Page 4 of The Perfect Wrong

Regardless, Marnie’s a bigger social butterfly than I’ll ever be.

With her outgoing style and charm and just as many special connections as mine, that could be useful. For now, it’s enough to put up with her shenanigans.

I drink more martini, marveling at how big the crowd has gotten. There must be several dozen people milling around, double fisting drinks, some already making out by the fires sparking up across the dark horizon.

Every time Dad lets me open up the beach and fire up the bar, Marnie promises it’ll just be a small group. And every time, our party beach becomes a magnet for a good slice of the Bay’s hot, rich, pretty youth—plus a few interlopers who are anything but.

“Thanks again for letting us borrow sand from daddy dearest!” Marnie calls drunkenly. “If anybody leaves their shit behind and litters, come to me. I’ll kick their asses.”

I smile because I know she means it.

Her life may be messy, but the girl has good manners.

“Yeah, me too,” Tangerine Man adds lazily, not even pulling his eyes off her boobs.

“Go have some fun! Talk to ya tomorrow,” she says with one last flutter of her blindingly bright fingernails.

I’m too upset to turn around until I’m sure they’re gone.

It’s not just my friend’s too-loud-to-live attitude or her sweet tooth for two-dimensional man candy.

Everything just reminds me I’m stuck being the good girl again, and...

...and maybe I don’t want to be.

Just once, I wish I could be somebody’s little firecracker, even for one night.

I wish I could get over myself and sample Marnie’s good life.

I wish a tall, dark, and mysteriously freaky man would swoop in like lightning and blow my hair back.

But none of the boys tonight fit the bill.

Maybe I really am too picky.

But the longer I stare at the clean-shaven, athletic twenty-somethings who are still laughing with each other and not dancing with a girl yet, the sleepier my ladybits get.

College sucks when your standards are sky-high.

That’s why I made this stupid summer pact with Marnie to give up my V-card before my last semester.

I thought it’d be the push I needed—a little urgency to grow up, to get past this big, scary coming-of-age thing everybody obsesses over until the day it finally happens.

But as I glance around at the laughing couples and semi-drunk single men who flick their eyes up and down my body, maybe it’s not a push I need at all.

I need a pull.

I need gravity.

I need to feel a spark with a man who has a brain and a beating heart behind his boyish smirk before I let him be my first.

* * *

It’sa couple hours after sunset, and totally shaping up like every other summer party I’ve hosted for Marnie.

I watch the last glittery embers of sunlight fade below waves like churning ink. Every curl of the nighttime shore comes alive with lights and small bobbing yachts lit up like Christmas.

I’m a fair distance away from the nearest couple now, retreating into my own little world on a big, smooth rock not far from where the tide nips at my feet.