AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“It was.” He shifts on his feet, taking one hand from his pocket and glancing at me as if he’s debating whether to hug me or shake my hand. “Enjoy the rest of your holiday.”
I’m pretty sure I will do something that causes lethal levels of embarrassment for one or both of us if I stay a second longer, so I turn and flee the scene before that happens. I’m so grateful to have Lily for an excuse I can almost forgive Mom for all the times she’s made me babysit for free. I didn’t realize there were other people like me out there, and that if we combined forces, we’d break the space time continuum and stop time at the most awkward moment in the history of mankind. Now that I know, I need to be on the lookout for more so I can make sure I’m never alone with one ever again.
six
Now Playing:
“Hey Man, Nice Shot”—Filter
“Dude, you could hook up with one of them,” Meghan says later, as we lie on the living room floor one more night, this time without my sister. She’s been checking her phone all night. I guess that’s her version of being stupid for a guy. “One for you and one for me, remember?”
“What about our boyfriends?”
“What happens at the lake stays at the lake,” she says with a sly grin.
“Meghan!” I protest. “You can’t cheat. Besides, Todd’s such a good guy, and I think I’m finally starting to like him.”
“I’m totally convinced,” she says, rolling her eyes.
But if he’s resisting Elaine, who he loves, surely I can resist some guy I just met, no matter how cute he is. Besides, being alone with him seems like a bad idea.
“What do you even know about these guys?” I ask. “They could be serial killers.”
“That’s the vibe you got?” she asks, snickering.
“Come on, I’m serious,” I say. “What happened to stranger danger, don’t leave your drink unattended, and all that? Do you even know his last name? Or how old he is? If you’ll ever see him again? He might go back to Ireland after the break.”
“Exactly,” she says. “He said he was old enough to buy us beer, so I told him you were in college with me, in case his brother wants to go out with you.”
“No you didn’t!”
“The point is, we don’t need to know any of that stuff. And neither do they. You can be whoever you want to be here. You don’t have to be Sky, the uptight virgin from Connecticut. You can be Sky, the cool music chick who goes to Dixon with me.”
“That’s true,” I muse, trying to picture anyone thinking I’m cool, or appreciating my band t-shirts for that matter. I stopped wearing them to school since Lindsey didn’t approve, and because it felt good to put away something Dad got me, even if I did it out of spite. But I still have them. Maybe Oliver would appreciate them.
Not that I should care. But for some reason, I keep thinking about it, wondering what music he listens to and if he’s heard of Buffalo Tom or the Screaming Trees. Would he think I was a slob if he saw me in ripped jeans, a Sublime tee, and Converse, or a snob if he saw me in my school clothes with a designer bag? There’s something freeing in the clean slate of our history. He doesn’t know about my past, my fucked up family, or my drunken mistakes. He doesn’t know me, and I don’t want him to.
Like Meghan said, I can be whoever I want with him. I can be myself, or the girl who earned Lindsey’s stamp of approval, or someone completely new. I can wear a white dress on the shore at sunset even when the air is freezing cold and damp from the mist rising off the water, like I did this evening when I took a walk with Meghan, both of us glancing around and pretending we weren’t looking for them the whole time. I can give him whatever version of myself I want, and he’ll take it home with him in his memory, and a piece of me will get to be that girl forever.
Meghan shrugs inside her sleeping bag. “Whatever,” she says. “Your business. But I’m gonna bone on New Year’s Eve.”
“Meghan Louise!”
She laughs. “What? If you don’t want one, maybe I’ll shoot my shot with both of them. Guys love threesomes.”
“Shit, I used your middle name too soon.”
We both break down into giggles. She recovers first. “For real, though,” she says. “If they’re down to hang again, you wanna go?”
“I can’t,” I say with a sigh. “Mom wouldn’t let me. She won’t even let me go out with my own boyfriend, let alone someone I just met.”
“We can just tell her we’re bored and want to go into town. She could drop us at the movies. Totally innocent.”
“Is it, though?”
She rolls her eyes. “That’s the point. She thinks it’s innocent. We know the truth.”
“I can’t believe I let you corrupt me this way.”
