Maeve
Five years ago
“Turn on Tom Petty.”
Yael curled her lip. “Yuck. No.”
I pressed up on my side, lowering my sunglasses to the tip of my nose. “Hey, I listened to Taylor Swift all afternoon. Let me have some classic rock.”
“You just have a crush on Stan Lynch.”
Ididhave a thing for drummers, that was true. “You can’t deny he’s a silver fox.”
“Oh, gross. He’s really old. Like forty or something. He could be your dad!”
I also had a thing for older men. Forty might have been pushing it, but boys my age were so damn immature.
“Just turn on ‘Mary Jane’s Last Dance’ and let me soak up the sun in peace.”
Yael groaned, but pulled up my requested song on her iPod. “Fine, but I’m choosing the next song, and spoiler alert, it’s going to be ‘All About That Bass.’”
How I was friends with a girl who liked bubblegum pop was still a mystery. It helped that she was my next-door neighbor, had a pool, and was a transplant just like me. Plus, I liked her—bad taste in music and all.
We’d both moved to this neighborhood four years ago, when I was a freshman in high school and Yael was a junior. Her family came from Long Island, mine from Georgia. We met in the middle in a suburb of Baltimore, Maryland. Our dads worked for the same company, and it didn’t take long for us to meet and bond over feeling like fish flopping around on dry land.
I thought her accent was hilarious.
She imitated mine at every turn.
I didn’t get offended, not when she let me float in her pool and ogle Mo’s rocker friends who always seemed to be around.
“Hey!”
Someone was blocking my sun. A distinctively Mo-shaped someone.
Using my pink polished toes, I shoved him aside. “I need my Vitamin E. Scurvy abounds.”
He chuckled and knocked my foot away with a playful swat. Mo was eternally good natured. Probably due to sharing a house with Yael, who had a severe case of the grumps more often than not.
“So many things wrong with that statement, Maeve. You get vitamin D from the sun and scurvy from a lack of vitamin C. Unless you’re a pirate, I don’t think you need to worry about it.”
I bit my lip to suppress a smile.
Yael groaned, loud and proud. “Moses, come on. It doesn’t take a genius to know Maeve is fucking with you.”
He shrugged, went over to her lounge chair, flicked her arm, then quickly jumped out of the way before she could retaliate.
“Hey, so I have a couple friends over. We’re going to use the pool for a while. We’ve been practicing and all of us are in need of cooling off. Is that cool?”
I glanced down at my bathing suit, making sure it was a cute one. Sometimes I wore the Sears one-piece my grandma had handed down to me, which looked as awful as it sounded. By sheer luck, I’d left it at home. Today, I had on my vintage-style, red polka dot halter suit. These things were important, since Mo’s friends were almost always incredibly attractive, and even though I never worked up the nerve to actually utter a single word to them, I liked to have the option. If I’d been wearing my grandma suit, I’d be hightailing it to Yael’s room to hide from the hot boys.
“Sure, that’s fine. Fair warning: Yael has been listenin’ to a lot of Taylor Swift and Meghan Trainor,” I said.
“And I’m not changing it, so don’t ask.”
Mo rolled his eyes at his sister. “I wouldn’t dream of it. We’ll only be out here for a little while, then we have to get back to practicing.”
A few minutes later, Mo, Murray, and two guys I’d never seen before came sauntering across the Aronson’s massive backyard. They should’ve been in slow motion, with water raining down on their ripped bodies.