Page 36 of The Summer List

She places a hand on her chest, and I can’t tell if the offense in her tone is fake or not. There’s something sincere about the disappointment in her eyes as she squints them at me.

Or maybe I’m just bad at reading faces and think everyone is mad at me all the time. Either way, I apologize.

“Sorry. I just didn’t think you’d have been into nerdy stuff like that in high school. You seem like you were probably way cooler than me in grade nine.”

Her posture softens a little, and she lets out a quiet chuckle. “To be fair, I mostly only auditioned because I thought it would be hilarious. We’d just done A Midsummer Night’s Dream in English class, I was like, why the hell not? It turned out to be one of the most fun things I ever did in high school, even though my friends never let me live it down.”

My breath catches when she pauses to turn that deadly smirk on me for a second.

“Plus, I was a really sexy Puck.”

Goosebumps break out on my arms, and I have to swallow down a very unsexy squawk when she swings her legs back into the tub to give me another look at her back.

“There’s an extra pair of gloves in the box,” she says.

I fish around for the gloves before returning to my hair duties. Due to Andrea’s heads up about dye mishaps, I’m wearing one of the only black shirts I own: a faded t-shirt from a spelling bee they held at my junior high in the seventh grade.

By some miracle, I managed to make it all the way to my elimination without bolting to the bathroom to puke. That spelling bee was one of the last school events I participated in before my anxiety got bad enough to make me give up on all my hobbies besides reading.

Not that I ever had many hobbies besides reading, but stuff like spelling bees and poetry club were out of the question once we all started turning into judgmental teenagers and every day made me more and more aware of just how far from normal I was.

“So were you a high school thespian?” Andrea asks as I massage a clump of dye into a spot I missed near her ear.

“Oh, definitely not,” I answer. “I’m not really the get up on stage type.”

I tense up, bracing for her to drawl the classic refrain of, Oh, so you’re shyyyy?

I don’t know why people say that. As fellow shy girls, Priya and I are always asking ourselves what kind of answer anyone expects. That question always comes out sounding like a jeer or a taunt, like whoever’s asking wants me to either take the bait and reveal I am in fact concealing my true nature as an extrovert or just sit there and mumble an answer that makes them feel justified in cooing at me like I’m a toddler.

Andrea doesn’t say anything like that. She doesn’t even ask why I don’t want to be in a play or how I know I wouldn’t like it if I’ve never tried.

She just nods and says, “Fair enough.”

For a moment, I’m so stunned I freeze in the middle of running my fingers down a lock of her hair.

“Is something wrong?” she asks, turning to glance at me over her shoulder and nearly pulling the hair out of my hands. “Do I have a massive split end or something? I probably should have gotten a trim before we did this.”

I shake my head. “Oh, no. No, nothing’s wrong.”

She squints at me for a moment before turning back around. “You good, Waters?”

She even makes the simple act of calling me by my last name sound sexy. The more time I spend around her, the more convinced I become that Andrea King could make literally any word in the English language sound sexy if she put her mind to it.

“Just, uh, finishing up,” I say.

I spend the next few minutes double-checking to make sure each layer of her hair has been fully saturated and then step back so she can stand up.

“I believe we’re finished,” I say, “but you should check it yourself to be sure.”

She moves past me to the mirror and grins as she tilts her head back and forth.

“You did great. I mean, I’m trusting you on the back. You could be totally screwing me over there, but I’m choosing to believe you’re not.”

I hold up my hands, still sheathed in the goop-covered gloves. “So I can officially take these off now?”

She shrugs. “Unless you want to go purple too.”

I must make some kind of hilariously alarmed face at that; she doubles over laughing before she straightens up and wheezes, “Or not.”

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