Free My Almost Epic Summer by Adele Griffin

doing a thing. Being too eye-catching must be slightly exhausting that way.
    Lainie trots right over. I follow. I haven’t seen Starla since last week’s junk-food theft. I was half imagining that she’d have been caught by now. Also arrested, and put on probation, and held up by local Larkin’s gossipmongers as an example of Teenage Delinquency.
    “Where were you the other day?” asks Lainie. “Me and my brother came here with our parents and you weren’t around.”
    Starla smiles down at her. “Even lifeguards get weekends off, cutie-pie.”
    “You should come back to our house for lunch. Since Evan’s not around to ruin everything.”
    “Uh-huh,” answers Starla.
    “We’re the last house on Highland and we’ve got three acres. That’s enough land for a pony but I’m not allowed one.”
    “I’ll stop by some other time,” says Starla in a flat voice, her eyes cutting at me in warning that Lainie’s thin charms have worn out.
    Lainie, deaf and blind to all social cues, touches the leather strap bracelet on Starla’s wrist. “That’s pretty.”
    “Did you get that in Idlewild?” I hadn’t meant to blurt this—but I’d logged on to Starla’s journal yesterday and learned that she and some of her friends— Me + Kelli + Em = FUN!!! —had hit the mall. I’d even checked out the photos: of long, rangy Em drinking a soda and crossing her eyes at an indoor mall café; of wispy blonde Kelli plus Starla imitating the mannequins’ poses in a lingerie storefront, and then one of all three, the camera held out and tipped so you could see up way too much nostril. I’d tried to cipher from the photos if Em and Kelli, as the cute-ish friends of gorgeous Starla, understood what they were up against. Did they huddle together or whisper on the phone about how all the guys loved Starla best? Did they despise Starla for her power? Or were they in constant competition to win her favor? Or maybe I was stone wrong, and Kelli and Em were perfectly at ease about their pal. That’s what their blandly happy smiles seemed to be telling the world—though photos often lied.
    Now I quake in horror, having exposed myself to Starla as a lonely blog-haunter and creepster. I am speechless with embarrassment.
    Starla snaps her fingers. “Gotcha, Nerd! I knew you’d go on my journal.” She looks genuinely delighted. “Did you read my poems, too?”
    “I might’ve read a couple . . .” I hate when Starla calls me Nerd, and Lainie’s bat-eared presence makes me doubly uncomfortable. I point. “Hey, Lainie, don’t you know her?”
    “Annie Waldron?” Lainie glances over at the freckly girl sitting under a tree, pretending not to notice that her mother is braiding her hair. “She’s in my class.”
    “I thought so.” I shove her. “Go say hi.”
    “But Annie Waldron is icky.”
    “How?”
    “She just is .”
    “But now she saw you, so you have to go. It’s the polite thing.”
    Lainie’s shoulders sag. “Only because you’re making me, not because I want to. And it’s not like you’re so polite, Irene. How many people are you making friends with around here?”
    “That’s my business,” I say, squaring her by the shoulders and pushing her off.
    As soon as Lainie’s out of the way, Starla flips her Off Duty shingle. She trails me while I pick a spot on the grass and spread out the towels. Lainie’s comment has embedded itself in my brain, and I smile in what I hope is a friendly and outgoing manner. Starla does not smile back. “So, Nerd, just between us,” she says, “tell me what you think of my poems. For real.”
    I weight the corners of the towel with rocks. “First, stop calling me Nerd.”
    “Just admit it that I’m good at rhymes. My friends all say so.”
    Then I have an idea. Obasan , which I finished yesterday, is still in my bag. “Listen to this.” I flip to a place and read. “ ‘The stillness is so much with me that it takes the form of a shadow which grows and surrounds me