The Sound

I lie down beside her and try to absorb everything she’s just told me about dead nannies, and about Tyler and Jesse almost killing each other over nothing. I’m glad I want to be a music journalist because I think I would suck at being an investigative one.

I lie down beside her and try to absorb everything she’s just told me about dead nannies, and about Tyler and Jesse almost killing each other over nothing. I’m glad I want to be a music journalist because I think I would suck at being an investigative one.

Despite how rude he’s just been to me I have been conditioned by my mother to be polite at all times and so I smile at him in apology. He notices but doesn’t smile back at me, rather his eyebrows raise a fraction as though he’s taking my apology and wringing it by its neck before handing me back its broken corpse.

You want unicorns and rainbows and Care Bears in the sky and Twilight-style declarations of eternal love? Well— newsflash— it ain’t gonna happen, Ren.

Also, unlike Edward Cullen, the voice in my head pipes up, Jesse most certainly hasn’t fallen in insta-love with me and isn’t torturing himself over the fact that he can’t be with me in case he eats me.

He has dark, quiffy hair and wide-spaced eyes, though his skin is tanned as opposed to diamond sparkly white. He has a very square jaw with a dimple in the center of his chin but alas no jet pack. I note that his eyebrow is cocked and the smile on his face is half sneer, half smirk as if he’s laughing at Eliza but she doesn’t seem to realize.

Robert Pattinson—if you genetically spliced him with Buzz Lightyear.

“I guess you could call it that. They hook up every summer, but it’s not like it’s Facebook official or anything.”

There are guys with attitude, and then there’s this guy. He needs his own special category in Urban Dictionary.

“Like, what are you doing?”

“Like, I’m renting a bike,” I answer. I’m still vaguely amused by the overuse of the word like. I thought it was something that Hollywood scriptwriters used to emphasize vacuity in female characters. Turns out that’s actually the way Sophie speaks.

“Did you make out with Jeremy last night?” she asks from her position perched on the bath.
“So you didn’t make it to first base? Or second? If you get to fourth base on a first date that makes you a dirty skanky ho.”

“Did you and Tyler hook up last night?”
“What?” Paige says. “It looked like you were about to bone him right there and then.”

“No. He’s hooked up with Summer one time I think and maybe a few local girls—they put out way more: total skanks. But last summer he was dating this college girl. Total cougar. He got major props.”

“Tyler’s the biggest player on the whole East Coast,” Eliza adds. “As if I’d get with that.” She rolls onto her back and wriggles her hips into the sand. “And anyway, I don’t do sloppy seconds.”

With trepidation I open up my e-mail. Megan has sent me about a thousand messages all asking a variation of did you pull Jeremy?

I’m a size ten to twelve with normal-size boobs—not ginormous, but not flat either. I have an average body with curves that, according to Will, are sexy.

Eliza stares at it sitting on my plate and I realize that I must have committed some monumental carb faux pas. I reach for the butter and start to slather the bread with it, thinking bite me.

For lunch Matt went and bought up half the supermarket—dumping a pile of crisps (they call them chips just to confuse me), cans of Coke (no diet), and sandwiches onto a towel between us, which all the girls complained about and refused to eat (carbs).

Eliza spins to face him and starts wriggling her way down him as though he’s a greased pole.

Megan thinks anything with a Y chromosome is hot. She’s perpetually in heat. Even she admits as much (with a tonguelolling emoticon for emphasis).

She holds her hair over her shoulder and starts gyrating her hips and butt against a guy who has stepped into the ring of light. His hands, feeling their way along Eliza’s sides, are moving fluidly, but he isn’t groping at her.

Eliza then wraps her arms around his neck and leans pouting toward him, but the bottle is in the way and she clashes her nose against it.
Classy move, I think to myself, smirking.

“Eliza’s perfecting her Ice Queen routine.” Summer laughs, trying to break the tension.
“Better than perfecting a skanky ho routine,” Eliza snaps back, looking in Paige’s direction.

She is short and not as skinny as the other three, but her boobs are quite enormous, which I imagine makes her exceedingly popular with the boys.

Her breasts are having their own conversation with him, one hand rests on her jutting hip bone and the other plays with a loose lock of hair.

“Do you want me to put some sunscreen on your back?” he asks instead.

He’s in his forties and big in that way I imagine only American men can be, with a tanned face, thick graying hair and teeth so white they shine like headlights.

Carrie and Mike are both wearing tan trousers—I didn’t think they were the type of couple to go in for matching, but they’re American and what do I know about how Americans dress?

"The mysterious, messed-up, bad boy with secrets. If I didn’t love him myself, I think I’d have to kill him for being such a cliché.”

I glance upward. He’s still glaring at me, but not with irritation. He looks instead like he wants to kill me. His fingers twitch around the wrench. Unconsciously I have edged back toward the door.

But Jesse is so off-limits that if he were a place, he’d be a nuclear testing site. And Jeremy doesn’t make me not quiver. He kind of does. Is that enough? I’m so confused right now.

He is wearing jeans that fit well, but he swaggers a little in them and I wonder if he learned that in prison. He’s also wearing a white T-shirt that has a few grease marks smeared across it but which shows his muscles to obscene perfection. His whole attitude screams do not mess with me.