“Rude!” I chide, throwing a Frito in her direction, though the truth is it’s nice to be teased by her. Ruoxi is wonderful, but she’s also completely, unrelentingly earnest. I forgot what it felt like to get ribbed by a friend. “Where are you going in the fall?”
“Art Institute of Chicago,” she tells me. “I got waitlisted, but they emailed two days ago to say I’m in.”
“Carrie, that’s great!” I pick my still-full beer can up off the concrete, clink it with hers. “Is that what you want to do?” I ask as Trevor executes a particularly painful-sounding belly flop and everyone groans. “Run a gallery like your dads?”
She shrugs, drawing one long leg up and resting her chin on her knee. “I have no idea, honestly.”
“Doesn’t that scare you?”
“I think it would scare me more to have my whole life plotted out, honestly,” she says. “What about you? Still headed for law school?”
“That is the plan,” I tell her.
“Mergers and acquisitions, or whatever?”
I shake my head. “Criminal defense, I think. Maybe death penalty stuff? Or something around mass incarceration, I’m not sure.”
“Seriously?” Carrie’s eyebrows flicker, like possibly I’ve surprised her for the first time all night. “That’s kind of cool.”
She’s starting to say something else when Ethan smacks his wet hands on the pool deck. “Hey!” he yells over to us. “Enough girl talk! Everybody into the pool!”
I shake my head again, but Carrie heaves a loud, theatrical sigh, unfolding her long limbs and getting to her feet before reaching for the button on her denim shorts. “All right, all right,” she tells Ethan. “Don’t get your panties in a twist.” Then, looking at me: “What do you say?”
“Wait, seriously?” I startle, shaking my head on instinct. “What happened to like, not wanting to be contaminated by James’s germs?”
“I’m over it,” Carrie says with a shrug. She shimmies out of her shorts and peels her tank top over her head, revealing a practical-looking black sports bra. “You coming?”
“I’m not getting naked in front of all these people!” I hiss.
“Then wear your clothes in, Princess.” She holds her hand out, an invitation. “Come on,” she presses. “You’re trying new things this summer, right?”
“I mean, sure, but—”
“So prove it.”
I hesitate for a moment, torn between every instinct in my body and the thought of Dr. Paula Prescott sitting on a lounge chair in her power suit, urging me to open myself to new experiences. Just say yes, right? Finally I scrunch my nose and stand up, tugging my fleece over my head. “All right. Let’s do this.”
“There you go!” Carrie says.
“Yeah, Walls!” Ethan yells, drunkenly delighted with himself. Trevor lets out a hoot. Tricia and her friends are eyeing me warily from the hot tub, but when I catch her gaze and smile sheepishly, I’m surprised to see her smiling back.
“On three, okay?” Carrie instructs, dragging me over to the edge of the deep end. “One…two…” And then she tugs my arm and we’re falling in together, the shock of the chilly water and the thrill of jumping in at all. My scalp tingles, goose bumps springing up all over my body. My jeans weigh about a thousand pounds.
“You didn’t say three!” I sputter as I surface, but I’m laughing. Carrie only grins.
* * *
The house is mostly dark by the time I get home, the porch light winking above the front door as I slip my squelching shoes off. Upstairs I change into dry pajamas and scoop my damp hair into a knot, glancing at the book still sitting on top of my bed. “All right,” I tell Dr. Paula grudgingly. “You win this round, I’ll grant you that.” Things definitely didn’t go quite as I’d hoped tonight—the bedroom door was open when we all finally traipsed back into the basement, Clayton and Bethany nowhere to be found—but on the whole, it wasn’t actually a disaster.
I’m just climbing under the covers when my phone buzzes with a text from Carrie: Glad you came tonight, it says.
I chew my thumbnail for a moment, dumbly pleased in spite of myself. We exchanged numbers before, but I never expected her to actually text me. Obviously I don’t think this means our friendship is back on, or whatever. But it’s nice to know we can go off to college without some weird, unfinished fug hanging between us.
Yeah, I type finally. I’m glad I did too.
I turn out the light and burrow under the covers. I sleep better than I have in a long time.
“So how was the party?” Miles asks the following morning. He’s washing dishes in the kitchen at the restaurant, loading the rack with a dozen pebbled plastic cups, and his voice is the singsong tease of a person who thinks he knows something. “Was the discussion of grain alcohol chasers absolutely scintillating?”
I blink, a half-assembled ham-and-cheese Gondola clutched in one hand. “How did you even know I was at a party last night?”
“I have my sources,” he says cryptically. Then he shrugs and holds up his phone, the screen of which is completely shattered—an unfortunate mosh pit incident, claims Miles, though I blatantly saw it fall out of his pocket in the parking lot one day last spring. “You were basically all over the internet.”
“Wait, really?” I grab the phone and scroll through his feed—where, sure enough, there’s a somewhat blurry Boomerang of Carrie and me jumping into Spencer’s pool. “Oh,” I say. “Well. Yeah.”
“Whose house is that, Spencer Thomas’s?” Miles strokes an imaginary beard. “Not your usual crowd.”
His tone is totally mild, but still something about the way he says it irks me—how sure he seems, maybe, how certain he knows exactly who I am and what I’m capable of. “And who would my usual crowd be, exactly?”
“I mean, nobody,” Miles deadpans immediately. “That’s what I’m saying.”
I huff a breath, stung. On one hand, it’s just Miles. I don’t care what he thinks of me. Still, it’s not like I’m crazy about the ideas of having no friends or suitors being my defining characteristic. “You know what, Miles,” I snap, “I don’t actually remember asking you for your opinion. And I don’t actually see how it’s any of your business what I do.”
I’m expecting an argument, but Miles holds up two soapy hands. “Sorry, sorry,” he says, conceding the point so easily that for a moment I almost feel bad about sniping at him. “I’m happy for you, if you had fun.” Then his lips twist. “Next time you should consider taking more of your clothes off, though. You know. For the cameras.”