Free Kiss Crush Collide by Christina Meredith Page A

changing room, momentarily caught, all pink and bookish, in her very own fluorescent spotlight.
    After yesterday’s outing I thought she would need to stay in the shade and administer cold drinks. Instead she’s back, and she’s wearing some kind of shiny Ravi Shankar caftan that sways around her ankles as she slowly makes her way from the changing room to my side of the pool.
    Freddie went through this totally annoying Beatles phase, so I know who Ravi Shankar is. Freddie and Evan would sit in her room with a lava lamp on and listen to
Yellow Submarine
over and over and over. Yorke told her it was worth it only if she was going to get high, or at least listen to
Sgt. Pepper’s,
but at the time Freddie was not willing to risk any brain cells or her chance at being valedictorian.
    I’ll bet that is what next year is for—illicit drugs and sex abroad. Although I know Freddie and Evan already do it. I guess he talked about it in the locker room after practice, so everybody knows, but the idea totally grosses me out.
    I just don’t think Evan is cute, although that really doesn’t make sense since he is just a lankier version of Shane, who is just a younger version of Evan, who kind of looks like my dad, and Roger looks like them all but just a bit more pinched and trimmed.
Merde.
    Valerie walks by my chair, a scuffed and scraped canvas tote bag heavy with books slung over one bony shoulder and the edge of her striped beach towel swiping along behind her on the deck. I can’t resist.
    I lean down, smiling fakely, my Lycra-covered boobs pressing warmly onto the tops of my knees as I ask, “Can I expect this pleasure every day?”
    “I bought a season pass,” she replies, slowing for a moment to grin back at me with a smile just as fake as mine, before she continues on, pulling at her beach towel in an ongoing struggle to drag it up onto her book-free shoulder and walk at the same time.
    Watching her go, the towel trailing over her shoulder like a terry-cloth boa, I lean back and think, Well, there goes her science fair money.
    Troy clicks on the office radio, and classic rock rolls across the surface of the pool, filling the spaces between the lazy splashes and soft laughter and the occasional odd remark from Valerie.
    “That man is absolutely rotund,” she says suddenly, to no one apparently, and I look over to see her examining a fat man waddling across the deck near the shallow end in a disturbingly tight madras suit.
    I can practically hear her bones grinding against the cement from way up here when she rolls onto her stomach, pulls a pink highlighter from between her front teeth, and watches a diver arc off the high dive.
    “Not a good angle,” she comments like an Olympic judge, lowering her eyes back down to her book.
    The diver is still underwater, making his way through the glowing water of the diving well, so I am guessing the ongoing dialogue is meant for me.
    When she calls out, “George Washington Carver was an excellent swimmer,” I have no doubt. She is trying to lead me astray educationally and drive me bat shit at the same time.
    I decide to ignore her completely. First because I don’t think her views regarding the swimming skills of the preeminent inventor of peanut agricultural science are true or in any way verifiable, but mostly because I think it should cost anyone, and especially her, way more than fifty-five dollars to get to torture me for the entire summer.
    At the stroke of nine, mostly everybody packs up and heads for the exits, weary and wet—everyone except for Valerie.
    She is attempting to wedge an entire library full of books, probably according to the Dewey decimal system, back into her bag and is temporarily rendered speechless by the effort.
    I am cleaning my side of the pool, stretching out as far as I can to reach the middle with the long-handled skimmer, straining for a bug or a Band-Aid or something that is floating just beyond my reach, when, from right behind me,