Cool for the Summer by Dahlia Adler (the read aloud family .txt) 📕

to Keisha, Derek, and the rest by inviting her out with my friends?

Even if I’m worried Shannon might steal her.

Or Keith might.

Or both.

What does it matter anyway, if I have Chase?

That’s the million-dollar question, I guess.

But also, I don’t quite have Chase yet. And if I want to, I should probably talk instead of staring out into space, letting the ice cream melt over my hands. After a while, there’s no way to make cleaning that up look sexy.

I take another lick of the cone and look at this boy who has starred in my dreams. He’s looking back at me, with those beautiful eyes the color of the night sky, and I somehow feel warm and shivery at the same time.

“It’s clear I’m gonna kiss you now, right?” he asks, and I nod.

I had always imagined sparks the first time I kissed Chase Harding, but it’s a sweet, cold kiss, thanks to the ice cream, and sprinkles feel better than sparks, anyway. We can’t exactly get handsy while holding our cones, but it’s definitely more than a peck, and I’m hyperaware of his scruff against my skin.

It’s hard to forget that the last person you spent weeks kissing was a smooth-skinned girl when you feel that scruff again.

But it sure doesn’t mean they can’t both feel good.

We finish our ice cream and head back to his car, where some more kissing happens before we drive home to Rush and The Who. There’s more kissing in my driveway. We finally jump apart when my cell phone rings, revealing Shannon’s face on the screen. But whatever, I’m in a good mood and I want to talk about my night, so hopefully she’s up for being excited rather than a buzzkill. One never knows how generous she’s feeling.

Chase laughs quietly as I silence my phone and says, “Guess I should let you go, but maybe next Friday night, after the game, we can do this ‘just the two of us’ thing again?”

“Weren’t the guys talking about going to Lucas’s after the game?”

“The guys were.” He tucks a blond curl behind my ear. “I wasn’t.”

Oof, that was good. I debate just how smutty it would be to haul him into the back seat of his car and decide it might be a bit much. But that won’t stop me from being a little shameless. “Sounds good. Maybe pick a terrible movie we can not-watch.”

“God, I like you,” he murmurs, and though I can’t respond through him kissing me, “I like you too” shimmers through my entire body.

It only makes sense that Jasmine Killary would be the first person I see at school Monday morning. She’s standing near my locker, and I’d almost think she was waiting for me, if she weren’t so consistently clear that waiting for me isn’t something she’ll ever be doing again.

“I hear you and Chase Harding are officially a thing.”

I freeze in my tracks. There’s only one person who’d have told Jasmine, only one person who sat with me on the phone for an hour last night until she’d squeezed out every bit of information. “Apparently, so are you and Shannon.”

“I knew he was gonna be all over you as soon as he saw you,” she says, sidestepping my response. “I told you that hair would be great on you.”

The fact that she’s taking any credit for Chase and me getting together when she’s the one preventing me from fully enjoying it pisses me off, and of course she managed to poke at the very thing I’ve been most worried about. “I don’t think a cut ‘n’ color can be credited for an entire relationship, Jasmine.” I hope not, anyway.

“No, I suppose not,” she muses. “But you have this whole … aura of confidence that’s a way more magnified version of when I met you. Has he found your piercing yet?”

The piercing. We were so bored one day that a game of Truth or Dare? went too far and landed me with a ring through my belly button thanks to Carter’s older sister. Cliché, maybe, but it looked hot. Anyone could see it if they happened to go swimming with me, or if I threw on a crop top, but the way she says it, you’d think it was somewhere even the tiniest of bikinis would still cover.

“Not yet.”

She smirks, but there’s no jealousy in it. No bitterness. And that’s what makes it cruel. “It’s only a matter of time, I’m sure.”

“I guess.” I still can’t get past Shannon running to Jasmine after she spoke to me. I guess she had her phone number after all. “So you’re talking to me now?”

“I haven’t been not talking to you, Tinkerbell. We literally just talked at my party.”

Tinkerbell. The resurgence of my nickname might suffuse me with warmth if she weren’t giving me such attitude. But I was right, I realize—Jasmine did need to know that I wasn’t going to try to bring things back to where they’d been this summer. She needed me to have a boyfriend in order for us to be friends, so she could be sure I wasn’t going to pursue her. I’d been happy when I first thought of how maybe that would bring us back to normal, but right now it makes me feel sick.

“OK, whatever. Guess it doesn’t matter since you’ve had no trouble making friends here.” I try to keep my voice light, to remember how grateful I am for the friends she made me a few months ago, even if they fell to the wayside. But my feelings at her buddying up with Shannon drip from every word, and it doesn’t help that I’m upset about the other stuff.

The thing is, I wanted us to be friends, and I wanted to date Chase, and it looks like I’m gonna get it all, so I should be happy. At the very least, I should be nice. “Guess this means you’ll be joining us for lunch?”

“Shannon did mention something about that, yeah.”

“Great!” I plaster