by Dahlia Adler
Maybe Chase and I aren’t official yet, but by the end of our next date, we damn well will be.
And my summer with Jasmine will be a distant memory.
Chapter Seven
THEN
It’s been three days of fruitful tanning and fruitless job hunting when someone finally blocks out my sun. I look up to see Jasmine standing over me, an impressive camera bag slung over her shoulder. “Listen,” she says without preamble, because she doesn’t believe in preamble. “My dad feels really bad about screwing you out of a job, and I could use an assistant this summer, so how do you feel about helping me out a few days a week, all expenses paid by Papa Dec?”
I shift slowly into a sitting position, trying to take this in. Jasmine and I have barely spoken since the night of the party. In fact, I’ve barely even seen her. It’s only by the grace of Keisha, Brea, and Derek that I’ve had anyone to hang out with at all.
Also, an assistant? For what? If she does anything other than read, tan, and make out with Carter, it’s news to me. If she thinks I’m going to be carrying her bag around like she’s some celebutante—
“I’m a photographer,” she says, a little smile playing on her lips that makes it clear my confusion was obvious. “Well, I’m a web designer, but I’m building a stock photo portfolio as part of that. I’ve already gotten all the beach and bikini shots I can handle for the week, so I was thinking of heading down to the Elizabethan Gardens to get some flower shots. You in or not? I gotta go in the next half hour to get the right light.”
There is suddenly a lot happening, but I’m bored as hell and I could use the money and company. Plus, the Elizabethan Gardens sound pretty, and I haven’t done a single touristy thing since I got here other than check out a billion cheesy shops selling magnets shaped like flip-flops and wind chimes with surfboard charms. I take a quick shower and throw on cutoffs and a tank top, and we hit the road to Manteo.
Jasmine is not a woman of many words, and I’m trying not to be annoying though I have a zillion questions about her business, so all I learn on the twenty-minute drive is her favorite music—or at least whatever she listens to in the car—is all by bands I’ve never heard of: Chronic Apathy, the Pepperpots, Glory Alabama, the Brightsiders, and some group whose name I don’t catch but who are definitely singing about wishing they were the scar on Padma Lakshmi’s arm.
Once we’re among the flowers, though, it’s like she’s a different person. As she sets up her shots, she explains to me how she can use some as background options for her website templates, and others might be used on book covers with other elements photoshopped in. She takes close-ups of brightly colored blooms and impossible shots of fluttering butterflies, and I’m so mesmerized watching her work, and how she seems to know the names of every blossom and creature, that I don’t hear her the first time she says, “Jump in one.”
The second time she says it, I immediately respond, “Nah, it’s OK. I don’t wanna get in your way.” But truthfully, I do, because the background is gorgeous, and let’s be real, I am not one to pass up a good profile pic.
Thankfully, she sees right through me, and before I can protest again, she yanks me over to a bench surrounded by fragrant patches of lilies and sits me down. “You know,” she says, frowning in concentration as she fusses with my shoulder-length, nutmeg-colored mess, “I’m jealous. Your hair has so many possibilities. You could chop it to your chin and would look amazing, especially with a little curl.”
“That’s too much—I could never go that short,” I say, though I’m already picturing it and I don’t hate what I see.
“The summer’s young,” she says with a smile, stepping back and handing me a petal-pink lip gloss from her bag. “It’s always a good time to get brave and make some fun changes.”
I dab on the gloss and hand it back, patently ignoring the little chill of excitement at the thought of coming back to Stratford with a different look—one that wasn’t advised, evaluated, and picked apart by my friends first. Then I smile, pout, and otherwise pose my way through a photo shoot with Jasmine mock-barking commands at me every time I move my limbs. “More duck face!” she demands, taking shot after shot of me pushing my lips up and out until they take up half my face. “More! Duckier! I said duckier!”
Eventually, we have to stop because I’m laughing too hard, and Jasmine goes back to taking her more official photos while I scramble to take light meter readings and rearrange stems.
