“Mom will probably say my summer reading is homework and make me do it before I play.” Marnie sighs and wipes the tears away with her knuckles as she draws in a shuddery breath. “Lilli’s youth group is full of the most annoying people on Earth, AJ. Don’t look at me like that. You hate them all, too.”
“I do not hate them.” I pause. “I mean, okay, they’re a little...obnoxious,” I admit. Now that I think about it, I’d rather take another grueling hot-yoga class with Mom than listen to those little Broadway hopefuls (more like doubtfuls) tune up dramatically and harmonize along to never-ending clean versions of pop songs. “So stay home with Dad.”
“No way. I heard Mom say they’re renting some old movies—like that one where Maya Hawke’s dad and Joyce Byers are kind of dating, and he’s so whiny, but she’s also kind of dating Zoolander, but he’s really preppy. Plus they’re making that weird seafood stew that takes all day to cook and stinks up the whole house.”
“Ah, it’s the paella and Reality Bites date weekend.” I absentmindedly flip to my mother’s blog on my phone and see the links to some Lisa Loeb song and a picture of our gleaming countertop laid out with jumbo shrimp and chorizo and saffron and all the other trappings of paella with blinking animated hearts on the picture. It always weirds me out a little to see the stat counters—like it’s bizarre to know that 12,386 people and counting have had an inside look at everything from our bathroom renovation to my and my sisters’ school dances, but I know that Mom’s blogs have helped other moms who aren’t as confident about the whole motherhood thing. Sometimes she’ll show us emails and DMs she gets from moms on the brink, thanking her for being open and sharing, and I get why her honesty is important...even if it sometimes feels incredibly invasive.
“Look, hang alone for a while, and I’ll swing by and bring you to Harper’s to sleep over, okay?” I suggest in compromise.
Harper and Tessa will not be happy, but oh well. I can’t please everyone.
“I don’t want Harper to tell me how big my pores are and try to make me do some stupid mud mask.” Marnie shakes her head. “And Tessa never laughs at my jokes. Does she laugh at anyone’s jokes?”
“Tessa’s just kind of intense.” Tessa is smart and witty and has a biting sense of sarcasm, but her threshold for silliness is incredibly low. “I don’t know what to tell you, Marnie. That’s my best offer. Take it or leave it.”
“If you let me come now, I won’t eavesdrop or annoy you guys or anything.” Marnie claps her palms together in front of her body, prayer-style. “I just really, really want to swim. You won’t even see me or hear from me. Only maybe if I cannonball, that’s it.” She raises her blond eyebrows and widens her eyes hopefully. I hate shooting her down, but I also imagine lounging in the pool, sipping on an ice-cold pop...then getting splashed by Marnie’s relentless cannonballing.
Hard. No.
“Sorry. Text me if you change your mind about tonight.” I steel my resolve and just keep telling her to get out, gently, then more firmly, until I basically push her out of the car and drive off while she’s still sitting on our driveway’s paving stones, head buried in her crossed arms. I don’t check my rearview.
Yes, I feel terrible and shitty.
Yes, I feel relieved and free.
Yes, the war between those feelings burns like acid in my gut as I’m changing into my yellow gingham ruffle bandeau-top bikini in one of Lex’s five guest bathrooms. The suit isn’t really my style, but Mom was the deciding vote when Tessa and Harper were trying to help me pick one for today’s party, and it is super cute. The yellow brings out the glow of my early summer tan and the golden highlights in my dark hair, and the color is also a nice contrast for my blue eyes. So it technically works, even if it isn’t my favorite. It’s just not super me. I think about the neon-orange flower-print string bikini tucked in my dresser at Dad’s in Florida. It’s my favorite bathing suit ever, the one my big sister, Dani, is always asking to borrow, but I can clearly envision the triple faces of horror Mom, Tessa, and Harper would wear if I tried it on for them.
Tessa looks sexy in her olive crochet-overlay suit, and Harper looks sweet in her high-waisted navy-and-white-striped bikini.
“Oh my God, I wish I could pull off a bandeau,” Tessa whines, cupping her generous breasts. “You look so freaking cute. I’d be scared of the girls making a surprise appearance.”
“I look like I’m in middle school, and you two look like you’re about to crush your college study abroad in Mykonos.” I reach for Harper’s enormous old-glam movie-star sunglasses and slip them on my face with a sigh. “If you didn’t have such crap eyesight, I’d totally try to steal these. Your prescription makes my head spin.”
Harper cackles, and Tessa motions for her to scoot closer to me so she can snap a picture of us together with the camera her brother, Logan, bought her for her birthday. She placed third in our school district’s photography competition, and her brother was crazy proud. He saved all his summer lifeguarding money to get her a top-of-the-line camera.
“You guys can’t really understand what it’s like to have a big brother,” she humble-bragged when she got the camera. “I mean, Logan’s so annoying sometimes, and he acts like he’s twenty years older than I am instead of two, but I know he always has my back. The bond we have is just different than the bond between sisters.”
I rolled my eyes and muttered, “You don’t even have sisters, so how would you know?” and had to bite my tongue when she said, “And you don’t have a brother, so maybe let’s just drop it?”
Duke would have been highly offended if he knew his years of big-brother teasing, supporting, and taking care of me were going unrecognized. But I couldn’t tell Tessa that I have excellent sportsmanship because Duke watched, unmoved, while I cried and screamed any time I lost at Monopoly. He never turned me down if I asked him to play a game, but he refused to let me win. I couldn’t explain that Duke taught me the best way to use a metal detector to find treasure—or a lot of bobby pins—at the beach, which led to my first newspaper feature when I found the mayor’s wife’s lost heirloom wedding band buried in the sand under the pier. I still have the cutout of the article, complete with a picture of the two of us, me with a gap-toothed smile, Duke lanky, hair shaggy and sun-streaked. My eyes look to the side, where Duke stands, arm around my shoulders, grinning down at me with total pride.
I wish I could tell Tessa and Harper about Duke and Dani and my dad, but it’s too complicated at this point. I’d never be able to do justice to my family and our incredible life in Florida, and I don’t want to attempt to talk about them and wind up leaving Harper and Tessa with the wrong impression.
I get totally gleeful when Tessa pulls her superior shit with people we mutually hate; when she directs it at me, it fries my patience. Especially when I want to throw in her face just how incredibly wrong she is.