescue him.
    Selfless, they’d all said.
    Heroic, they’d all cheered.
    But he knew the truth. He should never have let Cam try to swim across in the first place. Should never have let his best friend put himself in the position of needing to be rescued.
    Evan hadn’t been a hero, he’d been a damned accomplice. But he couldn’t tell anyone that without getting Cam in hip-deep trouble with his parents.
    So he’d taken his licks, and let the town fete him. And what should have been a great thing ended up being a miserable burden.
    In fact, that’s part of the reason why he’d become a reporter. Not simply to look at the surface of things, but to dig until he could see how different it really was down below. Because who better than him to know that there was always another story going on beneath the surface?
    He pulled himself out of his reverie and concentratedon his friend. “So what did you do?” he asked. “SCUBA dive without a regulator? Sky dive without a parachute?”
    “I’m reformed, haven’t you heard? All I did was trip over the damn cat. Twisted my ankle and threw my back out just after midnight. I’ve been on the couch all night.”
    “You need me to come over?”
    “Yeah,” Cam said. “But not for me. For Darcy.”
    Evan’s knees suddenly weren’t quite strong enough to support him, and he sank down on the edge of the bed, the phone still clutched to his ear. “Darcy? She’s okay, right?”
    Darcy was Cam’s little sister, the youngest of the four Franklin kids. And although Evan had been Cameron Franklin’s best friend throughout high school and college, it had always been Darcy who’d got his pulse rate going. Darcy who had been his fantasy. Darcy, whom he could never approach. Because how could he go after his best friend’s little sister?
    “Right now she’s fine,” Cam was saying. “But the day is young, and it’s not a great day to be a Franklin in New York.”
    “She’s here?” He hadn’t seen her in years. He could still remember the first time he’d met her—he’d been a senior and she’d been by herself, alone at a table in the cafeteria. He’d come in with Cam, the two of them surrounded as usual by laughing friends—cheerleaders and jocks and a few kids from band. Cam had noticed her across the room and called her name. She’d slowly put her finger in the book to mark her page, then looked up, her eyes wide and unblinking and so bright they seemed to cut right through Evan. “Wanna sit with us?” Cam had asked. She’d smiled, then shook her head and returned casually to her book. The shock ofthe rejection had reverberated through the cafeteria. No one— no one —turned down an offer to dine with Cam and his friends.
    No one except Darcy.
    She’d gained a bit of respect from the rest of the school that day, and also a bit of a reputation as a freak. The fact that she was young for a freshman—having skipped a year of junior high—didn’t help, and for the most part, Darcy Franklin had become a school loner, even with one of the most popular guys in school as a brother.
    Evan, however, had been smitten the first time he’d seen her. He’d never done anything about it, though. He might have had his