Girlfriend Material Read Online Free PDF Page B

school didn’t want to go out with us. Like my dad had said, we were waaay too cool for them.
    But now it turned out that it wasn’t that guys didn’t want to go out with us .
    It was that guys didn’t want to go out with me .
    I’d been expecting the Larkspur Golf and Country Club of Dryer’s Cove, Massachusetts, to be really fancy, something like the Olympia Club in Salt Lake, which we don’t belong to but Laura’s family does. Olympia has valet parking and a brand-new clubhouse, inside of which pretty much everything is pink marble or brass. Larkspur, on the other hand, just had a dirt parking lot, and the clubhouse looked like an actual house, albeit a large Victorian one. There weren’t too many of the Mercedes SUVs and BMWs and Hummers that you saw at Olympia, either. In fact, almost every car in the lot seemed to be a Subaru wagon. I had a minute to wonder how people ever found their cars when there were so many identical ones before I had to hustle to catch up with Sarah, who was headed down a pebbled path that had a hand-lettered sign saying “Pool” at the head of it.
    As I followed Sarah, I felt not unlike a puppy struggling to keep up with a much larger dog. I swear, I wouldn’t have been surprised if Sarah had said, Hey, Kate, look over there before dashing off in the opposite direction. As soon as we sat down, it was clear that despite our lounge chairs being next to each other, Sarah wasn’t any more interested in talking to me poolside than she had been bayside.
    I forced myself not to try and make conversation. If she didn’t want to talk, that was fine with me. I opened the Agatha Christie again, trying to focus on the intricacies of a village murder and not the fact that my best friend had a boyfriend and the girl sitting next to me was probably hoping I’d drown in the pristine pool before lunch.
    I’d barely made it through a sentence when I saw, out of the corner of my eye, Sarah shoot her hand up in the air and wave at someone. She was off her chair in a flash, though she did say something to me over her shoulder. It was either, Excuse me a sec or Please be gone when I get back . I kept my book up in front of my face as I watched her walk around the edge of the pool and embrace a shortish girl with a towel wrapped around her waist.
    I was more relieved than I care to admit that Sarah didn’t point over to my lounge chair and mime vomit-ing. This whole day was making me feel like I was going into junior high instead of junior year.
    Okay, I had to stop. What did I care if stupid Sarah thought I was lame? I was only going to be here for at most two months, not the rest of my life. Starting tomorrow, I’d say I just wanted to hang out at the house. Was that such an awful way to spend the next eight weeks—sitting on Tina and Henry’s beautiful deck and admiring the body of water I now knew was the bay? I could write. I could read. Let Sarah have her car and her club all to herself.
    There was the squeak of flesh on rubber as a girl sat down on the lounge chair next to mine. I noticed Sarah hadn’t left anything on the actual chair, just her bag at the foot of it. Should I say something about its being occupied? Clearly. But what was I supposed to say? Excuse me, that’s my friend’s chair. Hardly. That chair belongs to a girl who hates me because I ruined her summer, which is 39 hilarious since I too am a victim of the world’s vagaries rather than an agent in this affair. Seemed a bit too much information to give to a complete stranger.
    “Um, someone’s sitting there,” I said.
    The girl was pretty, but not quite as pretty as Sarah; she looked more like the pretty girls at my school than a super-model. Her hair was blond and straight and she had on a pair of jean shorts and a PrincetonT-shirt. She was eating a peach, and some of the juice dribbled down her chin.
    “Yeah,” she said, swiping at the juice and wiping her hand on her shorts. “Sarah. I saw you guys come in. I’m