The seniors in our crowd put Evan and me to work grilling hot dogs on a public barbecue near the lifeguard stand. Evan complained about being a grunt, but I honestly didn’t mind. It was peaceful standing there, the heat from the coals drying my bathing suit, the sun slanting off the water. It was the beginning of junior year, and we had everything to look forward to.
After we ate the hot dogs on hamburger buns (“No one f**kin’ told me what kind of buns,” Evan had protested) and the girls pretended to be upset over it, Brett Masters, the captain of the water polo team, challenged the tennis guys to five-on-five volleyball.
They destroyed us because, unlike tennis, water polo plays all on the same court and knows how to pass the damn ball. I’d managed a pretty spectacular spike out of sheer luck, but Jimmy and Evan were drunk enough that it was actually entertaining to watch them fumble and curse at their own ineptitude.
The sun had begun to set during the game, the ocean breeze turning cold. The girls put back on their sundresses. Charlotte unhooked her bathing suit top and removed it from beneath her dress as if by magic. She caught me looking and grinned, sensing that I was under her spell.
“Ezra, come over here,” she demanded, pouting cutely.
Dutifully, I went.
“Jill and I found this quiz in Pop Teen magazine about how to tell if a guy likes you,” she said, and before I knew it, the girls had trapped me on their matching hot pink towels and were making me take the quiz from their magazine. The questions were ridiculous, and when we finally reached the last one, Charlotte insisted on looking up my horoscope.
“Love is in the cards for all of you stubborn Tauruses!” she told me, and then frowned. “Well, what do you think?”
“I think I just learned the plural form of Taurus,” I joked, and Charlotte pretended to be upset that I wasn’t taking the horoscope seriously.
Ever since the end of sophomore year, I’d suspected that Charlotte liked me, but that day at the beach was the first time I sensed that she wasn’t just flirting for the fun of it—that she had something specific in mind.
“You’re so sweet,” she murmured, leaning into my shoulder as we sat side by side on her towel. “It’s a shame you’re not over Staci.”
Staci Guffin and I had broken up a month earlier, for reasons I didn’t fully understand and didn’t particularly care to. She’d traumatized me with a Sex and the City DVD marathon when I thought I was going over to her house for, uh, something more orgasmic than shoes. Maybe she’d just wanted to break up so she could have an ex-boyfriend to complain about to her friends. I honestly didn’t know.
“Trust me,” I said, glancing down at the long blonde hair piled on top of her head, and her endless, tanned legs, dusted with a fine layer of sand. “I’m definitely over Staci.”
I didn’t know much about Charlotte back then, just that she was gorgeous and sexy and always had gum in her purse that she’d offer me with a smile, like she’d brought it just for me. I didn’t know that she listened to her iPod in the kitchen while she made elaborate cookies and cupcakes from gourmet baking blogs, or that she thought it was bad luck to eat the batter. I didn’t know that she’d danced since she was three, that she did yoga with her mom before school, or that she collected everything to do with ladybugs. I didn’t know that we’d be together for more than eight months, the longest relationship I’d have in high school.
We wound up taking a walk to the other end of the beach, where the rocks jutted into the surf, forming little tide pools. She wore my Eastwood Tennis sweatshirt, because she’d gotten cold. I was secretly glad, since it made her seem more real somehow, the way she kept pushing up the sleeves of my hoodie as we walked through the tidal foam.
We scrambled onto the rocks, the barnacles stabbing into the soles of our feet. In the distance, I could see our friends beginning to pack up, and it filled me with a strange sense of urgency. I watched Evan heft the cooler, dumping its contents over Jimmy’s head, and I judged that we had maybe five minutes for whatever it was that had brought us apart from everyone else.
“I’m glad you’re not a complete jerk,” Charlotte said. She had slipped her phone out of the pocket of my sweatshirt and was texting.
“Thanks, I guess?”
“I didn’t mean it like that.” Charlotte looked up from her phone with a guilty smile. Her hair streamed behind her in the breeze, and the bridge of her nose had turned pink from the sun. “Sorry. Jill wanted to know where I’d put her sunscreen. Anyway, I just meant how we’re, like, destined to date each other. The most popular girl in the junior class and the most popular guy.”
“I’m not the most popular guy in our year,” I protested, dropping my gaze to the tide pools.
“Um, duh. Of course you are. Why else would I have brought you here?”
“You brought me here?” I raised an eyebrow, teasing her.
“Yes, I did. Now shut up and kiss me.”
I shut up and kissed her. She tasted like strawberry lip-gloss and diet soda, and she smelled like suntan lotion and my mom’s favorite detergent, and we were sixteen and not fully dressed, even as far as the beach is concerned.
“So?” Charlotte asked with a sly smile when we pulled apart.
“You should keep my sweatshirt,” I said. “It looks nice on you.”
“Ezra,” Charlotte chastised. She put her hand on her hip, waiting.
“Um, would you like to go out with me?”
“Of course.” She grinned triumphantly and kissed me again, her hands warm and soft on my back. “Mmm, you’re so cute. We should take you shopping. I bet you’d look super hot in some new jeans.”