Hello again! :) here's the beach party chapter, on time, as promised! Hope you all enjoy it :)

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Chapter 5

I look up, and the guy who snuck up on me is holding out a plastic red cup to me. Then, I realize that this guy is actually kinda hot. He’s broad shouldered and tanned, and his hair is blond and a bit wavy. He has these chocolate brown eyes, a piercing color, and they’re looking right at me.

Oh, and then I realize he called me pretty.

And this is one occasion when I just can’t hold back a blush.

I eye the drink he’s offering while inside I’m kind of freaking out (in a good way) that this guy called me pretty, and I know I should try to flirt – because this hot guy is talking to me. Me!

Instead, I blurt, “Didn’t your mom ever tell you not to take things from strangers?”

I know it’s not the kind of thing I should say even as I am saying it, but by then it’s too late.

He laughs, though, like I just made a good joke. Then he sits beside me. I’m shocked, but so not complaining – for the first time in my life, a hot guy is choosing to sit beside me, laughing like I’m actually funny I can see him starting to talk again, but I blurt out more words without thinking.

“Do you always use that pick-up line on girls?”

I want to slap myself in the face. Then turn to dust.

I am just such an idiot!

“Only on the lonely girls,” he jokes, and winks at me. The blush rises in my cheeks again; I can’t stop it. I gulp at how close he is to me, but my heart races at the thrill of having someone like him interested in me.

“I’m Bryce,” he tells me, and offers the drink out to me again. “There. Now I’m not a stranger.”

I laugh, and this time I take the drink. I’m tempted to take a sip, but I know my parents would kill me – and besides, I don’t even know what it is. I think it’s cider, or beer, but who knows? So I don’t. I just hold the cup.

Bryce. I bet he’s like, the quarterback or something. He just emits that kind of social standing – the confidence, the winning smile, the way he carries himself. It all screams Mr. Star Football Player, and Mr. Popular. It makes me wonder why he’s sat here, talking to me.

I wonder where Dwight is. Because shouldn’t he be back already?

Then I realize that this guy, Bryce, is waiting for me to give him my name, and I think, I’m such a dork. I must’ve paused too long though, since he carries on.

“So where are you from, Lonely Girl? I haven’t seen you around.”

He says it like he knows anyone and everyone.

And he probably does.

“Maine,” I answer. “I’m from Maine.”

“Really? Oh. That’s cool.”

“No, it’s not. LA is cool. New York City is cool. Where I’m from, it’s boring.”

He laughs again. “I’ll take your word for it. So you’re gonna be coming to school at Midsommer?”

I nod. “I’ll be a junior,” I say aloud, when Bryce doesn’t fill my silence again.

“Cool. Maybe I’ll see you around sometime.”

“Sure.”

Flattered as I am that this hot, obviously cool and popular guy is taking to me, of all people here, I feel like a complete and total dork.

I can’t talk to guys. Okay, maybe I can talk to them, considering I’ve had conversations with Dwight and now Bryce, too, but I mean I can’t flirt with them. I don’t know how. I bet if I tried, I’d make a fool out of myself.

I know they say to ‘be yourself’ around guys, and ‘never change for a man’ or whatever. But thing is, I don’t really know how to be myself. I’ve hidden myself away for so long.

This is my big chance, my once in a lifetime opportunity to start over again. And I want people to like me. I want guys to ask for my number at a party. I want a busy social life. I want to have friends.

I just don’t know how to do that.

And I’m scared.

So I sit there, feeling like a dork, and give Bryce a smile because a) I have no idea what to say now and b) why not; I can barely believe it when he actually smiles back at me.

He even has dimples.

Of course he does. Go figure.

The way the firelight is hitting him almost makes it seem like his teeth sparkle. I bet if the sun hit him just right, he’d be like some cheesy mouthwash ad on TV.

“Hey, Bryce! Get over here, man! You’ve gotta check this out, it’s totally gross!”

I follow the voice and so does Bryce. There’s some tall guy with spiky hair waving Bryce over, and a group are clustered around something. They shuffle a little, and I catch sight of it for a moment. I think it’s a jellyfish.

I stand up first, though, again wondering where Dwight is. He shouldn’t have been gone this long, should he? What was he doing anyway?

Not that I didn’t want to spend time with this Bryce guy… I just didn’t have a clue how to act around him, and I didn’t want to risk spending enough time with him to make a fool of myself.

“Nice meeting you,” I say, and start walking off in a random direction and hoping I’d spot Dwight around somewhere, and not wander aimlessly for the rest of the night.

“Wait,” I hear him call after me as I’m two steps away from the log we were sat on. “I don’t even get a name, Lonely Girl?”

“I think Lonely Girl is good enough for now,” I tell him. Except when I say it, it doesn’t come out as flirty in the slightest. Not that I mean it to – but I bet if anybody else said it, they could make it seem like they were flirting. Bryce appears to think I am flirting, though, from the way he raises one bushy blond eyebrow at me and smirks.

I just wave and say, “Bye, Bryce.”

He’s laughing when he calls out, “I’ll catch you round, Lonely Girl.”

