Girl at Sea Read Free

would make such a good beach blanket, except she had never taken it to the beach. It covered the bamboo chair in the corner of her room. Ollie wore long, blue trunks with a pattern of flames coming from the bottom of each leg. She wore a red bikini. She didn’t own a red bikini, but she was wearing one. Sometimes her brain misfired in the fantasy and gave her red boots as well, and she would have to fix the image and start again.
    Anyway, they were on the beach, sharing the blanket. Clio’s best friend, Jackson, was there on a towel next to them. Jackson would be trying to read her magazine, but every time she looked 11

    up, Clio and Ollie would be kissing again. Obviously, because he was so tall—he was like Mr. Torso—he would have to crane his neck down to kiss her.
    “Seriously,” Jackson would say. “You guys. You have to stop.”
    “I can’t,” Ollie would say. “Come on, look at her! I can’t.”
    And then something would happen—Clio couldn’t figure out what, but something—that would pull Ollie away for a minute.
    Maybe he would rescue a small child from a giant tangle of killer New Jersey seaweed. Jackson would move closer and say, “Sorry.
    It’s just jealousy. You guys are so perfect together. It’s not fair.”
    “Yeah . . .” Clio would answer. “I know.”
    Long sigh here.
    “You were right to wait seventeen years for the perfect, kissable guy,” Jackson would go on. “I just dated whichever guy crossed my path. I feel dirty now. Cheap. Like a balled-up napkin from a coffee place that you find at the bottom of your purse, and it’s kind of . . . hard. And you don’t know why. That’s what I feel like. The mystery napkin.”
    Clio would smile benevolently.
    Admittedly, the real Jackson would never say this, not in a million years. The real Jackson considered herself a connoisseur of kisses. In fact, she classified them using the same method normally employed by wine tasters. She claimed this was the best way. A look test. A sniff test. A taste test. A consistency test.
    Some guys, she explained, had a thin, smooth technique.
    Quick, darting moves. They tended to taste of mint because they were obsessed with technique and chewed gum com-pulsively if they thought they had any shot at all. Some were more 12

    full-bodied. With them, it was a slower experience, one that Jackson always said had “woody aftertones.”
    She stopped short of the swilling-and-spitting part of the wine-tasting metaphor because it kind of fell apart there.
    The phone was ringing again. Unknown number. Clio had reached her house by this point. The call could wait. She had good news to deliver first.
    13

    Where There Is a Balloon,
    There Is Always a Pin
    This was a Thursday night, and Thursday nights were Clio’s mother’s date night. Date nights had been going on for the last eight months—basically, since the start of the school year, when Rob (the date) turned up on a tour of the Philadelphia Museum of Art that her mom had been leading. Thursday was the only free night they had in common, so it became the night that Clio got the house to herself, plus twenty dollars to spend on Thai takeout. Thursdays smelled of jasmine and ginger and were washed down with delicious, sugary Thai iced teas. Jackson would probably come over at some point, and they’d do homework or watch TV. Or they’d just blast music and mess around online.
    Thursdays were beautiful things, and this was the king of Thursdays.
    But her mom was home, and she didn’t look even remotely date-ready. She was standing at the kitchen bar in one of the 14

    oversized men’s dress shirts she always wore when she’d been working in the studio. Her hair was in pigtails. Suki, Clio’s orange cat, sat on one of the stools looking deeply shocked about something. Clio picked him up, set him gently on the floor, and took his seat. There was nothing to eat at the bar but a jar of sesame seeds her mom had left out after cooking last night’s stir-fry.