You're Invited (4 page)

Becca takes off, with Vi right behind her. I gather up the trash—including Vi's empty pita-chip bag—and lock up the
Purple People Eater
before Sadie and I walk back to the office.

“So we're really doing this,” she says.

“Yup. This party is going to be amazing. Just wait till your mom sees you in action. She'll wish she never fired you. Hold up, I want to give you something.” In the yellow-colored light streaming down from the lamppost next to us, I dig through my backpack until I find what I'm looking for.

I hold the beautiful pink-and-maroon shell out to Sadie. “Here, I found this today. Scallop shells are symbolic of pilgrimages. And maybe you're on a new
journey. I mean, I know that's not the same thing as a pilgrimage, since a pilgrimage is religious and all, but . . .”

Sadie's trying really hard not to laugh, I can tell.

“Anyway, it's really pretty, isn't it?”

Sadie takes the shell and admires it in the light. “Thanks, Lo.” And her grin is brighter than the moon overhead. It might even be brighter than all those fireworks she set off earlier.

And that makes me happier than any A on a test ever could.

Daily Love Horoscope for Scorpio:

Venus is rising. It's the perfect day to go flirt with a cute stranger.

A
s soon as I'm old enough, I'm totes packing up and moving somewhere like Savannah, because this Southern belle look is soooo completely me. I twist my neck so I can watch myself sway from behind in the full-length mirror on the back of my bedroom door. Omigosh,
why
did petticoats ever go out of style? I mean, okay, fine, they're not the most comfortable things to wear in the middle of, like, the single most humid June on record, but they swish when I walk.

SWISH. When I walk.

I
reallllly
need to put this dress back in my closet so it doesn't get ruined before next week's party because Sadie would KILL me after she was up first thing this morning talking the janitor into opening the school so we could borrow the costumes from
Little Women
. With a few tweaks they're perfect Southern belle dresses. Okay, off it goes. But maybe just one or two more swishes first.
Swish. Swish. Swish.
Last one, I swear.
Swish.

Except
 . . . this dress would give me the perfect excuse to find the cute boy from the Visitor's Center social the other night and position myself right in front of him before murmuring, “I do declare, I'm feeling right faint in this heat.” And then I can swoon directly into his arms and he'll realize he's been looking for a girlfriend like me his whole life and he'll have to revive me to tell me just that.

So romantic.

And just like that, I think of a possible song. I always get this buzz when I hit on an idea I'm excited about, and it's like it
hums
through me as I grab my spiral notebook from under my pillow and flip past the giant
PRIVATE
on the cover. I turn sheets until I find a blank one and scribble “plantation,” “petticoat dress,” and “love like ours never goes out of fashion” to jog my
memory when I have time to work on it later, maybe with my guitar. I snap the notebook closed, but then find the page again quickly when a lyric comes to me out of the blue. I write,

When I doubt,

You surprise me.

When I faint,

You revive me.

I promise, promise, promise myself I'll go back to that page later. But I have my fingers crossed just in case that whole Pinocchio thing is true. My nose is totes my best feature and I don't need it growing all long on me. Eww.

Anyway, it's not like I don't
want
to go back to it. I want to go back to
all
my pages of scribbles and turn them into something amazing. Something you could hear on the radio and just have to hum along to.

I jam my notebook under the pillow as hard as I can.

Because the problem is that all those song lyrics are about L-O-V-E. And I . . . don't know anything about that. My English teacher said the very best writers always write what they know and write from the heart. Um, hello?
My heart is twelve. I barely know my
times tables
inside and out.

But having a boyfriend, a boyfriend who adores me and inspires me and makes me feel all the feels, would solve that.
That's
why I need one. My friends think I just want a boyfriend to be cool (and also plus because I
might
have a reputation for being a teeny-tiny bit boy-crazy ever since first grade, when Christopher Paulson picked me to march next to him in the kazoo band in the Fourth of July parade), but really I have REASONS. I just haven't been able to bring myself to tell them those reasons.

Which is admittedly weird. One, because I truly, positively, absolutely know Sades, Vi, and Lo would have my back and most likely even think songwriting is really cool and completely perfect for me. Two, because I'm like the least shy person I know when it comes to pretty much everything else. Mama says I'm “deliciously flamboyant”; Daddy says I'm “responsible for all the antacids I take.” (Which he always says with a smile, so I know he doesn't actually mean that. Probably.)

But my songs are different. They're just so
personal
on this, like, really deep level that makes me weirdly shy about them. It would be completely squicky-feeling to
let anyone read my lyrics. Omigosh, I would die!

Okay, so
that
just got real. Time to shake it off. I slide from my bed and kind of can't help pausing in front of the mirror again to admire the dress. So faint-worthy. I wonder what smelling salts smell like. The salt I use on my corn on the cob doesn't really have an odor, but all the girls wearing swishy dresses in old movies are always getting revived from their fainting spells by smelling salts. Weird. Probably Cute Boy doesn't walk around with salt in his pocket. Then again, I'll never know if I don't give him the chance.

Sending a silent promise to Sadie that I'll be extra careful in the dress, I bounce down the steps.

“Rebecca Elise Elldridge.
What
are you wearing?”

I skid to a stop with one hand on the front door. Drat. I was two seconds from freedom.

“Daddy, it's a dress, of course.”

“I can see that it's a dress, Rebecca, but what I would like to know is
why
you are planning to wear a dress like that out and about?”

“I just . . .” I wonder if Mama ever swooned in Daddy's arms. Ew. Gross. I really, really will not discuss swooning with my
father
.

