is an equation. I just have to fill in the right factors to find the answers. I can’t be a ballerina, but Scarlett’s social interactions are at least worth a look.
I need to be far enough away from the second lifeguard chair but close enough so no one can recognize me. There are four possible boardwalks. I walk up the first one and when I get to the end, I try to stay near groups of people. The second lifeguard chair is one hundred yards away. There are about five hundred people in my immediate view, so I should be camouflaged. I have to get closer to see Scarlett. I walk along the edge of the beach and the dunes that run all the way to the parking lot. I can hurry back to the first boardwalk if necessary.
I don’t see her. She’s not at the—
Holy crap.
Scarlett stands up about twenty feet from me and pulls a blue strapless dress over a zebra-print string bikini top. I drop the chair and turn my back to my sister, pretending to riffle through my beach bag.
A few couples and their beach umbrellas separate us. I hunch my shoulders up as though somehow that will hide my face.
“I love that suit even more on you than when we saw it in the catalog,” a girl says. I recognize her but don’t know her name. Scarlett made friends with a lot of local girls, but I have only met them out on Main Street when we’ve bumped into them on our way to dinner. She even hangs out with them when she visits Nancy throughout the year. Except for the summer, I’ve never been to visit.
“It’s so cute, right?” Scarlett says and adjusts the triangle cups. “Definitely an eye catcher.”
They pass by me and once they turn onto the boardwalk I hurry behind.
The sand sinks beneath me as I haul ass the way I came. I slip in my flip-flops, burning the underside of my feet on the sand. The silver bar of the chair is slicked with my underarm sweat and the thong of the flip-flop is killing the skin between my toes. This sucks.
Boardwalk. Thank the beach gods.
Once I get to the end, I walk slowly because the sound of a person running on the planks will travel. Scarlett and her friends are already past the third boardwalk entrance and near the beach headquarters, which sit just before Liam’s, the best clam shack in existence.
I leave the chair by the showers and follow their path car by car.
Scarlett and her friends hold their bags, pass by Liam’s, and keep walking. I scoot to a car nearby, but stay hunched over and out of sight.
“Well, well. If it isn’t my true love, Scarlett Levin.”
I peer around the side of the car. The driver of the Jeep gets out and walks toward Scarlett and her friends. The Jeep Wrangler idles near the entrance to the outer beach. The blond guy who laughed at me secures a cooler with a bungee cord. They seem to be packing to go somewhere.
The driver says something I can’t hear. Scarlett laughs and it chimes out over the parking lot. I don’t laugh like that; I snort.
“You coming to the outer beach?” he asks Scarlett.
“I wish,” Scarlett says. “My aunt is having some kind of welcome-back dinner.”
She lets her hands linger on his chest. The blond guy keeps working on the cooler. “Tate, you want to let the air out of the tires?” he asks the other guy riding in the Jeep. His hair is so blond, it’s almost white.
Oh, they’re going four wheeling. You can’t go out on the beach unless your tires are at a lower pressure. It makes it easier to drive on the sand.
“Drive me home first?” Scarlett says. “You won’t make me walk, will you?”
How can Scarlett just ask them for something like that? These guys were about to go out on the beach and she gets them to stop their plans, drive her home, and then come back. Does she have some kind of special power? Some branch of science that hasn’t been discovered: a boy manipulation molecule?
“I’ll see you tonight. Main Street,” she adds.
The girls jump in the car and Scarlett sits in the front on the lap of the guy with the white blond hair. Her friends cozy up next to the guy who talked to me. The Jeep screeches out of the parking lot. The girls scream and fall into