Any Other Girl (4 page)

“It's the reason for your bad track record with boys, you know,” Harper said, her gaze following a tiny squirrel as it shimmied up a tree at the side of the road. “Guys don't like it when you flirt with other guys either.”

“No, it's because every guy I've ever dated has been incredibly insecure,” I said. “Not my fault.”

She shook her head at me. “Oh, Katty.”

“Oh, Harpy.”

Laughing now, we approached the two-lane road at the end of the gravel and looked both ways. Cars flew down that road at reckless speeds, and if a person wasn't careful, they could end up as flattened as the assortment of wildlife that was brave enough to attempt crossing.

“Clear,” I shouted, and we took off across the road, careful not to lose a flip-flop on the way like Harper had done last summer. Three more minutes and we were coming up on Goody's, a small, ramshackle beacon of light and grease.

When I swung open the heavy wooden door and walked in, I couldn't help but stagger back and shriek, “What the
hell
?”

Harper stepped in behind me, her eyes as wide as mine undoubtedly were. Goody's had vanished. The grungy black and white floor tiles had been replaced with shiny dark hardwood, the ripped padded booths had turned into small round tables, and the sticky, laminated menus were thick, creamy paper. Everything familiar was gone, exchanged for . . . whatever this was trying to be. And the jukebox . . . where was our jukebox?

Sherry—owner, operator, and all-around Jill-of-all-trades at Goody's—appeared in the empty dining room, dressed in her usual uniform of black pants and a checked shirt. At least
one
thing had remained the same.

“Sherry, what happened?” I demanded.

“Oh, hey! Welcome back, girls,” she said, walking over to us and grabbing a couple menus off the stack near the cash register. “Just two?”

We stood there gaping at her until she explained herself. Renovations had taken place over the spring, apparently, in an effort to make the diner “classier” and “more accessible” to customers—which was weird because the vast majority of Goody's customers consisted of people who summered at Millard Lake and long-haul truck drivers.

In other words, she'd sold out.

“The jukebox?” I asked hopefully as she led us to a table.

She shook her head. “Sold it.”

Harper and I looked at each other in disbelief. No more singing along to “Yakety Yak” as we waited for our burgers and shakes. No more shabby, vintage ambiance. The food, Sherry assured us, was pretty much the same, with a few added dishes. At least we still had that.

As we waited for our orders, I ran my hand over the smooth, clean tablecloth (tablecloth!) and wondered what it meant when the place that was supposed to kick off the best summer ever wasn't the same place we once knew.

chapter 4

T
he next morning, I got up extra early. After gobbling down a bowl of cereal, I threw on a pair of jeans and a hoodie, located my heavy black boots, and headed out to the garage.

The sun had barely cleared the horizon, and the air felt chilly and damp. I breathed in, enjoying the fresh, unadulterated scent as I unlocked the garage door and pulled it up. The detached garage, installed by the previous owners, was home to a lot of things—the lawnmower, bikes, tools, and anything else one might need over the summer.

Taking up most of the small space, however, was the sole reason I'd dragged myself out of bed at the butt crack of dawn: my Yamaha Raptor Sport Quad ATV.

I'd started trail riding a couple years ago, after Dad had taught me the basics. At first, I wasn't sure I'd like riding. Zooming along the bumpy terrain on a loud, dirty ATV sounded more suited to the younger me, before I'd abandoned soccer cleats and mud for makeup and sundresses.
A sundress would be a disastrous fashion choice for this
, I thought as I secured my goggles, helmet, and gloves. When I was ready, I rolled the ATV onto the driveway and checked it over. Dad had de-winterized it for me yesterday evening, testing the tire pressure and lubing the drive chain and whatever else he needed to do. I didn't know much about the mechanics of it all—I just loved to ride.

I pressed the start button and then cringed, knowing the engine noise would probably wake my parents. Dad wouldn't care, but Pop always worried when I was out riding. According to him, all-terrain vehicles were even worse for my health than Pop Tarts and coffee. For one, they could potentially kill me outright. But so could a lot of things.

When I got to a steady roll, I let out the clutch, shifted into first, and gave it some gas.
Slow and easy at first
, I heard Dad say in my head.
Get a feel for it.
By the time I reached my favorite riding path in the woods, I felt confident enough to speed up a bit. Soon, I could feel the familiar lightness in my chest, pure joy bubbling up as I traversed the jagged earth, my body lifting and twisting to absorb the impact. My laughter echoed through the confines of my helmet, and for a moment I felt completely, utterly, unabashedly free.

I was so absorbed in my adrenaline rush of freedom that I barely noticed the flash of red up ahead on my left. At first glance, I assumed it was some kind of animal. A deer or maybe even a black bear, both of which I'd encountered now and then on my rides. But deer and bears didn't wear red tank tops, and I'd never hit an animal the way I was pretty sure I was about to hit this human.

