Postcards From Last Summer Read Free

happened to you?”
    I pulled the wet surf shirt away from my tummy, trying to distort my overall shape. This was the reason I hadn’t called Darcy or Tara when I arrived last week. I’d decided to play it under the radar, but necessity had forced me into her sights this morning.
    â€œI mean, I heard you put on a few pounds but, whoa, girl,” Darcy pushed on. “Time to drive past the drive-thru.”
    â€œThanks for sharing, but I didn’t call you in to be my personal trainer,” I said, trying not to reveal that she’d stung me anyway. I pointed down the beach, to where Kevin McGowan, the love of Darcy’s life, lay in a drunken heap. She nearly yelped when she spotted him there. “The lifeguards are going to call the police if he’s not out of here in ten minutes,” I told her.
    â€œOh, poor Kevin!” She pressed a fist to her glossed lips and began marching down the beach toward him. “Is he okay?” she yelled back over her shoulder. “Did anyone even check? Maybe he’s sick.”
    Against my better judgment, I followed her. “He’s drunk, Darcy. Or stoned. And he’s scaring people away from Bikini Beach.”
    â€œMaybe he just fell and hit his head or something,” she said hopefully.
    â€œHe was here with Fish.” Fenwick “Fish” Peters, local pothead, was Kevin’s sidekick, supplier, and enabler. “Fish left when the lifeguards mentioned calling the police.”
    â€œThat is just so wrong,” Darcy said. “This is parkland. A free beach. Kevin should be able to take a nap, just like anybody else.”
    â€œA nap?” I stopped walking, not wanting to get any closer to Kevin, a nasty drunk. Darcy and I had been down the road of denial before. She refused to accept that the boy she had some twisted attraction to had an addictive personality. “What’s wrong is that your boyfriend, who’s so blown out of his shorts he can’t even stand, is freaking out little kids and families.”
    She froze, then turned to glare at me. “Well, isn’t that just the voice of compassion from the psych major? How can you talk that way about my boyfriend? You never did like him, did you?”
    Strike two—I couldn’t stand the love of her life. In my book, Kevin McGowan was a soulless, spineless creature, a scavenger bird, circling until he could swoop down on the next feeding frenzy. Aside from the fact that his father owned Coney’s, one of the coolest hangouts in the Hamptons, I didn’t understand the attraction at all.
    â€œYou know what I think?” she said when I didn’t answer. “I think you’re just jealous of Kevin. Jealous that he’s my boyfriend.”
    In her dreams. Darcy had been sniffing after Kevin McGowan since she was ten years old, the day we came across Kevin in his cutoff denim shorts trying to float down the beach in an apple crate. Not even in a trainer bra yet, and Darcy had begun plotting and scheming ways to win over the smiley, freckle-faced boy and secure her place as Mrs. Kevin McGowan, queen of a small but popular restaurant empire. It was a dream we’d all come to call the Darcy and Kevin Bliss Package, as if it were something you could win on a game show. The big quandary was that Kevin wasn’t falling for Darcy. Although she possessed the three girl B ’s my brother’s friends so admired—Blond, Beautiful, and Bodacious in Bed—for reasons none of us could decipher, Kevin remained lukewarm toward her.
    But I didn’t want to go there, especially since I was already low on her list. This year she was drinking age and I was not, which probably accounted for the fact that I hadn’t heard from her at all over the past week. So now my limited summer options were dwindling fast. There’d be no cruising in Darcy’s lipstick red convertible, no tanning by the pool, no country club visits or