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Well, Preston is a WASP. Not just any elite prick, but one from someseriousold money. Cut him, he’ll bleed liquid gold.
That’s Billie’s guy. But only in the summer.
This summer…
This one will be their last.
He just doesn’t know it yet.
There’s a snap of manicured fingers in front of a pale, freckle-dusted face. “Billie-George.”
The sound of her name in song snaps Billie right out of her thoughts, like a bucket of ice-water was just thrown over her.
She blinks out of her early moonshine haze—the gloss of only two or three swigs from her ‘water’bottle by noon that’s left her somewhere in the booze triangle: Content, sleepy, and irritated.
It shows in her twisted face as she squints up at her closest friend, the girl from the same side of the tracks as she, but the one who will charge her way out of the crappy life-cards they were dealt.
Kate looms over her. Her full lips wear a pastel pink gloss and a satisfied smirk, a mockery of using her full name.
Billie-George. Makes her want to gag. No one calls her that.
Billie murmurs, using her hand as a makeshift shade, flattened against her head to shield her pale eyes. “What the fuck,Mary-Kate?”
Kate’s smirk turns into a smile, something sincere but fleeting. Like Billie, she doesn’t care too much for her full first name. Both of them got stuck with the hyphenated thing, sure, but they both damn well know that Billie’s is downright embarrassing and Kate’s is charming.
“Don’t salute. That’s what Nazis do, B.” Kate smacks Billie’s hand away from the side of her head. “Did you get a dress for tonight?”
They might have been calling each other ‘besties’ since they met in elementary school, and still would today if either still used that term, butfuck,Kate annoyed Billie with her preppy-bullshit ways.
Thing about Kate is she tries too hard. Too hard to convince others but mainly herself that she isn’t from the southside of the old tracks; that she didn’t grow up in a cabin falling apart at the seams; that she’s some established All-American lady in the making. Kate, with her wide, false smile she displays for outsiders, her prim posture she developed around the time she started dating preppy-frat-boy-from-old-money-Trevor, it’s all as fake as that patterned, slightly woolen Chanel skirt she wears. A knock-off, of course.
Billie leans back on the bench. Slumping, she hits down her shades—some designer things that Preston got her for her last birthday, all scratched up now—and her uncombed strands of bleached blonde hair fall over her face.
“Borrowed one,” she answers and cups the water bottle close, her thumb toying with the pop-off lid.
Kate arches her perfectly penciled and combed eyebrow. Her dark-hazel eyes gleam with the question before she asks, “From…?”
She damn well knows the answer. She just wants the chance to chew and spit Billie out.
Billie rocks her leg back and forth, smacking the now-tasteless gum in her mouth as she looks up at Kate from the shield of the Ray Bans. “Got it from Tammy. So what?”
“Borrowed, you said.” Kate’s hazel eyes darken to match the smooth brown of her skin. “Loaned, is what you should have said. How much?”
Billie’s grin is crooked. Pink bubblegum sticks out from her bite.
She shrugs. “Ten bucks.”
Kate says, “That’s a bargain, given that everything Tammy loans out isstolen.”
Spitting out the gum, Billie throws up her hands. “What’s the problem?”
“I don’t get you.” Kate sighs and, shaking her head of freshly weaved blonde hair, parks herself beside the tipsy blonde. “You spiral when you and Preston break up. And when you are back together, headed in a good direction—this is what you do.”
“This ain’t about him. So I got a dress from Tammy. What’s that got to do with Preston?”
Kate’s mouth turns down with a frown. “It’s about him. You do this all the time—this no effort act of yours. You pretend you don’t care. Push him away. I won’t say it seems as though you stop trying, because I see that you are trying—trying to push him away as much as possible.”
Billie peels off her shades.
