“You could never look slutty,” Haley said. “But what about me?” She twirled in the dressing room, her blond hair flying out. She was petite and cute, with perky B cups and a round butt, and she bumped her hip against Tasha’s and gazed up at her with a grin.

“You want to look slutty?” Tasha said, laughing.

“No,” Haley said, pretending to be offended. “But what do you think?”

“You both look great,” Tasha said, and she put her arms around us as we gazed at ourselves in the floor-length mirror.

Back then, none of us really understood what slutty meant, other than that it wasn’t something we wanted to be called. We hadn’t yet learned that the line between sexy and slutty was so thin it could move with a whisper.

—

I met Nathan one afternoon while Haley and I were walking from her house to where we planned to lay our towels out on the beach. He was part of a group of older teen boys playing volleyball nearby, and I eyed them through my sunglasses as I approached. They had the blond good looks of kids who went to boarding schools like Choate or Phillips and learned how to sail like a Kennedy during summers on the Cape. One boy in particular—he had sandy hair and a tight stomach and was wearing blue board shorts—seemed to notice me a couple of times. As we walked past, he actually turned his head to watch, and a volleyball came out of nowhere and smacked him in the shoulder.

I laughed. His teammates, who were ribbing him over not seeing the ball, noticed, and a few seconds later they pushed him out of the game toward me. He seemed slightly abashed, but not enough to resist their encouragement.

“Hey,” he called. “You’re distracting me so much I might as well say hello.”

His smile was that perfect summer-boy grin—freckles, white teeth, blue eyes—slightly sheepish but mostly self-confident. He had a buoyant spirit I was drawn to right away. In those first couple of minutes while we introduced ourselves, I practically planned out the whole summer in my head. He’d buy me ice cream in the afternoons; we’d walk along the beach and he’d hold my hand. He’d kiss me at sunset as the water sighed onto the shore; I’d melt into him as he told me I was the most beautiful girl he’d ever known. By the end of the summer, he’d have fallen in love with me and would promise to visit in the fall. All this flashed through my mind even before I managed to say, “I’m Aria.”

“Nathan. Have I seen you around here before?”

“I don’t know,” I said coyly. “Have you?”

His smile grew more flirtatious. “You gonna be around tonight?”