I probably shouldn’t take all the credit for finally getting Juliette’s vacation started…but I will! By the time my dad got back to the beach the next week, Juliette had not only met all my new friends and learned to surf, but cut off her hair and mailed it to Locks of Love, too. (She even let me do the honors, and it turned out pretty awesome.)
The funny thing was, my dad had just as much to say about the changes in me as about the changes in Juliette.
“Look how light your hair’s gotten, and how much it’s grown. And you’re so tan—especially in that dress!” he said. (I was wearing an awesome rainbow-colored sundress that Juliette had loaned me.) “Are you using enough sunscreen? Every time I see you, sunshine, you look different, I swear!” he declared.
If you say so, Dad.
I guessed I’d upped my “surfer girl” wardrobe a little, thanks to the five dollars an hour from Karen, and Sonny’s Surf Shop, and Juliette’s generous closet. It turned out that she and I were the same size in some things, and she was absolutely, positively great about sharing clothes. We even traded bikinis: She looked amazing in the skull one that had traumatized me, and she gave me an excellent aqua one that was too small for her. (And yes, it stayed up!) As for all my Goth stuff, I packed most of it away, and gave the tutus to Kiki for dress-up.
Juliette also painted my nails the same bright blue as hers. That didn’t go unnoticed by Kiki, of course, who immediately demanded we paint hers, also. Which then meant doing Emery’s. (We had to call it “paw polish” for her, though.)
It actually started to feel like we were all sisters, like the March girls in Little Women, and I, of course, was Jo! (Only we lived in a big, questionably haunted beach house…and the youngest one of us preferred to bark instead of talk.)
But still, it was perfect.
My dad, unfortunately, didn’t get to stay for long. The reason? The weather. As usual.
“Just got a call from the station,” he told us the day after he’d arrived. “They need me down in Florida to cover Hurricane Brian if it hits, which”—he got a gleam in his eye—“it looks like it will!”
“Hurricane Brian?” said Karen. She looked down at the puddles of ketchup and mayonnaise and who knows what else that her son had left on the porch after lunch. “How did they know?” she exclaimed. Everyone laughed.
“Oh, but Marv,” my mom said and sighed. “You can’t go. It’s your vacation.”
“Yeah, Dad, you just got here,” I said (or rather, whined).
My dad shook his head cheerfully. “Mother Nature doesn’t—”
“Take vacations,” my mom and I flatly finished for him. (We’d last heard this saying over spring vacation, when my dad had had to leave early to cover the Midwestern floods.)
“Well put,” said my dad, grinning. “I’ll be back before you know it. Besides, I’m not going anywhere yet. Not until late tomorrow. And I noticed on the way in from the airport that there’s a carnival on the mainland. You guys haven’t gone yet, have you? I think we should go tonight.”
I love, love, love, love carnivals! And not just because of the rides—though I do love those. But also because of the food. I could live on funnel cakes and cotton candy if I had to, no problem at all.
And caramel apples with rainbow sprinkles. How could I forget those?
I’d been to enough carnivals, though, to know that you can’t eat everything you want at once (and still enjoy riding the Spider), so I paced myself and had one funnel cake. Then it was ride time.
Josh and Brian were already off with Jay and my dad, thank goodness. The minute they’d seen that there were go-karts, they were all over that. My mom and Karen and Jackie, meanwhile, headed to the kiddy rides with Emery. But Kiki said that was way too babyish, and I really couldn’t argue with her. So that left her with me and Juliette.
The only problem was, besides the Giant Slide and House of Fun, Kiki was too short to go on most of the rides with us. (No matter how hard she begged the operators…and she did.)
“Well,” I said as we stood outside the Spider. “I guess we’ll have to take turns. You go first, Juliette, and I’ll wait here with Kiki.”
Juliette looked up at the arms spinning wildly overhead. “You know what?” she said. “I think I’ll skip it, Samantha. You go ahead.”
“Okay,” I sighed, and walked up and handed the guy my ticket. But my heart wasn’t in it. I love going on rides—but I don’t love going on them alone. (There’s no one to scream with! And you slide around too much.)
But then, just as I’d resigned myself to sitting alone—or even worse, with some sweaty stranger!—I spotted Nick in the crowd.
“Nick!” I cried. “Hey, Nick! Come ride this with me!” He saw me, waved, shrugged, and pulled out a ticket to join me.
If I said that was the best ride of my life, I would totally be lying. (The new roller coaster at Great Adventure was extremely hard to beat.) But it was still pretty great.
“I’m so glad I found you!” I told Nick as we climbed off the Spider a few minutes later. “I hate riding these things alone. Don’t you? Wasn’t that awesome? Want to ride it again?”
He grinned, but shook his head as he gently rubbed his ear. “I think I should find my friends,” he said, “and let my hearing recover a little.”
“Sorry,” I said sheepishly. “I guess I can scream a little loud.”
He nodded. “A little,” he said. “But I don’t think there’s any permanent damage.”
I had to smile. “Maybe later?” I said (hopefully).
He nodded. “Sure,” he said. Then he looked around us. “So, did you come here by yourself? Didn’t, uh, anybody come with you?”
“Oh yeah,” I said quickly. “The whole gang is here. But we’ve all split up—fortunately—and right now it’s Juliette, me, and Kiki. She’s not really big enough to go on much,” I said as I led him off the platform and into the crowd. “There they are. Hey, guys,” I called. “Check it out! Look who I found!”
“Hi,” said Juliette, looking surprised.
Kiki looked surprised, too—but for a different reason. “Are you the lifeguard? You’re wearing clothes. You look different,” she told Nick.
He laughed. Then I waved good-bye. “Maybe we’ll see you later,” I said (hopefully again). “I know you have to find your friends.”
“Huh?” He glanced at me, then at Juliette, then back at me again. “Oh, that’s okay,” he said. “They’re probably riding go-karts or something I’m not really into. I could hang out with you all for a little while longer.”
“Really?” I said. I couldn’t believe my luck! “That’s great! What should we ride next?”
Kiki pointed to the Ferris wheel. “That one!” she cried.
And from then on, the night just got better! I had a permanent partner for all the rides Kiki was too small to go on and that Juliette wasn’t crazy about trying. And Juliette didn’t have to sit by herself on the less crazy rides, when Kiki insisted on sitting with me.
Plus, Nick—thanks to all his baseball playing—was an excellent milk-bottle toppler. He won not one, not two, but three giant, stuffed “matching friendship snakes,” as Kiki called them—plus a floppy-eared hound dog we all knew Emery would love.
“Isn’t Nick nice?” I asked Juliette as we headed home in the car at the end of the night. There weren’t many guys, after all, who would have hung out with three girls like us for so long. Unless…they liked us! Did he? Could he? I wished I knew enough about boys to tell if Nick liked me. I am not always accurate on that account, as Liza and Mina would attest. But he sure seemed to. Especially after that night. In fact, I wondered if after the carnival we were even kind of…going out? (Probably not, but I’d say, “Definitely, yes!” if Olivia Miner ever asked me.)
It was funny how life had brought us together in so many ways—on the pier, on our beach, at the carnival. Didn’t that mean something? Wasn’t that fate?
Plus, we had so much in common. I’d already started a list in my head:
I thought about maybe asking Juliette what she thought, sometime when Kiki wasn’t around and my mom and dad weren’t totally eavesdropping from the front seat of the car.
“Don’t you think he’s nice?” I asked again.
“Yeah…he is,” Juliette said softly.
“He should wear clothes all the time!” Kiki chimed in.