Total pages in book: 139
Estimated words: 141281 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 706(@200wpm)___ 565(@250wpm)___ 471(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 141281 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 706(@200wpm)___ 565(@250wpm)___ 471(@300wpm)
Every time Dad lets me open up the beach and fire up the bar, Marnie promises it’ll just be a small group. And every time, our party beach becomes a magnet for a good slice of the Bay’s hot, rich, pretty youth—plus a few interlopers who are anything but.
“Thanks again for letting us borrow sand from daddy dearest!” Marnie calls drunkenly. “If anybody leaves their shit behind and litters, come to me. I’ll kick their asses.”
I smile because I know she means it.
Her life may be messy, but the girl has good manners.
“Yeah, me too,” Tangerine Man adds lazily, not even pulling his eyes off her boobs.
“Go have some fun! Talk to ya tomorrow,” she says with one last flutter of her blindingly bright fingernails.
I’m too upset to turn around until I’m sure they’re gone.
It’s not just my friend’s too-loud-to-live attitude or her sweet tooth for two-dimensional man candy.
Everything just reminds me I’m stuck being the good girl again, and...
...and maybe I don’t want to be.
Just once, I wish I could be somebody’s little firecracker, even for one night.
I wish I could get over myself and sample Marnie’s good life.
I wish a tall, dark, and mysteriously freaky man would swoop in like lightning and blow my hair back.
But none of the boys tonight fit the bill.
Maybe I really am too picky.
But the longer I stare at the clean-shaven, athletic twenty-somethings who are still laughing with each other and not dancing with a girl yet, the sleepier my ladybits get.
College sucks when your standards are sky-high.
That’s why I made this stupid summer pact with Marnie to give up my V-card before my last semester.
I thought it’d be the push I needed—a little urgency to grow up, to get past this big, scary coming-of-age thing everybody obsesses over until the day it finally happens.
But as I glance around at the laughing couples and semi-drunk single men who flick their eyes up and down my body, maybe it’s not a push I need at all.
I need a pull.
I need gravity.
I need to feel a spark with a man who has a brain and a beating heart behind his boyish smirk before I let him be my first.
* * *
It’s a couple hours after sunset, and totally shaping up like every other summer party I’ve hosted for Marnie.
I watch the last glittery embers of sunlight fade below waves like churning ink. Every curl of the nighttime shore comes alive with lights and small bobbing yachts lit up like Christmas.
I’m a fair distance away from the nearest couple now, retreating into my own little world on a big, smooth rock not far from where the tide nips at my feet.
I’m just finishing my third drink, an extra tall Long Island iced tea.
The gaping yawn that slips out of me says I should go soon, but I have a reason to linger. To delay the inevitable.
Sigh.
I’m running behind on my senior paper pitch and I just...I don’t want to deal with it tonight.
Professor Thosser might be the biggest hardass in the whole journalism department. He’s also the teacher holding all the keys to a nice post-grad internship, or maybe a full-blown career after school.
Needless to say, I’m determined to impress him.
Unfortunately, that means turning in a thesis, outline, and starting on a draft before summer ends. Ideally, something interesting enough for him to cite in his Op-Eds to the big papers and endless seminars.
A few simple citations for other students over the years landed them gigs with serious money and mobility. One guy wound up a full-time author, launching multiple books onto bestsellers’ lists.
Oh, and I’m also supposed to meet my new stepbrother tomorrow.
Stressed?
Yes, I am.
When Dad tied the knot for the second time in his life a couple months ago, it flipped my whole world upside down.
Calling it weird is a mammoth understatement.
Even weirder, they went from dating to I do in barely a season. I knew Dad was infatuated when he started mentioning this woman in every conversation, but I never expected this kind of insta-love.
Sure, Evangeline looks exactly like the sort of hot, prestigious trophy wife a towering older airline executive should have.
She’s also a washed-up Hollywood bombshell with three ex-husbands and at least two bankruptcies behind her. I looked into her to make sure she wasn’t a total gold digger.
If the tabloids are honest—and I’ve seen her mentioned plenty in places like The Chicago Tea—she’s been fighting to claw her career back ever since she starred in a few slapstick teenage comedies a decade ago.
I’ve barely been around her for a full week, so I shouldn’t be so harsh.
Still. I just don’t get it, and maybe I don’t want to.
It’s not like my straitlaced father to elope with a stranger. Much less an aggressive, demanding Hollywood starlet with so much baggage she could employ a small army to carry it.