Frantically, I mashed the hand brake, but it was no use. The human was running toward me, oblivious, out for a nice, early morning jog in the serene woods. As I barreled closer, I had just enough time to register that the jogger was actually a young guy before swerving sharply to the right, missing him by a couple feet. The ATV came to a stop inches from the base of a tree, and I immediately twisted around, searching for him. He who had appeared out of nowhere had disappeared. Maybe I
had
hit him, and his body was lying in a nearby shrub, mangled and bloody. My heart in my throat, I threw the ATV in reverse.

Relief coursed through me when I spotted him in the exact spot we'd nearly collided moments before. Instead of peacefully running, he was half bent over and panting like someone who'd just narrowly escaped death—which he probably had.

“Are you okay?” I asked through my helmet. My face felt like it was on fire. Not only had I almost flattened a guy like a fox on the highway, I'd almost flattened a
cute
guy who looked no older than nineteen.

He just stared at me, his blue, blue eyes taking in my outfit and helmet before finally resting on the only body parts of mine that were exposed—my eyes, which were no doubt wide and panicked behind their goggles. He stood up straight, yanked out his earbuds, and gave me a look that could only be described as murderous.

“Maybe you should pay attention and watch where you're going,” he snarled at me over the loud rumble of my engine.

I jolted slightly on my seat. It wasn't often I got yelled at by a guy. My dads didn't believe in yelling, and I'd never tolerated it from boyfriends. Girls were a different story, but I could handle that. Getting yelled at by a total stranger for something that was only partially my fault? That wasn't gonna fly.

“How could you not see me?” I replied loud enough for my voice to penetrate the helmet and the engine noise.

“I was watching my footing so I wouldn't break an ankle.” He glared at me again, and even as I burned with indignation, I couldn't help but notice when a lock of his wavy brown hair fell across his forehead.

“How you could not see
me
?” he asked. “I'm wearing bright colors. Maybe you shouldn't ride that thing if you can't follow simple safety rules.”

“Maybe
you
would've heard me coming if your music wasn't so damn loud,” I said hotly. Before he could come back with another smartass reply, I shifted out of neutral and went on my merry way, leaving the jerk to stew in the trees all by himself.

 

I rode back to the cottage with my knees shaking and my blood racing. The trembling in my limbs didn't let up until after I'd shed my bulky clothes, took a shower, and dressed in a pair of pink capris and a white tube top.
Much better
, I thought as I smoothed my hair into a ponytail in front of the bathroom mirror. In this outfit, no one would ever suspect that I'd been inches away from plowing someone down. In this outfit, I looked innocent. Demure.

Feeling calmer, I headed over to Harper's cottage. The cool, dreary weather still hadn't cleared, so we hung out in the kitchen, making pancakes. Aunt Carrie didn't share her brother's passion for appliances, so their counters were always a lot less cluttered and easier to work on than ours. As we mixed ingredients together, I tried not to think about how this was the last summer I'd ever spend with my aunt and cousin at the lake. Because whenever I did, I wanted to cry in the batter. They'd been spending summers there even longer than we had. Aunt Carrie and her ex-husband Lawrence had bought the cottage outright, and she'd acquired it during their messy divorce four years ago. Actually, she'd gotten the cottage
and
Harper, because Lawrence no longer gave a crap about either.

Shaking off my sentimentality, I told them all about what had happened earlier in the woods. It felt good to get it all out, like confession.

“My God, Kat,” Harper said, horrified. “You could've killed him.”

I loved my cousin, but her steadfast insistence on keeping me in check freaking annoyed me sometimes. “I know, but I didn't.”

“Who was he?” Aunt Carrie asked from the couch where she was curled up with her coffee and a book.

“No idea.” I opened a container of blueberries and dumped some in the batter.

“Didn't you say there were new people moving in?” Harper asked.

Duh. Of course.
Obviously, he had to be one of the infamous Reeses, who'd taken over the Cantings' cottage. I wondered if they'd noticed the missing light bulb yet. “So, yeah,” I said, handing the mixing bowl to Harper so she could start the pancakes. “I think I might have gotten off on the wrong foot with the new neighbors.”

The three of us sat down to eat, filling our plates from the huge platter of pancakes and fruit in the middle of their small table.

“Heard from your aunt Beth lately, honey?” Aunt Carrie asked me as she speared a strawberry from the fruit tray.

“Not since Christmas. You?”

She shook her head, chewing. “You know how she is . . . always on the go, too busy to return her big sister's calls.”

I nodded even though I didn't really know “how she was.” I barely had any contact with Aunt Beth. She'd lived in England all my life and I'd only met her twice. Once when I was six, when she came to visit for a couple weeks in the summer, and once when I was twelve, when my dads and I went to London on vacation. Well, theoretically I'd met her three times, but I never counted that first time, seeing as I was just an embryo.

