Chapter 5
RIGHT OFF THE BAT, THE girls could tell he wasn’t from Seaside.
It was tradition for the high school kids to flock to Wonderland on the very last Saturday of summer break—the mixture of townies and tourists was part of the fun.
From their vantage point across the crowded midway, the man with the sandy blond hair was definitely a tourist, and also at least ten years too old to be in high school.
But neither of those things deterred the three of them from watching him as they licked their ice cream cones and speculated about where he might be from.
“California, for sure,” Lorelei said, and they all nodded. “How old do you think he is?”
“Twenty-eight,” Barb said without hesitation.
Her chocolate ice cream was melting faster than she could eat it.
It had been a mistake to get two scoops.
Even with the ocean breeze, Wonderland always felt twenty degrees hotter than the rest of Seaside.
Too much asphalt and metal and concrete, not nearly enough shade. “Maybe thirty. In other words, old.”
“That’s not old,” Nicolette said. She had finished her single scoop of vanilla and was daintily nibbling around the cone’s edges. “That’s seasoned. And don’t you like older men? We all know you’re crushing on Hawk.”
“Shut up,” Barb said, feeling her cheeks flush.
“Yeah, I don’t get that one,” Lorelei said. “Mr. Hawksfield’s weird. I caught him staring at me once.”
“You think everyone is staring at you,” Nicolette snapped. “Pretty sure you’re not his type.”
“I’m everyone’s type,” Lorelei replied. “Duh.”
Barb focused on her melting ice cream so she wouldn’t have to participate in this particular conversation.
Daniel Hawksfield was her favorite teacher, and she didn’t think of him as old; he was only twenty-six.
He was also the faculty advisor for the school yearbook, which meant that he and Barb had spent a lot of time together over the last school year.
Nothing inappropriate had ever happened between them.
But deep down, she kind of wished something would.
“I told you not to get two scoops,” Nicolette said with disgust, eyeing Barb as she tossed her glossy dark hair over her shoulder. “I thought you wanted to lose ten pounds.”
“Oh, leave her alone,” Lorelei said. Unlike Barb, Lorelei had no patience for Nicolette’s snark. “Nobody even asked you.”
But Nicolette had no intention of leaving it alone.
Barb had known her two best friends since kindergarten, and Nicolette Montes’s mood swings were legendary even before the puberty hormones had taken over.
If she was feeling irritated, frustrated, or bad about herself, she had no problem lashing out at whoever was around, and she never worried about the consequences.
And yet people always forgave her for the mean things she said.
Barb always felt it was because Nicolette was pretty. Pretty girls got away with everything. Of the three of them, Nicolette was the beauty, Lorelei was the brave one, and Barb was the brains. Lorelei once joked that they should have a show on MTV, something like Real World.
“We could call it Real Girls,” Lorelei had said with a laugh. “And have the cameras follow us around to capture our school life and home life and all our cute outfits and boyfriend drama.”
“I have no cute outfits or boyfriend drama,” Barb had replied.
“I’d be on a show like that in a heartbeat.” Nicolette had appeared delighted at the idea. “I mean, I’d have to get a whole new fucking family that isn’t completely embarrassing, but I’d do it.”
Nicolette’s parents fought all the time.
Her father, Richard Montes, was a longtime member of the Devil’s Dukes motorcycle club and had been in and out of prison for most of Nicolette’s life.
Whenever he wasn’t locked up, he was usually too busy outlawing and messing around with other women to be much of a family man.
Nicolette also had an older half-brother named Ray who’d come to live with them when he was five after his biological mother died from a meth overdose.
Deanna Montes resented Ray, his very existence a daily reminder of her husband’s infidelity.
And she resented Nicolette, too, who seemed to remind her of the beauty she once was before alcohol had destroyed her face and her figure, leaving her with nothing but seething resentment for everyone around her whose life seemed easier than hers.
Lorelei Glass, on the other hand, had never known her father at all.
Her mother, Renata, had raised her alone, and for the most part, they’d had a happy home life up until the year before, when Renata married Burt Kieswetter, the manager of a Kia dealership in nearby Portland.