“I don't expect this will be the last time we have this conversation,”
Daddy says, dropping his voice before mumbling, “Lord knows it isn't the first.” Then his voice gets all normal again. “Your mother and I are the first people most visitors encounter when they get here. We're the face of this town. The business owners on the chamber of commerce count on us to make them look good. As our daughter, the same goes for you, young lady. Now march.”

He extends his arm and points my way back up the steps.

Le sigh.

I spin in place and lift my chin as I pass him, making sure to put some extra stomp in my step as I navigate the stairs and head back to my room. I toss the swishy dress on my gingham bedspread and switch to a pair of yellow twill shorts and a magenta cami.

“Bye, Daddy.” I wave as I glide downstairs. He nods his approval and heads back to his home office while I close the door behind me, race down the stairs, and cross under the house to the storage room. I roll my bike out and pedal toward the beach at top speed, almost like I'm on a mission.

Okay, I'm totally on a mission.

Technically, it's to get supplies so the girls and I can
fold tea-party fans and cut out tea-party doilies at the
Purple People Eater
tonight, but that's not my main goal for today. Nope.
Toda
y
is the day I scope out Hottie McHottington, the new boy in town. Fresh blood is hard to come by when you live in a beach town that is less like a dot on a map and more like the fleck of pepper that fell onto it. Granted, we get the summer tourist crowds, but they're usually weekly renters, and who wants a boyfriend who'll be packing up his boogie board by noontime Saturday? No thanks. I need a
real
relationship that will help my songs feel more . . . authentic. It totally works for Taylor Swift.

I pedal harder to work out my frustration. Operation Get a Boyfriend, which was
supposed
to be Mission Complete by now, is in danger of becoming Mission Impossible if I don't step it up, and fast.

It's possible Cute Boy is a weekly too, but he seemed pretty chummy with Mrs. O'Malley, and even though the weeklies are always venturing into the Visitor's Center for restaurant reservations or to rent a fishing boat, I'm pretty positive I've never seen one at a business chamber social.

So this leaves me with a mystery to solve. The Mystery of the Mystery Guy. I'm like Nancy Drew.
Or Encyclopedia Brown. Or maybe even Dora the Explorer without a backpack singing to me. I'm like Daphne from Scooby— Oh, wait. Um, I think that's him walking on the road to the beach up ahead. Okay, so that wasn't the world's best detective work, but hey, it's all about the results, not the procedure, right?

I slow my bike so I can observe from behind. Hmm. Definitely looks like the same messy-in-a-boy-band-way hair, not messy in an I-don't-own-a-comb-way hair. It's the exact coppery brown color with little streaks of blond I drooled over at the Visitor's Center. I could
definitely
write a lyric or two about that hair.

And his eyes! He's facing away from me, so I can't tell if they're the piercing blue I remember. It feels like mere days ago that we were locking gazes across the racks of brochures for hot-air balloon rides and water parks. Okay, so it
was
mere days ago. Or, well, yesterday.

Anyway, I don't need to see his baby blues, because the fact that he's wearing the same orange T-shirt he had on last night is probably evidence enough. How many other middle-school-aged guys in town could possibly have a T-shirt with
MRS. POPPOT'S SCHOOL OF DRAMA. STOP “ACTING” LIKE IT'S ALL ABOUT YOU!
stamped
across the back? I'm pretty sure Dora could crack this case even without Backpack's help.

I pedal slowly behind him as I collect more data. Bare feet, but picking his way along the sandy side of the road, so probably not used to walking without shoes. Definitely
not
a local. Towel, rolled up and slung around his neck. Striped board shorts.

I use my thumb to pull back the tab on the little bell attached to my handlebars as soon as we've both crossed Coastline Drive and passed the pavilion. When it
brrring-brrring
s, Mystery Boy jumps a little and scoots toward the edge of the boardwalk leading to the beach, but he doesn't turn around. How are we supposed to have our Meet Cute like in the movies if he won't even turn around? Rude.

Well, a girl has to make a memorable first impression, right? So I do the only thing I can think of.

I crash into him.

I mean, I slow down as much as possible so I don't actually hurt him or anything, but I guess getting tapped from behind by a beach cruiser when you aren't expecting it is kind of enough to knock someone off his feet. I'm so surprised at his yelp that I'm thrown off balance
too, and I go tumbling over the handlebars and land beside him in the marshy grass lining the boardwalk. Whoops.

His lips form a shocked O shape. But all I can focus on are those blue, blue eyes. Seriously, they are like something out of . . . out of . . . whatever's really, really,
really
blue. Just picture that.

“Sorry!” I say, when I tear my eyes away from all that epic blueness.

“ ‘Sorry'? ‘Sorry' is all you can say? You ran me over!”

Oh. My. Gosh. He. Has. An. Accent.

British, I think. Or Irish, maybe? Is there anything more swoon-worthy
ever
? I am so working this into the song about us. I wonder if he would read the phone book to me. Probably not the best time to ask him, because he looks a little, um, perturbed. Is that a word? I think it is. I'll have to ask Lauren.

I stand up, brushing sand from my knees. “Well, it was an accident. Geez. Anyway, hey! I'm Becca!” I stick my hand out but he ignores it.

“Do you always meet lads by running them over?” he asks.

I mean, no, but it's not the worst idea ever.

I give him my sweetest smile. “I didn't run you over.
I bumped into you . . . with my bike. Totally different. Anyway, like I said, it was an accident.”

He still looks super annoyed as he grabs his towel from the ground and loops it back around his neck. He uses one end of the terry cloth to swipe sand from the top of his sunscreen bottle, which is how I really,
really
know he's not from around here. Any local could tell you that getting sand off an opened sunscreen bottle is a lost cause.