Free Biggest Flirts by Jennifer Echols Page A

little mean, even for him, “Thx but no thx.”
    I plopped my phone down on my lap in frustration. I ordered Chelsea, “Go down there and tell old Angelica she has to get Will out of the sun. He doesn’t understand that the five o’clock rays will still fry him.”
    “I’m not getting in the middle of this,” Chelsea said.
    “In the middle of what?” I asked innocently. But I felt myself blush at the idea that Will and I were in a messy love triangle.
    “Besides,” Chelsea said, “if that player fries, he deserves it.”
    “What?” I asked. “Will? Why is he a player?” My heart sank at the thought that he might have dropped Angelica off to go night-night after practice, but he had another girl on the side. This hadn’t occurred to me.
    Chelsea gasped. “He went home with you after Brody Larson’s party, then dumped you for Angelica the next day, and now he’s here feeling her up at the beach after he basically felt you up at band practice all morning! Don’t you even care?”
    I wasn’t sure what she meant when she said he’d felt me up. True, at every practice, Ms. Nakamoto called through her microphone, “Mr. Matthews, get off Ms. Cruz.” In fact, Jimmy had taken to looking at his phone and announcing the elapsed time between her reprimands—“One hour, forty-five minutes”—like we were going for a record. But in one of those instances, Will had been helping me adjust my snare harness. It only looked like he was molesting me. On another occasion, he caught me in a headlock, which I really enjoyed, after I mentioned lutefisk to see what he would do. So that was my fault. And several of those times, he was spreading sunscreen on my back at my request. Ms. Nakamoto simply didn’t catch me when I was lotioning him up.
    “He’s cute, though,” Chelsea said. “I look forward to seeing that around school this year. I’m not helping you, but, yeah, you should go warn him before he gets burned. Hey!” When she called out to DeMarcus, who was passing by, he helped her backward off the rock. They walked toward the open-air pavilion where the food was, abandoning me to carry out my own mission.
    I scrambled down to the beach. But as I moseyed toward Will and Angelica, who were oblivious that I was about to disturb their romantic moment, I felt less and less like a friend aiming to avert a medical tragedy and more and more like a scheming bitch. Will was seventeen years old, and he could put on his own sunscreen. He couldn’t reach his back, though. And he didn’t seem to have a lick of sense when it came to the Florida sun. I ought to let Angelica take care of him, but obviously she wasn’t willing or able.
    So I knelt in front of them—I knew I should not be doing this as I did it—and said in a low tone that spoke of my mature health concerns, “Angelica, you can’t let Will get burned out here, no matter how much you’re enjoying second base.” I waited only until she sat up and scowled at me in outrage. Her movements jostled Will’s sunglasses down on his nose. He opened one eye and frowned at me.
    Mission accomplished. I walked down the beach and got drafted into a volleyball game, baritones versus tubas. They thought I would be good to have on the team because I was tall. By the time they figured out I wasn’t good at volleyball, it was too late for them to kick me out. I ate until I was stuffed—I realized suddenly that I’d been living on Pop-Tarts for the entire week, now that I wasn’t working at the Crab Lab and scarfing free food—and then lounged on the beach with my friends, swam, and got into a splash fight with Jimmy and Travis (which I won).
    I had a lot of fun, like always. But the entire time, I was aware of where Will was, and what he was doing with Angelica. My scolding seemed to have shaken them out of sun-worshipper mode, and they secluded themselves on a shady bench. When the sun went down, they joined everyone in the pavilion. DeMarcus’s parents had hauled