Summer Love by Jill Santopolo

Author:Jill Santopolo
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Group US
Published: 2014-05-01T04:00:00+00:00

Click here to go back to hanging out by the pool with Tasha and Jade.

- - - - -

Click here to go back to the beginning and start over.

YOU sit back down in your chaise lounge by the pool as quietly as you can so you don’t wake Tasha, but all the trying to be quiet ends up being a waste, because when you lean back, the hook keeping the backrest in place comes undone, and it clanks onto the brick patio. Tasha wakes up.

“Are you okay?” she asks, snapping up in her chair.

“I’m fine,” you tell her, as you get up to see what happened. “Minor chair malfunction, that’s all. You can go back to sleep if you want.”

She stretches, and you can already see a tan line forming at the edge of her bikini bottoms. Tasha sees it, too.

“Would you mind reapplying me?” she asks, holding out a bottle of sunscreen.

“Not at all,” you say.

Tasha squirts some sunscreen in your hand and some in her own. She starts on the front of her body, and you move to her back. “What SPF is this?” you ask her.

“Thirty,” she replies. “I always start with thirty at the beginning of the summer and then work down to fifteen once I have a base tan.”

You wonder if that’s a real thing: a base tan.

As you rub the lotion under her bikini strap, she keeps talking. “You know, I read an article that said that all the higher SPFs—the ones like fifty and eighty and whatever—it’s just marketing. They don’t work any better than thirty.”

“Is that true?” you ask her. You’re a bit incredulous. How would the companies be allowed to say that the sun protection factor was higher if it’s really just a lie?

Tasha shrugs. “That’s what the article said. I didn’t fact-check it or anything. Want me to do you?”

You nod, and Tasha reapplies sunscreen to your back while you do your front. The fastest way to ruin a beach vacation is to get sunburned the first afternoon you’re there. You know this from experience.

When you’re done with the sunscreen, Tasha picks up a copy of Entertainment Weekly you’ve brought out. You grab a copy of People.

“Okay,” Tasha says. “Here’s the game: whichever one of us finds the least flattering picture of a celebrity in our magazine wins. Go!”

That seems sort of mean. “How about most flattering,” you say.

Tasha rolls her eyes at you. “You’re really nice, you know that?” she asks.

Sometimes you are, but not always. You don’t say that, though. What you say is, “I just wanted two chances to win.”

“Fine,” Tasha says. “Most flattering and least flattering. And winner decides where we eat tonight.”

“Deal,” you say, opening your magazine.

But before you can get too far in, you hear the gate to the street open. You turn around, and two muscular guys without shirts walk into the backyard.

“Um,” you whisper, “Tasha? Who are they? Did you order them for my birthday?”

She looks up from her magazine, and her face lights up.

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