Lorelei tolerated Burt—barely—but she couldn’t stand her new stepbrother, Marty.
As far as she was concerned, there was nothing worse than living with a skinny, gassy, pasty-faced eighteen-year-old boy whose bedroom was right next to hers.
She hated Marty with the fire of a thousand suns, and was counting the days until he left for college.
They’d already seen Marty twice at Wonderland, loping around by himself like he usually did.
Barb felt bad for him. It couldn’t be easy to move to a small town like Seaside, which welcomed tourists with warm smiles, but new residents with suspicion.
As he’d been the official yearbook photographer, Barb had gotten to know him a bit, and though she’d never admit it to Lorelei, she thought Marty was all right.
Then again, she didn’t have to live with him.
“There’s chocolate all over your face,” Nicolette said to Barb, shaking her out of her thoughts. “You look like you face-planted into a diaper.”
Barb’s hand flew to her cheek. It was clean, if a little sweaty from standing in the sun. Nicolette was messing with her. “You’re such an asshole.”
“Loser.”
“Bitch.”
“Ding-dong.”
“Shut up, both of you.” Lorelei was reapplying her lip gloss and keeping one eye on the guy they’d decided had to be from California, who was watching them with a bemused look on his face. “Should I go talk to him or wait for him to come over?”
“Neither,” Nicolette said. “Oh, hey, there’s Jonathan. Looks like they’ve got him on garbage duty.”
All three of them waved to a purple-uniformed Wonder Worker their age who was hauling a big bin of trash across the midway.
Nicolette and Jonathan had been hanging out on and off since they’d both been cast in the school play, but he definitely seemed more into her than she was into him.
He waved back sheepishly, but there was no shame in working at Wonderland.
The majority of Seaside kids got their first jobs here. It was practically a rite of passage.
Which was exactly the reason none of them ever wanted to work here.
The girls had a theory that anyone who got a job at Wonderland was cursed to spend the rest of their life in Seaside, which was the last thing any of them wanted.
It wasn’t that life in a small town was so terrible.
But it was quiet. Predictable. A place where dreams were contained rather than encouraged.
And they all had big dreams.
Barb wanted to be a writer. Nothing literary or highbrow, mind you; nothing like the fussy books they read in Hawk’s English class with the beautiful prose and the vague endings that always left her frustrated and confused about what actually happened.
She dreamed of writing dark, page-turning, unapologetically commercial novels that would make her rich, though the only person she’d ever admitted this to was Hawk.
Her teacher had laughed and said, “I get it, Barb, I do. But you have to study the highbrow stuff first so you can learn how to write the stories you want to tell.”
Nicolette’s dreams were even bigger. Though her family couldn’t afford acting or singing lessons, she dreamed of being a movie star. After high school, her plan was to move to either LA or New York and start auditioning.
It was Lorelei’s dream that seemed the most likely to come true.
She wanted to be a fashion designer, and thanks to her mother’s old Singer sewing machine, she was already skilled at customizing her own clothes.
Today she was wearing a cropped white tank top with an old plaid miniskirt she’d thrifted from Goodwill, and both were tailored to hug her body perfectly.
While Lorelei wasn’t as objectively pretty as Nicolette, she had a certain quality that caught the attention of boys.
And men, too, considering the guy who’d been staring at them was finally walking over.
He didn’t get very far before a tall, thin, ginger-haired boy popped out of nowhere, snapping a Polaroid picture before any of them had a chance to react. “Great,” Marty said. “Got it.”
“What the fuck?” Lorelei snapped at her stepbrother. “You didn’t even ask first.”
“If I’d asked, it wouldn’t be a candid shot,” Marty said as the photo ejected from the base of the camera.
He smiled at the three of them, seemingly unbothered by his stepsister’s viciousness. Then again, Marty seemed unbothered about most things in general. Barb kind of liked that about him, that he seemed comfortable being a loner and wasn’t sensitive to other people’s opinions.