After a couple of hours in the sweltering heat, I’m sweating like a pig and mentally begging for Jasmine to call it a day, but she doesn’t seem to notice the temperature. There’s no moisture beading on the skin above her tube top, and her flowy skirt dances as she moves, making it look like she’s bringing her own breeze with her wherever she goes. Even the dark, honey-highlighted hair piled into a bun on top of her head isn’t sticking to her face.
“Middle Eastern blood,” she says with a shrug, and I curse my Russian DNA for leaving me unprepared. Next to her, I look like a panting sheepdog.
When she finally declares it’s time to pack it in, I’m beyond relieved. I can already feel the air conditioning in her Jeep. But at four o’clock, there’s plenty of daylight left, and I have no idea what to do with it. I want to ask, “Now what?” but she’s already taken me under her wing for the day, and I imagine she must want some space.
Sure enough, there’s no mention of evening plans on the way home, only twenty minutes of indie rock followed by “Thanks for the help” when we get out at her house. I’m halfway to my room when she says, “Owen’s having some people over for a barbecue tonight, if you wanna come.” Before I can answer, the main bathroom door shuts. A few seconds later, the shower turns on, and I realize she has completely taken my “yes” for granted.
God, I must radiate loneliness.
I take a shower in the smaller bathroom I share with my mom, then check the phone I’ve barely glanced at all day. There are a couple of pictures from Shannon on the group text chain—a selfie with a croissant between her teeth and a shot of her linking arms with a cute guy while drinking champagne—a video from Gia of her falling on her ass during a routine, and a notification that Kiki posted a new episode of her podcast. I smile at the latter and queue it up after posting my favorite selfie from the gardens, letting Kiki’s familiar, soothing voice surround me as I moisturize.
“What is that?” a voice asks, and I nearly jump out of my towel when I realize Jasmine’s standing in the doorway to our little suite. I hadn’t realized I never closed the door, and now I’m standing here half naked, though thankfully only the two of us are home.
I wrap the towel tighter around myself and swipe at my face to clear any visible dabs of lotion. “My friend Kiki’s podcast, Kiki on the Case. It’s fun—it’s like a gossip column where she plays detective, and she posts a new episode every week.”
“Ooh, cute.” Jasmine comes in and sits down on my bed, privacy clearly not a dominant word in her vocabulary. “What’s this episode about?”
“Our school librarian is having kind of a dramatic breakup, and Kiki’s a little obsessed with it,” I say with a smile because it’s so silly and so Kiki. “I mean, she didn’t originally say it was our school librarian on the podcast, but we all know it is, because Ms. Adams is always on the phone in the library and she doesn’t follow her own ‘Shhh’ very well. Rumor is she’s hooking up with the librarian at our town’s middle school, and Kiki’s trying to confirm it, with the help of her little sister, who’s in sixth grade.”
“That … is bizarre.”
“Isn’t it?” God, I miss my friends. They’re so weird. I have to remember to message them later about my new job and about how much I love this episode of the podcast; Kiki lives and dies by her fandom. “Kiki’s obsessed with mysteries. It’s her thing. She has to find out if it’s really him so she can dig into how they met and what went wrong, because of course she does.”
Jasmine laughs. “You should bring her to Roanoke.”
“Roanoke? Isn’t that in Virginia?”
“Different Roanoke. Haven’t you ever learned about the lost colony in school? The settlers who disappeared?”
Oh, yeah, this is vaguely familiar. “I think so. Maybe.”
“Guessing history is not your subject,” Jasmine teases, and I confirm that it’s definitely not. “Anyway, it was this whole thing in the late sixteenth century—the first attempt at a colony. These people came over from England, set up a town, and then … completely disappeared. Nothing left but a single word: CROATOAN. There are all sorts of theories about whether they were murdered or just moved to another place, but no one’s ever been able to definitively say. There’s a theater right near the gardens we were at today that does a show about it every night. I bet your friend would love it.”
“Oh man, she would!” Bringing Kiki down here for a weekend sounds like a lot of fun, and there’s no way a mystery like that isn’t already super high on her radar. “Do you think your dad would let me have a friend here for a couple of days?”
