“My mom said y’all have to leave,” Rae says. “All of y’all.”
“Oh, your mom said?” Tommy taunts, snickering.
I wait for her to threaten us with her dad the cop, like Tommy would, but she doesn’t say anything. I don’t like Tommy hanging around, but he plays ball with Maddox, and after he found out Rae’s dad is on the police force with him, he thinks he has free reign of her pool any time and can talk to her any way he likes. It pisses me off, the way he’s trying to upstage me to look good in front of my brother, even though he’s a soft little bitch.
“Chill,” Keisha drawls, taking a swig of her beer and moving her ass around on Maddox’s lap. “We’re just having fun.” She’s straddling my brother, facing the pool, while he lays back on his lounge chair. Of course the head cheerleader wants to ride his dick.
Pretending I don’t notice, I laugh and open the cooler, digging out a beer. “Relax, Sunshine,” I say to Rae, holding it out as a peace offering.
We’ve been using her pool for a couple weeks now, ever since the party. We leave our shit all over, and every day when we arrive, all the empties are gone, and it’s fresh and clean for us to start over. There hasn’t been a single sighting of Rae, though. I was starting to think her dad sent her to a boarding school for having a party or some shit.
Now I almost feel bad that she’s been cleaning up after us this whole time. She starts picking up our empties, holding them to her chest, clad in a filmy black t-shirt that says “Atomic Love” on the front.
“Come have somepolasand chill out by the pool,” I say, waving the cold beer at her. “What’s the point of having it if you don’t enjoy it?”
“I enjoy it,” she says through clenched teeth. “When you’re not around.”
“What happened to you?” Maddox asks, pushing up on his elbows and looking at her past Keisha and Mariana, who’s on Billy’s dick. I ignore the fact that no one’s sitting on me, and I check out what Maddox is looking at.
He’s watching Rae with a frown, and I move so she’s not silhouetted against the blazing August sun. Her eyes are hidden by shades, but the bridge of her nose and cheeks are yellowed with an old bruising.
She shrugs and snatches up the last of the bottles, and I see that her legs are bruised below her little high-waisted shorts. “I fell down the stairs when I was tipsy after the party,” she says. “I’ve never lived in a house with stairs before, and I’m still getting used to them.”
“Chin.”Mariana giggles and hides it behind her beer can.
Maddox raises his brows and turns to me. We share a look, and then he shrugs and lays back on the chaise. “We’re not hurting anything,” he says to her. “No one’s stopping you from using the pool. In fact, we use it when no one’s here. It’s just sitting here going to waste.”
“Yeah,” Becky pipes up. “Don’t be such a buzz kill.”
Rae doesn’t answer. She goes over and dumps the bottles into the trash can at the corner of the house, then walks back, kicks off her sandals, and strips out of her clothes. She’s wearing a swimsuit underneath, but all five of the guys and probably a few of the girls sit there gaping, transfixed. There’s something about a chick undressing… The way her body stretches when she reaches up to pull the shirt over her head, the way she bends to drop her shorts. My cock twitches in my trunks, and I wonder what it would take to get her to sit on my dick the way Keisha’s sitting on Maddox’s.
Still ignoring us, she dives into the pool. She swims up and down, not acknowledging us as she does laps for about twenty minutes. Then she climbs out of the pool, water streaming off her freckled shoulders. She twists her hair up into a wet bun, secures it with a scrunchy, and picks up her towel, pretending five dudes aren’t getting a semi watching her.
“Come ‘ere,mi cariña,” I say. “I want to talk to you. No hard feelings?”
Showing no sign she heard me, she wraps her towel around her body and disappears into her house without a backwards glance.
nine
#1 on the Billboard Chart:
“Honey”—Mariah Carey
Rae West
Starting a new school where you don’t know anyone sucks a big one. Especially when I’ve somehow become known for being the buzzkill who broke up the North’s party. The first time someone says it, I roll my eyes.
Like, what the hell? It wasn’t their party.
Okay, maybe it was their party, but it was at my house. I had every right to send them home at dawn. Not that it did much good. If I’d known my little tantrum that morning, when I kicked them all out before Lee got home, would become what I was known for at Faulkner High, I would have just let him find them all there. It’s not like getting rid of them and cleaning up helped matters with my stepdad.
But thinking about him yelling at them, or worse, arresting them, makes me want to keel over and die of embarrassment. I’d rather be known as the crybaby who ruined their good time than the daughter of the pig who threw them in jail for swimming in his pool.
Luckily, Faulkner High is bigger than Ridgedale, and it’s fairly easy to avoid my neighbors themselves. They spent the rest of summer coming to my pool on the regular, but after the day when I tried to get them to leave, I didn’t bother going out when they were there. I tried getting Mom on board, since she took a beating for the party too, but she just looked at me and asked, “Did you tell them to leave?”
When I told her I had, she said, “What am I supposed to do about it? If they won’t leave when you tell them to, they won’t when I do.”
She wouldn’t even try, so I went back to reading in my room during the middle of the day and venting my frustrations to Poe when she visited. I’d rather be alone than be friends with assholes like my neighbors. I wasn’t alone, though. I had my bird friend, and together, we made our own murder of crows. Fuck the Norths.