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

But sure enough, there she is, stepping up to the mic and laughing with Shannon as everyone cheers. Her hair is in a glossy high ponytail that swirls around her shoulders—shoulders bared by cutouts in her skin-colored dress and glittering with a dusting of gold. I’m too short to see anything else, but she’s head-to-head with Shannon so she must be wearing at least three-inch heels.

She’s dressed to get every single eye in the room on her, and it’s working.

I couldn’t take mine off her if I tried.

The music starts—Shannon must’ve flipped it on—and my brain is such a blur it takes me a few seconds to figure out what song she chose. But there’s a lot of whistling from the hornier members of the football team who do know.

And, with the first word, it clicks.

Demi Lovato’s “Cool for the Summer,” a fucking anthem for girls exploring each other’s bodies.

Jasmine’s low, sexy voice can’t hit Demi’s higher notes, but she’s singing about fooling around with a girl and absolutely nobody gives a shit about her vocal skills. Behind me, even Chase is whistling, his hands on my shoulders, ironically the only thing to keep me steady when my body wants to shake uncontrollably. Every lyric cuts me like a knife, and I wait for her to make eye contact, to tell me to my face that she’s reducing our summer to a little curiosity, but she never does.

Instead, she goes all in, flirting with what feels like literally everyone else in the audience. Thanks to Shannon’s proximity, people are whispering, coming up with their own interpretations, even as Jasmine practically sits in Paulie Wolman’s lap. Everything about this is awful, except that it isn’t. Watching her perform is incredible, and when I close my eyes, her voice strokes me the way her fingers used to. I’m a horrible person, standing with my boyfriend and completely melting at a girl’s voice, at the memory of her touch. To make it worse, I suspect—though you can never know with Jasmine—this song was chosen to tell me to fuck all the way off and give up trying to have any semblance of a connection with her, that any deeper meaning to this summer was entirely in my head.

“She’s good, huh?” Chase murmurs in my ear, dropping his elbows onto my shoulders, lightly brushing a hand against my boob as if he knows watching Jasmine is turning me inside out, making me want to be touched.

That it’s making me want what being alone with him upstairs didn’t.

That I’m more attracted to Jasmine, to this girl who seems to hate me, than I am to my incredible boyfriend.

All at once, way too much crashes into place.

Chapter Fifteen

THEN

It was Declan’s idea to host a low country boil, to persuade my mom to finally eat some local cuisine. My mom grew up on Russian fare—pelmeni, pirozhki, borscht, and all manner of things made with potatoes, cabbage, and/or sour cream. She’ll eat fish eggs before she’ll eat a prawn that’s still got its head on. So, it’s been kind of a struggle for her spending the summer in an area dominated by seafood and barbecue. (Though she loves that the Outer Banks has somehow become a hot spot for Eastern European students to work for the summer. Getting to speak Russian to people who aren’t me or her parents has been the highlight of her summer, I think.) Naturally, Declan sees that as a challenge.

My mother is not amused.

And because he can’t ask my mother to plan a social event she’d rather die than attend, it’s up to me and Jasmine (and okay, hired staff) to get everything going.

“I wish you could see your hair right now!” Jasmine laughs as we struggle to weigh down the gingham-printed tablecloths against the breeze rolling off the Atlantic.

“You encouraged this hair!” I lift my hand self-consciously to my new blond curls. I’m still getting used to the way they dance in the breeze, so much lighter than the inches of mousy gold I left on the cutting room floor of the Seaside Salon. But between the way my new hair frames my face and the deep tan I’m getting out in the Carolina sun, my eyes pop blue-green more than ever, and I look healthy and happy and different.

Jasmine did a photo shoot of me immediately afterward, but I keep stopping short of posting any of the pictures. I don’t want anyone’s opinions yet. I like that it’s something that’s strictly Larissa of the Outer Banks—Tinkerbell, if you will. Something separate from Stratford. Shannon would completely kill me if she knew, but Shannon’s in Paris, posting selfies from beneath the Arc de Triomphe and at little cafés dotting the city. She’s having her version of a fabulous summer, and somewhere along the way, I realized that I am too. I may not be scarfing pain au chocolate on the Champs-Elysées or whatever, but I don’t envy it. I’m about to eat my weight in shrimp, crab, clams, lobster, and corn, and I feel great about that.

“I’m not making fun of the hair under normal circumstances,” Jasmine clarifies, smoothing one of her perfect pigtail braids. “It’s just kind of … everywhere right now. I’m sure it’ll look lovely for the party.”

“I’m sure your face will look lovely for the party,” I shoot back, feeling childish as I kick sand in front of me, being careful not to land any of it on the white plastic folding chairs.

“Was that supposed to be a burn?” Jasmine finishes placing shells on her corners of the table, then does a cartwheel in the sand, her mint-green-polished toes pointing elegantly at the sun. “Pathetic, Tinkerbell.”

“You’re pathetic.” I drop the rest of my shells in a messy cluster and start my own run—roundoff, back handspring, back tuck. Being a former cheerleader has its merits.

“Holy shit.” Jasmine’s jaw drops. “What did you just do?”

“Oh, did I not mention that I used to be on the cheerleading squad?” I blow