Lorelei found it creepy. “He doesn’t feel things the way other people feel things,” she’d once complained. “When his dog died, he just buried it up at the cabin and got on with his weekend. He’d had that dog for thirteen years.”
“You’re supposed to ask someone before you take a picture,” Nicolette informed Marty, glaring up at him. “Who even takes pictures with a Polaroid anyway? Where’s the digital camera you use for the yearbook?”
“I had to give it back to the school.” Marty waved the ejected photo gently. “I like my old Polaroid. The photos can’t be edited. It makes what they capture totally genuine.”
He offered the photo to Barb, who took it with some reluctance.
She hated having her picture taken. But surprisingly, it was a good shot.
Marty had gotten the three of them standing in a row, heads all turned in the same direction, and Barb almost looked pretty.
Behind them was the Wonder Wheel, perfectly centered.
The stranger from California had also ended up in the picture.
He was standing off to the side, but looking directly at the camera.
“Not bad,” she said.
“Let me see that.” Nicolette plucked the photo out of Barb’s hand and examined it closely. “I guess it’s not terrible. Let me try your camera.”
Marty handed her the Polaroid without hesitation. Nicolette attempted to take a picture of her own face, but she was too close to the lens and it came out blurry. She then snapped a photo of Barb and Marty, whose head was nearly cut off. Their height difference was comical.
Barb slipped all the Polaroids into her pocket, to add later to the pin board in her bedroom.
“Are you guys going to the drive-in later?” Marty asked them. “I can get you in for free.”
Lorelei’s stepbrother had been working at the Starlight all summer, an enviable gig. Free movies and half-price food for the employees, but you had to be eighteen to work there.
“And we’re supposed to get there how, genius?” Lorelei snapped at him. “It’s a drive-in, and none of us drive. Weren’t you and your dad supposed to go to the cabin this weekend? Or did you stay home to hang with your friends? Oh, wait, you have no friends.”
Nicolette snickered, but Barb felt a small stab of guilt for how the other two were treating him.
The problem was, Marty made it so damned easy.
Dressed in khaki shorts and a plaid button-down, he was the worst kind of dork—the kind of dork who didn’t know he was a dork, and therefore could not be rehabilitated.
The pale skin and red hair didn’t help. He very much resembled the comic book character Archie Andrews if Archie were weird and socially awkward.
After he loped off, Lorelei grimaced. “I hate him so much. Did I tell you guys that I found a pair of my panties in his room? He said it must have gotten mixed up in the laundry, but that doesn’t explain how they got under his pillow.”
Barb frowned. “But why were you in his room looking under his pillow?”
“I was looking for—”
“Heads up, bitches,” Nicolette said. “That guy Lorelei’s been eye-fucking for the past half hour is finally coming over.”
“Holy shit,” Lorelei said, panicking. “How’s my hair?”
“I don’t think it’s your hair he’s interested in,” Barb said.
“What’s up, ladies?” a drawling voice said, and they all turned their attention to the man now approaching. If Marty was all angles and awkwardness, then this man was the opposite—smooth and sinewy, as if he had all the time in the world.
And there was no mistaking it: He was a man.
Lean and tanned, he had chin-length sandy hair and was wearing ripped jeans, scuffed Vans, and a vintage Blondie T-shirt with Debbie Harry’s face on it.
His gaze roamed languorously over Lorelei’s body, his pale blue eyes skimming the length of her body up and down, and up again.
Lorelei broke the silence by saying what all three of them were surely thinking. “How old are you?”
He grinned, revealing a small chip in his front tooth. “Old enough to know you’re too young for me.”
His attention shifted briefly to Nicolette, who smirked and said nothing. He then glanced over at Barb, but before she could tell him that Blondie was her mother’s favorite band, his focus was already back on Lorelei.
As if he didn’t even see Barb. As if Barb weren’t standing there at all.
“I’m Sam,” he said to Lorelei, drinking her in. It was clear he had made his choice. “And fuck me, you’re beautiful.”
“Fuck you?” Lorelei cocked her head, a small smile playing at the corners of her raspberry-glossed lips. “Maybe. We’ll see how it goes.”