Chapter Fourteen #2
“I’ll think about it,” I promise as he retrieves our clothes from the floor and tosses me my shirt. And I’m sure that I will, nonstop.
“Cool.”
We get dressed and cleaned up, and he makes a little teasing “aw” of disappointment as I scrub off the last of the paint in the Ferrises’ enormous en suite bathroom.
“You ready?” I ask as soon as I’ve reapplied lip gloss, a futile attempt to make myself look put together despite my clothes having the permanently rumpled look of someone who’s just rolled around with her new boyfriend.
“Ready.” He holds out a hand and I take it, amazed at how quickly and comfortably we’ve slipped into these roles, and then he opens the door.
The picture of the crown with a big number 14 on it is still there, but no one else is; they’re all crowded in the living room, being serenaded by what I immediately recognize as Gia on karaoke.
Taylor Swift is her go-to. In addition to being a huge fangirl, she has no problem hitting the notes, but her performance always falls a little flat because she doesn’t have the romantic angst; very few of those lyrics work when you’re smiling happily at your boyfriend through them.
Currently, she’s warbling her way through “Blank Space,” singing it at a starry-eyed Tommy as if it’s a wedding-worthy romance rather than an epic burn of a song.
Chase’s teammates spot us immediately and come over to give him shit, but he tells them to mind their business and find their own girls so they can stop worrying what he’s up to with his.
Then he raises a fist and cheers loudly for Gia, and I squeeze him around the waist as I watch her cheeks light up with pleasure.
He really is a good guy. Hot as hell, and I feel safe with him. I genuinely like him, a lot.
That’s what matters, right? Not that I didn’t want to go further tonight?
God, I wish I could talk to Shannon. I know she’s here, but I doubt her brain’s been here here since five minutes after she walked through the door.
She’s just so good at being blunt with her advice, and that’s exactly what I need—not Gia’s effusive and all-consuming belief that love is always the answer, or Kiki’s comfort in the form of dismissing all high school romance as temporary bullshit.
I need some real talk, Shannon Salter style, even if it means sitting through a lecture on breaking one of her rules, complete with an I told you so, even though this isn’t what she told me at all.
And suddenly, there she is, on the “stage,” taking the mic from Gia as “Blank Space” fades out and everyone applauds.
I’m stunned to see Shannon standing next to the machine.
She never participates in karaoke, or anything else that might make her look silly.
Even Kiki participates in karaoke more than Shannon, as long as you let her sing angry 90s girl rock.
But maybe Shannon’s been practicing or something.
I know better than anyone how much time she puts into making everything she does look effortless.
And she certainly looks the part of a pop star in her sequined miniskirt, a purchase I don’t recognize.
A purchase that means she’s been shopping without me.
I don’t have any time to dwell on how her friendship is slipping away from me before Shannon hits me with the next blow. “And now,” she says in her most tantalizing I-am-the-first-to-everything voice, “for the first time in Stratford history, please welcome the vocal stylings of … Jasmine Killary!”
She’s joking. She has to be. When did Jasmine even get here?
But sure enough, there she is, stepping up to the mic and laughing with Shannon as everyone cheers.
Her hair is in a glossy high ponytail that swirls around her shoulders—shoulders bared by cutouts in her skin-colored dress and glittering with a dusting of gold.
I’m too short to see anything else, but she’s head-to-head with Shannon so she must be wearing at least three-inch heels.
She’s dressed to get every single eye in the room on her, and it’s working.
I couldn’t take mine off her if I tried.
The music starts—Shannon must’ve flipped it on—and my brain is such a blur it takes me a few seconds to figure out what song she chose. But there’s a lot of whistling from the hornier members of the football team who do know.
And, with the first word, it clicks.
Demi Lovato’s “Cool for the Summer,” a fucking anthem for girls exploring each other’s bodies.
Jasmine’s low, sexy voice can’t hit Demi’s higher notes, but she’s singing about fooling around with a girl and absolutely nobody gives a shit about her vocal skills.
Behind me, even Chase is whistling, his hands on my shoulders, ironically the only thing to keep me steady when my body wants to shake uncontrollably.
Every lyric cuts me like a knife, and I wait for her to make eye contact, to tell me to my face that she’s reducing our summer to a little curiosity, but she never does.
Instead, she goes all in, flirting with what feels like literally everyone else in the audience.
Thanks to Shannon’s proximity, people are whispering, coming up with their own interpretations, even as Jasmine practically sits in Paulie Wolman’s lap.
Everything about this is awful, except that it isn’t.
Watching her perform is incredible, and when I close my eyes, her voice strokes me the way her fingers used to.
I’m a horrible person, standing with my boyfriend and completely melting at a girl’s voice, at the memory of her touch.
To make it worse, I suspect—though you can never know with Jasmine—this song was chosen to tell me to fuck all the way off and give up trying to have any semblance of a connection with her, that any deeper meaning to this summer was entirely in my head.
“She’s good, huh?” Chase murmurs in my ear, dropping his elbows onto my shoulders, lightly brushing a hand against my boob as if he knows watching Jasmine is turning me inside out, making me want to be touched.
That it’s making me want what being alone with him upstairs didn’t.
That I’m more attracted to Jasmine, to this girl who seems to hate me, than I am to my incredible boyfriend.
All at once, way too much crashes into place.