As I walk away, I’m smiling inside and out. A rush of adrenaline and relief courses through me. I just talked to a hot guy who, if he isn’t Mr. Popular, I’ll eat my flip-flop, and I didn’t even make too much of an idiot out of myself. In fact, I think he may have even been flirting a little at the end there…

Probably not. But I like to think he was.

First Dwight being friendly, and now this guy, who was maybe flirting, too. Things really were looking up for me already.

“Oh, hey, there you are!” I exclaim all of a sudden. I’d been scanning the party, and now I run up to Dwight and push a hand into his shoulder – only playfully, though. He sways a bit, because I catch him off guard when I push his shoulder, and he stops talking midsentence for a moment.

I take a quick look at the guy he’s talking with – messy brown hair that stands about two inches tall, and is practically defying gravity the way it sticks up in the air like that. It’s not even gelled. He’s got glasses, too, and he raises his eyebrows behind them, looking from Dwight, to me, and back again.

“Hi,” I say, because there’s a bit of an awkward pause. I smile at the guy with the gravity defying hair. He looks a bit… I don’t know, really. Shocked isn’t quite the right word. Stunned, maybe. Yeah. He looks kind of stunned before smiling back at me.

“Hi, Madison.” Dwight smiles, but it doesn’t quite reach his eyes.

His friend clears his throat pointedly.

Dwight sighs and says, “Madison, this is Andy. Andy, this is Madison. She just moved here from Maine.”

“Hello,” Andy says to me. He smiles. I think distractedly for a moment that his smile isn’t quite as warm and friendly as Dwight’s is.

“Hi.”

“How do you know this guy then?” Andy jerks his head at Dwight, who takes a sip of whatever he’s got in his red plastic cup. It reminds me that I’m holding a drink, too, and I haven’t drunk any of it either.

“I met him at the café.”

“Ooh, the café,” Andy says teasingly. When I give him a wondering look he says, “We all just call it the coffee shop. Café sounds posh. No offence. It just seemed kind of funny when you said it, is all.”

“Andy talks a lot when he’s had a drink,” Dwight says matter-of-factly.

“Oh,” I laugh to Andy, and shake it off, but I know my cheeks are beginning to burn up a little. “Um, so you, uh, you go to Midsommer High, right?”

Andy nods. “Uh-huh. I guess that’s where you’re going.”

I nod. “I’ll be a junior.”

“Same as us, then!” Andy claps Dwight on the back. “Cool. Hey, has Dwight introduced you to Carter yet?”

“Uh…” I shake my head.

“What? Oh, you’ve got to meet Carter. Come on, I think he was over there, last time I saw him.” Andy starts walking off, like he assumes we’re following him.

I glance at Dwight, and smile when he catches my eye. My smile feels a bit uncertain though, because he’s not smiling back at me very much.

“What’s up?” I ask. I can’t help but feel like somehow, I’ve done something wrong.

“Huh?” He shakes his head slightly, a barely perceptible movement, and says, “Come on, or we’ll lose Andy.”

We catch up to Andy just before he has the chance to completely disappear into the crowd. There’s a heck of a lot more people here now than there were earlier; it makes me wonder just how long I spent talking to Bryce.

“There you are.” Andy glances over his shoulder at us briefly then starts striding off through the crowd. Dwight and I hurry to chase after him. Well, Dwight doesn’t hurry half as much as I do; he’s got much longer legs than I do.

I actually run into Andy – like, bump right into his back and bounce back off – when he stops suddenly. Dwight catches me when I stumble back from crashing into Andy, and gently pushes me back onto balance, but by then it’s too late. The drink in the red plastic cup I’m still holding has already slopped over me.

“Oh, shoot,” I mutter irritably, pulling at my soaked camisole. I hope whatever is in that cup it doesn’t stain…

“Madison,” Andy says, oblivious to the drink I just spilt over myself and pulling me around him and with his other hand gesturing at the skinny boy standing in front of him. “This is William Maverick Carter.”

“It’s just Carter,” William Maverick Carter tells me. He sounds a little embarrassed, and he can’t quite make eye contact with me, but he smiles anyway.

He’s not much taller than me, and his short, mousy brown hair is a bit scraggly and uneven. I don’t think I’m making the best impression, considering I’m covered in beer or something. I pluck at my top.

Then I notice something.

He only has one and a half eyebrows.

Like, he’s actually, really missing half of his left eyebrow. I know I’m staring, and I know my jaw has dropped a bit, but I can’t help it. It’s not every day you see someone who’s missing half of an eyebrow.

And, because I’m oh so socially adept, I blurt out, “What happened to your eyebrow?”

“I was saving an old lady’s cat from a burning building,” Carter tells me, and now he looks me dead in the eye, very serious.

“Oh my gosh!” My free hand claps over my mouth automatically. “Really?”

Dwight snorts with laughter all of a sudden. “Carter. Seriously, you think a girl is going to buy that?”

“Well she just did,” Carter defends himself, with a laugh. Then he looks back at me. “Had you going for a minute there, didn’t I?”