Jasmine shrugs. “Sure, why not? If you’re still gonna be here August 18, that’s the day to go. It’s silly, but they call it Virginia Dare Day. They even use a real baby in the show, in honor of Virginia Dare’s birthday—she was the first new settler born on colonized soil. Garden admission is discounted that day, too, if you wanna take her there.”
I actually don’t know when we’re heading back to New York. You’d think I’d be counting down the days, but right at this moment, I’m looking forward to going on some more adventures here. Seeing more stuff. Learning more from this girl who’s full of surprises. “That’s a cool idea, thank you.”
She nods. “Sure. I’ll leave you to get dressed.”
* * *
The barbecue that night is a lot of fun, as is pizza and night swimming at Keisha’s the evening after, and going to a Battle of the Bands at a club the night after that, and a sunset sail on Brea’s boat the night after that. The days are cool too, even as Jasmine begins to trust me with heavier equipment and more work, leaving my muscles sore and my skin lobster-pink at the end of long days shooting lighthouses, slow-crawling crabs, and hang gliders. I get to see everything touristy from a completely different angle, and I always expect Jasmine to mock the cheesy gift shops and fanny packs, but she never does. Instead, she plays the role of tour guide, adding her own little-known facts about the first flights to our stroll around the Wright Brothers Memorial and the histories of the different lighthouses. It’s clear that coming to the Outer Banks for summers her entire life has given her a profound pride in the place.
I’ve never seen someone find so much beauty in everything.
But by Friday night, which brings us to a poker game at Carter’s, she seems wiped. She doesn’t acknowledge it as she drives us to his house, though. She’s just quiet, the way she is to and from photo shoots, a time I’ve come to realize she uses to go over her plans in her head. But unless she’s planning card strategies, that isn’t what’s on her mind.
I don’t push. Something tells me that never works with her.
“How real is this poker game?” I ask instead. I brought it up to distract her, but I’m a little nervous. “Is this, like, playing for M&Ms, or for actual cash? Because I don’t have a whole lot of the latter.”
She waves her hand. “I know. Don’t worry about it. I’ll spot you.”
Okay, I’m annoyed. It’s enough that I’m living in her house, well aware my mom is her dad’s secretary and I’m her “assistant.” I don’t need to be handed out cash favors. “I’m not looking to be spotted; I want to be prepared.”
“You’ll be fine” is all she says, and now I’m silent too, irritated at her new clothes and this fancy Jeep and how she’s probably gone to shows for every one of these stupid bands on her stupid satellite radio. But then she follows it up with, “Here, why don’t you pick the music? Put on whatever helps you de-stress.”
I do not need to be asked twice to blast Demi Lovato.
It turns out the buy-in is fifty bucks, which I don’t have. But I offer to help Carter in the kitchen, shoving trays of frozen pigs in a blanket and mozzarella sticks in the oven as slowly as I can to avoid the question of whether I’m going to be up-front about not having the money, or do something stupid like promise to pay Jasmine back so I can not embarrass myself in front of my new friends.
But when all the food is in and I’ve stirred the lemonade for so long I’ve probably churned it into butter, I’m out of time.
When I finally enter the game room (yeah, he has a game room), Carter says, “Hey, Jasmine’s low on cash this week, so we’re doing a buy-in at ten. That cool?”
I shrug, forcing myself to meet his eyes so I don’t have to look anywhere near hers. “Sure.”
Turns out, I am not very good at poker—not at bluffing, nor remembering that a flush is a thing, nor reading other people’s facial expressions. But Jasmine is wiping the floor with everyone. I should’ve known she’d be great at it. She has the best poker face I’ve ever seen. I’ve picked up slight frowns and nose wrinkles I thought must indicate crappy cards, but nope. Inside of an hour, she has everyone’s money, including mine, and shockingly, nobody feels like playing another round.
“I knew I should’ve let your invite get lost in the mail,” Carter teases, but it’s obvious from the way he’s looking at her that it’s everyone else’s invites he would’ve rather lost instead. I expect Jasmine to flirt and it to take point-twelve seconds for them to head off to his room, but all she says is, “Better luck next time, sucker,” as her long, ring-laden fingers proceed to shuffle the cards like a pro.
