Mila nods again.
Sammie laughs. “Do it to me.”
“Okay.” Mila shrugs. “Turn around.” Sammie does, and then Mila whacks her smack in the middle of her back. Hard. Really hard.
“Ow!” Sammie yelps. “That really hurt!”
“Mila! Say you’re sorry!”
“I’m sorry,” Mila says. “But that’s how hard my friends and I do it to each other.” She’s not even remotely upset by the fact that I am. In fact, she’s proud of the abuse that she and her friends inflict upon one another.
“Now you get to pull my hair,” Mila says to Sammie, laughing.
“I’m not going to pull your hair,” Sammie says. “Friends aren’t supposed to hurt each other.”
Friends aren’t supposed to hurt each other.
“Okay, fine. I’ll pull my own hair,” Mila says, and then she does, really hard, and then she laughs. “That hurt.”
“You’re crazy, little girl,” Sammie says.
Evan comes over and sits on the chair next to Mila, right across from me. “What in God’s name are you doing to yourself?”
“It’s a game. Want to play? I promise I won’t pull your hair.”
“Are you going to hit me like you hit Sammie?”
“Maybe.” Mila laughs.
“No, thank you.” He looks at me. “Is she always this abusive?”
“She’s always this wild,” I say.
“Am not,” Mila says, scrunching up her face at me. “Can we go to the zoo now? I want to see the baby gorilla that was born last week.”
“Seriously? You want to go to the zoo now? Aren’t you exhausted?”
“I’m surprised you’re not totally passed out,” Sammie says. “You guys were in the water for, what, three hours?”
“Yeah.” Mila holds up her hands. “My fingers are like dried cranberries.”
“Dried cranberries?” Evan says. “How gourmet! Mine only turn into raisins.”
“Can we go back in the water?” Mila whines. “I want to swim more.”
“I need a break,” I say.
“What about you, Sammie?” Mila begs. “Come in with me?”
Sammie, who spent the entire three hours sunbathing on the side of the pool, shakes her head no.
“Why didn’t you get in, Sammie?” Mila asks.
“Yeah,” Evan says. “Why didn’t you get in, Sammie?” He’s teasing her, and though I’m sure she likes the attention, I can tell she’s embarrassed to give the real reason: She’s dressed for Evan, and if she were to swim, her hair and makeup would get messed up.
She shrugs. “Just didn’t feel like it.”
“So no one’s going to go back in with me?”
“Well, I just clocked out and was about to do my laps,” Evan says. “I can skip a few and swim with you. Want to play Marco Polo?”
“Yes!” Mila perks up.
Evan looks at me. “Is that okay?”
“Sure.”
And then he starts staring at me, at my eyes—like he won’t look away. “What?” I ask.
“You have extremely large pupils,” he says.
“Um, okay…,” I mumble, not knowing what else to say to such a bizarre statement.
“I mean, I don’t mean to stare, but scientifically speaking, it means that you are an attractive person.”
“What?” I can feel the blood rush to my cheeks from embarrassment.
“Men are attracted to large pupils,” he says. “It’s been studied. I learned about it in psych this year. From Professor Cox, of course. Women in Italy used to use a plant called belladonna to dilate their pupils to attract men. You wouldn’t even need it. You have this natural ability to do so.”
“To attract men?” I spurt out with a laugh.
“Yes,” he says, smiling. “To attract men.”
At first, I smile back at him, but then it hits me that this is a weird, private thing he’s saying and we have a weird, public audience of both my little sister, who’s grinning romantically at us, and Sammie, who’s giving me a sharp look of death.
Great.
Mila breaks the awkward silence between us by pulling on Evan’s arm. “Are we going in or what?”
That breaks Evan’s stare. He claps his hands and jumps up. “Let’s do it!”
Mila throws off her towel and starts to run to the pool until Evan calls out his “No running” warning in his official lifeguard tone, and she slows to a run-walk.
This leaves Sammie and me alone, and me worried about what she’s going to say.
“Look, Sammie, I’m sorry. I have no idea what that was about.”
But Sammie’s not angry anymore. Instead, her shoulders are slumped, her head in her hands. “Forget it, Vivi,” she says. “It’s done. I’m over it. He’s into you. No bikini is going to change that.”
“We don’t know that for sure.”
She looks up at me. “Um, your pupils are so large that they attract men? I think we do know for sure.” She stands up and wraps a towel around her waist. “No hard feelings or anything, but I’ve got to go.”
“Come on, Sammie—”
“You don’t have to run after me. And I’m not mad. I just need to be alone, okay?”
“Okay,” I say. “Hang out tonight maybe?”