I’m not sure whether to frown or laugh, so I do some strange mixture of both.

“What happened to your top?” Andy asks me, only just noticing the wet stain on me.

“I spilt my drink.”

“Someone’s clumsy,” Andy says, laughing. But he doesn’t say it in a mean way, so I laugh and smile, too.

“Just a bit,” I admit sheepishly.

“So Carter, this is Madison. She’s Dwight’s friend. She’s from Maine. A soon-to-be junior just like the rest of us.” Andy turns to me. “Anything to add?”

I have a lot to add to that, I think. But I just laugh and shake my head no, like I’m just a totally normal, carefree teenager and this isn’t my first party ever…

“Well, I’m Carter. I’m also Dwight’s friend. And, uh, I’m from around here. Orlando, actually, but we moved here when I was about three years old.”

“Oh, cool,” I say. And I shift from foot to foot, then smile.

“I’m going to get another drink,” Dwight says, by way of excusing himself.

Impulsively, I hold up a finger to say ‘one minute’ to Andy and Carter, and say to Dwight, “Hold on a sec, I’ll come with you,” despite the fact I have no intention whatsoever of getting a drink.

He doesn’t stop walking, but I job for a moment or two and catch up to him.

“I didn’t think you were drinking much,” Dwight said to me casually, turning to smile a little. “You didn’t touch your drink,” he adds, nodding at the mostly empty cup in my hand when I frown in confusion, trying to remember if my dad had said something in front of Dwight about not drinking.

“Oh. Well, uh, I don’t really, um, drink much… Plus, my parents would kill me.”

Dwight’s smile stretches a little wider then, and there’s a glint of laughter to his eyes, too. “I can relate to that. Do you have any brothers or sisters?”

“Um, yeah, an older sister.”

“I’ve got a younger sister. My mom’s not too happy for me to drink at parties, but I bet she’ll be more comfortable with it once my sister gets old enough to start going to parties.” He smiles again. “Didn’t your sister go to many parties?”

“Yeah, she did,” I say, then I look down and gnaw on my lip, unsure how to carry on. I start to stammer, then: “But, um, I – well, I… it’s just that, well, um…”

“Oh,” he says. “Sorry. Next question: what was Bryce talking to you about?”

I shrug. “Just stuff, I guess.”

“Stuff.” I look at Dwight, and he’s raising an eyebrow at me, the one side of his mouth quirked up higher than the other so it’s half a smile and half a smirk. “Care to elaborate?”

I shrug again. “Well, we just… talked.”

“About…?”

“Why does it matter, anyway?”

I guess I come off as a bit snappy, because Dwight holds up his hand, palm out, as if in surrender. “I’m just curious is all. Bryce Higgins doesn’t exactly have the, ah, the best reputation when it comes to girls.”

“Huh?”

Dwight shrugs. “I don’t know if any of it’s true, it’s only what I’ve heard. Rumors. You know, the usual high school gossip that gets around. It’s just that he’s not really the nicest guy out there, from what I’ve heard. Could be wrong, but you can never be too careful.”

“What difference does it make? I was only talking to him.”

Dwight makes a noise that I think was a grunt, but it could’ve been a sigh; it’s some strange in between thing. But from that, and from the look he’s giving me – the raised eyebrows and sympathetic look in his eyes, I get the impression he doesn’t think Bryce is the kind of guy to ‘only talk’.

And maybe he isn’t. What did I know about guys? And for that matter, what do I know about Bryce? A few minutes of talking to him hardly justifies me to know what kind of person he really is.

“Watch it,” Dwight says all of a sudden, throwing an arm out in front of me to stop me walking. I stumble back, dropping the red plastic cup I’m still holding so that the beer or cider, whatever, slops over my feet and into my flip-flops.

“Darn it,” I mutter under my breath. Great. Now I will definitely stink of booze when I go home. I just hope my top and my shoes aren’t ruined.

Wow. I never thought I’d find myself thinking something like that.

I shake that off, though, and turn to Dwight. “What did you stop me for?”

He nods at the floor just in front of us. “Jellyfish.”

I look down, and, sure enough, there’s a dead jellyfish lying in a mess on the sand in front of us. I think it’s what all those guys who called Bryce over were looking at, before. I wonder for a moment if it was alive when they found it, and they didn’t do anything to help it out.

People are like that sometimes. They don’t want to think about the consequences. And why should they? They’re having fun. Sometimes, they don’t even realize somebody’s in trouble until it’s too late.

I stare at the dead, sand-covered jellyfish a heartbeat longer before I stretch my legs wide to step over it. Dwight falls back into step beside me, and tells me a little about his friends, making me laugh and smile. And when I’m laughing and smiling and chatting, it’s like I can almost believe that my life was never lonely and messed up.

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Thoughts on Bryce, anyone? :p I'll probably upload the next chapter on Wednesday :) Let me know what you guys all thought of this chapter, and again, any ideas for a cast list for Madison/Dwight/Bryce, would be appreciated! :) x

ps. I don't know why exactly but William Maverick Carter is one of my favourite names in this entire book. I don't know. I just like it :)