We drink hard cider and play Asshole until Jack and Derek disappear to fool around and Owen and Brea head to a party on the beach, and it’s me and Jasmine, Keisha, and Carter left.
The wingwoman handbook dictates that Keisha and I GTFO, but she doesn’t appear to be in a rush to go anywhere. Instead, she takes the deck from where it was abandoned during the rush of cheek-kiss goodbyes and gives it a shuffle worthy of Vegas. It’s starting to feel like I’m the only one here not born with an ace up her sleeve and a joker in every pocket. “Spades?” she suggests, cracking her cinnamon gum, but judging from the way Carter and Jasmine seamlessly shift around the table to split us into teams—cousins versus housemates—it isn’t really a suggestion.
This is confirmed when I reach for a second cider, only to feel Jasmine’s rings dig into my wrist. “You’re gonna need to keep your wits about you, Tinkerbell,” she warns me. “These two share a Spades brain.”
I snort. “I think I can handle it.”
I could not, in fact, handle it. “The two of you are such shitty cheaters!” I yelp after getting utterly destroyed for a third hand in a row. “This is not humanly possible.”
Keisha smiles smug and wide, tossing her tight beaded braids over shoulder, while Carter throws back his head and laughs. “We’ve been coming down here since we were babies,” she says, her Southern accent coming in stronger as the night wears on and the alcohol settles in. “Carter’s brother and our cousin Richie trained us at this table as soon as we could walk.”
“There’s not a lot to do here after dark before you get a driver’s license,” Carter confirms. “At least not before I discovered girls.”
“You mean before girls discovered you,” Keisha says with a snort. “Your goofy ass wasn’t exactly ‘filling the time’ until you came back six inches taller and with your braces off.”
“Burrrrrn,” I say instinctively before realizing that Jasmine is one of those girls, though she seems completely unbothered. In fact, she’s laughing too. I turn to Keisha, remembering that she mentioned being aroace. “And what’d you do while girls were ‘discovering’ Carter? Guessing you had … different preoccupations.”
“Slightly,” she says with a laugh, dealing another hand. “I’m a gaming nerd, so I was plenty happy to stay home while Carter and them went out, play The Sims or Dra
gon Age until sunrise. But lots of nights we all stayed in and played, same as we did waiting up for Santa when we were kids.”
“See, that’s my problem,” says Jasmine, tugging on the six-pointed star charm hanging at her throat. “Too Jewish.”
“Hey, me too!” I cheer, and we slap five over the table while they laugh. My mom and I aren’t remotely affiliated—the one thing we do all year is light menorahs and eat latkes on the first night of Hanukkah, which we only do because it makes my mom feel better about raising me on Christmas—but it feels like the first thing we’ve had in common.
Except for how we both suck at Spades.
But it’s fun, and Jasmine seems so much more at ease in the smaller crowd. It takes the sting out of losing so badly to see her chilled out, more like the person I hang out with on photo shoots and long car drives. By the time we officially bite the dust, my face hurts from laughing so hard. At least until Carter asks us to stick around, his eyes hovering somewhere around Jasmine’s lips, and my stomach drops at the thought of ending our fun night by being ditched.
“Nah. We’ve gotta get up early for a sunrise shoot,” says Jasmine, rising on her toes to give him a peck on the cheek. The shoot is news to me, but I nod and accept good-night hugs and promises of a rematch. Keisha and I even exchange numbers, and I appreciate that her phone case is designed to look like a vintage Nintendo controller.
“Are we really doing a sunrise shoot tomorrow?” I ask after we buckle ourselves in and leave the Thomases behind us.
“Sure, why not?” Jasmine shrugs. “People love cheesy sunrises for social media backgrounds and templates. Unless you don’t think you can get up that early.”
I’ve been getting up early to run on the beach the past couple days, before Jasmine or Mom or even Declan is awake. It’s been nice having time to myself where I’m not in Declan’s house, or assisting Jasmine, or tiptoeing around my mom. I’ve never been a morning person, but running on the sand is more relaxing than walking on eggshells and feeling like an interloping piece of luggage my mom was forced to bring.
