Page 53 of Whispers at Seaside
Jenna’s hand shot up in the air. “To Parker’s!”
“I’ve got the cookie dough!” Amy held the tubes over her head.
A flurry of packing began as food, towels, and computers were put away.
“Wait.” Mira looked around the table in confusion. “Why are we going skinny-dipping?”
Parker flashed a mischievous smile. “Remember I told you about the initiation?”
“I thought that was a joke,” Mira said, remembering the story Parker had told her about skinny-dipping for the first time in her life with the girls in the pond by Grayson’s house.
“No joke, sweet cakes.” Jenna winked. “You’re a Seaside girl now by association. We were going to initiate you last summer, but then you and Matt looked like you were eventually going to hook up, so we thought we’d wait and do it all at once.”
“Oh my goodness. I love you guys!” Serena said as she gathered her things. “Skinny-dipping! We haven’t done that since we were kids!”
“Oh, so you have done this before?” Jana asked. “I knew Mira wasn’t as goody-goody as she seemed.” She held her hand up, and Mira halfheartedly high-fived her.
“But now I’m amother,” she pointed out. “It feels wrong to skinny-dip.”
“Please.Five of us are mothers,” Jenna pointed out. “Now go lock up so you can be afunmother with us.”
As Mira locked up the house and met them out front, excitement crept in. By the time they arrived at Grayson and Parker’s house, it was dark out. Christmas, Parker’s English mastiff, bounded out his doggy door and followed them through the woods to the pond. The girls took turns loving him up.
The other girls dropped their clothes as they walked along the pier, leaving a trail of sundresses and flip-flops. When they reached the end of the pier, they stripped naked, held hands, and jumped in, shrieking on the way down, sending Christmas into a barking, whining frenzy.
Serena and Mira shrieked from the dock as the girls’ splashes soaked their clothes.
“Chipples!” Jenna yelled as she broke the surface. “Get ready for chilly nipples!”
One by one the girls’ heads popped out of the water and a plethora of shouts ensued. “Brr! Freezing! Hurry! Get in! Good thing we’re not guys. Our dingies would disappear!”
They all laughed.
“Come on!” Serena stripped off her clothes. “Hurry up! It’s cold.”
Mira glanced at her best friend’s hairless body as she stripped out of her clothes, lulled by the excitement of the group. “You really do use Nair!”
Serena rolled her eyes. “You never know when the right guy will come along. Now, hurry up!”
“You have to hold hands! It’s tradition!” Bella yelled.
Mira pushed aside the embarrassment of standing naked on the dock and grabbed her best friend’s hand.
“It’s not tradition,” Jenna snapped through chattering teeth.
“It is now,” Amy said.
“Do I have to do something?” Mira asked. It was aninitiationafter all.
“You already did,” Sky said. “You brought my brother home for the summer!”
“But what if we break up?” The words flew from Mira’s lips out of fear of losing not just Matt, but all these glorious friends, too. “You’ll hate me and you will have already initiated me. Isn’t that against a rule or something?”
“Come on, silly girl,” Parker said through chattering teeth. “Once Lacrouxs fall, they never look back.”
“Trust the Lacroux way!” Sky urged. “Take a leap of faith.”
A leap of faith.She remembered what Matt had said when she’d asked how they’d figure things out when he went back to Princeton after his sabbatical.We have to trust that we’ll both know what the right thing to do is when we get to that point.