Aunt Beth was Pop's second youngest sister . . . and also my egg donor. When my dads decided they wanted a baby, she was the one who'd selflessly offered up her eggs for implantation. Growing up, my friends were always fascinated and slightly confused when I told them I was biologically related to
both
my fathers. Back then, I loved telling the story of how I came to be. It made me interesting. Unique. Of course, once my classmates and I hit preteen age and had some sex education under our belts, the first question asked was always something like, “Wait, so your father had sex with your
aunt
?” To this, I always rolled my eyes. For one, Dad was one hundred percent gay and always had been. For another, how weird would
that
be? The person who'd carried me and ultimately given birth to me hadn't been my aunt. For that part, they'd used a woman named Valerie from a surrogacy agency who wasn't genetically related to any of us. My friends usually lost interest after I started explaining to them how the fertility clinic had used one father's sperm and the other father's sister's eggs, mixed them in a dish like pancake batter, and then inserted the concoction into the surrogate. Of course, that was back when I was still comfortable discussing my dad's sperm.
Shudder.

So yes, my aunt Beth was technically my “bio mom” too, but I'd never thought of her like that any more than she thought of me as her daughter. She was simply the woman who'd bravely and generously donated her eggs so that my dads could realize their dream of having a child who was biologically connected to both of them. And the surrogate? She was a vessel, nourishing me and keeping me safe until it was time to hand me over to my real parents. I'd never wanted or needed a mother. My dads had always been enough. And I had Aunt Carrie, who always said
she
would've been my donor if it hadn't taken her ten years and several thousand dollars' worth of fertility treatments to have Harper. Harper and I often joked that we were too competitive to share her eggs anyway.

After brunch, Aunt Carrie took the leftover pancakes over to my dads while Harper and I took off for the lake. The sun had finally made an appearance and was quickly burning off the clouds. Maybe later it would get nice enough to lie out on my dock and start working on our tans.

Harper and I walked along the rocky shoreline, talking and jokingly looking for pretty stones like we used to when we were smaller. My room at the cottage was still filled with jars of interesting rocks, summer relics that lived there year-round. I didn't take home souvenirs at the end of August like some people. To me, summer only existed at the lake.

As we approached the McCurdys' dock, I almost grabbed Harper's arm and turned back. Nate McCurdy was standing at the edge of it, holding his cell phone up to the sky as if trying to get a signal.
Idiot.
Nate and his family had been coming to the lake as long as we had; he should've known how incompatible Millard Lake and modern technology could be.

“Try standing on your head while singing ‘Jingle Bells',” Harper called to him.

Great,
I thought.
Now he's going to speak to us.

Nate spun around, almost dropping his phone in the water. “Oh hey, ladies.” He recovered quickly, presenting us with his signature smarmy grin. Yes, he was the kind of teenage boy who called girls l
adies
, which was likely part of the reason why he never got any. Nate was good-looking, if you liked the gelled-hair preppy type, but he was just too douchy to take seriously.

“Hey, McTurdy,” I said, resurrecting the nickname I'd given him when we were twelve. It was still funny.

“Hey, Hurricane Katrina. How's it blowing?” At this, he cracked up.

“You do know that Hurricane Katrina killed almost two thousand people and left millions homeless, right?” I reminded him for the millionth time. I didn't like being referred to as a devastating natural disaster. Especially hours after I'd almost killed the new neighbor with my ATV.

“Who are you trying to call, McCurdy?” Harper asked, crossing her arms as she peered up at him from the shore. “Your girlfriend?”

I snorted. Any girlfriend Nate had ever managed to snag turned out to be short-lived. Not that it stopped him from trying. He'd been working on charming Harper and me for years, but we were too smart and self-respecting to fall for it.

“Why, are you jealous?” Nate said, slipping his phone into the front pocket of his board shorts and moving closer to us.

“More like sympathetic,” she replied. “Toward her, I mean.”

I snorted again, even louder. Normally, Harper was pretty shy, but Nate brought out the snark in her.

“For your information,” Nate said, sitting on the edge of the dock, facing us. “I was trying to text Emmett to let him know that the bonfire was officially on for tonight.”

“Who's Emmett?” I asked.

Nate smirked, like he enjoyed dangling scraps of bait for us to nibble on. “Emmett's the guy who moved into the Cantings' cottage. I met him earlier while I was looking for some dry kindling in the woods. I mentioned that I planned to have a bonfire tonight if the weather cleared up and told him he should come. He said okay. Seems like a cool guy.”

Harper looked at me and raised a blond eyebrow. Emmett. The cute guy who'd yelled at me in the woods that morning was named Emmett. And he was going to McTurdy's summer-kick-off bonfire on the beach, an annual event that Harper and I never missed because his mom always bought enough s'mores provisions to feed a small army.