Chapter Seven #2
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 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 Dragon 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.
I don’t wanna give up my secret, though. “Oh, I can. The question is whether you want company that early. You don’t seem to enjoy the presence of others before coffee.”
Her teeth flash in the dark interior of the car. “You’ve noticed.”
“I’m very observant,” I say with a flip of my hair.
“You are.” Her voice is more serious than I anticipate, and I’m not ready for it. “I like this about you. You know when to talk and when not to. It’s a rare skill.”
“I’ll take that as a compliment.” It strikes me then that it’s the first time we’ve driven without music. “Especially since you can be a hard girl to read.”
The corner of her mouth turns up. “Not many people bother to try to read me.”
Outside, it’s relatively quiet, and with our windows down, we can hear the ocean lapping at the shore during the pauses in our conversation. The peaceful rhythmic interlude makes it less glaring that it takes me a minute to figure out how to respond.
“I don’t know about that. We just left a whole house of people sick of losing to you at poker.”
She laughs. “Touché. But none of them like to work for it.”
“Have you ever considered not making people work for it?”
“Literally never.”
“Well, at least you’re self-aware.”
My phone beeps, and I know before I look down that it’s gonna be my mom, asking where we are. I quickly tap out that we’ll be home in two minutes, and Jasmine says, “I didn’t really make you work for it, did I?”
I think of how quickly she invited me to the pool, to meet her friends, to join in on her photo shoots.
I press send on my reply and say, “No, you didn’t, I suppose.
” Although all of that was superficial; there’s still so much I don’t know.
But I like the idea that I’m a standout.
What can I say? I’m vain. “Am I just special?”
Her lips twitch. “I guess you are.”
“I feel special,” I say seriously. It’s meant to sound like teasing, but I do.
I’m grateful for how much she’s helped me love it here, for how generous she’s been with her time, with her life.
Hell, I’m even grateful that she listened to me tonight about not wanting to be spotted and found another way to make it work. “To what do I owe the honor?”
“You really wanna know?”
“Obviously.”
She pulls us into the driveway and shuts off the car. “You cut through bullshit really, really fast. I cannot even tell you how refreshing that is.”
I definitely owe that to a combination of my mom, who has zero time for bullshit, and Shannon, who taught me not to bother since she’ll see right through me anyway.
But I don’t feel like giving anyone else credit.
I’m enjoying feeling special—unnervingly so.
I’m not gonna say that either, so instead I deflect like the wind.
“Well, as long as I’m doing that: I thought you’d want to stay longer tonight.
Hang out with Carter.” I let the rest go unsaid.
She glances at me, her usually golden eyes impenetrably dark. “Can I tell you something, only because I think you’ll get it and not think I’m extremely weird?”
I have no idea what’s coming, but there’s only one right answer to that question. “Of course.”
There’s a tear in the thigh of her jeans, and she picks at it, concentrating her gaze downward with the same intensity she gives to capturing perfect shots of butterflies.
“I don’t really love the whole partying thing.
I mean, sometimes I do. But being surrounded by people is just …
a lot. And it’s not that I don’t like hooking up with Carter, but it’s like …
I don’t need it in the same way when there aren’t a ton of people there. ”
My first thought is that she means she wants other people to see it. After all, how many times have I dreamed of the feeling of a million eyes on me as I stand with Chase under the spotlight at Homecoming or prom? But that isn’t the vibe I get from Jasmine. And then I do get it.
“You don’t need the escape, you mean?”
The smile on her lips is faint, but I see it because I’m looking for it. “Yeah.”
It isn’t something we have in common. I like to be kept busy, to be surrounded, entertained.
As much as I love my mom, I suspect it’s from growing up in a quiet house of two.
But sometimes always having to be “on,” having to abide by Shannon’s “rules,” having to balance school and work and, yeah, even my high-maintenance crush can get exhausting and frustrating and I just want that feeling of taking your bra off at the end of the day more than I want anything else in the world.
Even if it feels like I’m not allowed to admit it.
“So why do you keep going out?”
She shrugs. “I don’t wanna be alone either. There’s no real compromise here—you either hang out with everyone, or no one.”
“Well,” I say, a brilliant idea sparking in my brain, “maybe that was true before, but it isn’t now. Now you have a housemate! How about tomorrow night we stay back and hang out? We can have an incredibly cheesy and stereotypical girls’ night. Heavy on the ice cream. Hair curlers optional.”
Jasmine laughs with a rare fullness that I’m way too proud of eliciting. “Deal.”
We shake hands before going inside.
I think about that handshake a lot, because it reassures me that it was clearly just a friendly suggestion.
I had no idea what it would spark.