“It’s so fucking lame,” Paige said, stripping down to an ink black bikini that revealed a tiny rhinestone stapled to her belly button. “All these stupid pool toys. It’s like, who even plays in the water anyways?”

She and the other Preps took their places on the lounge chairs and began slathering themselves with baby oil. My great-aunt Janice had recently survived a nearly fatal bout of melanoma, but I happily joined them in the oiling, wondering if anyone would notice my swimsuit. I’d gotten it the night before, after begging my mother to buy me a new one. In the dressing room at JCPenney, she insisted on watching as I tried things on. “You’d be better off with a one piece,” she’d said. She had an idea that I wasn’t developed enough for a bikini. Obviously, she was out of her element. Not to mention a pervert. Maybe I hadn’t fully developed the bust that was sure to one day be mine, but there was definitely something there, something that had to be retained by a garment with more horsepower than a girl’s Speedo. In the end, we settled on a canary yellow bikini with a generous amount of padding and a scandalous bow that tied at the breast-bone. At home, I shut myself in my room and practiced seduction dances. I pictured Paige going red with envy. Even she wouldn’t have a swimsuit like this. “Ain’t nobody got a suit like mine,” I chanted as I gyrated before the mirror, ignoring the full rack of identical suits back at JCPenney, not to mention all the JCPenneys across America. “Ain’t nobody, nobody, nobody.”

What nobody also knew was that I had a plan to make a name for myself. This would happen by seducing Paige’s older brother, Tucker, who was said to be a spitting image of a young Johnny Depp, circa What’s Eating Gilbert Grape. The problem with Tucker was that he was homeschooled, so nobody had ever talked to him. Even Paige kept quiet on the matter of her older brother, only mentioning him once, by accident, to tell us that her father had gotten him a Jeep for his birthday, and how stupid, since Tucker never left the house. Which was true. Tucker did not go to parties or play sports or race pickups in the country with the Andover boys. Rumor held that he was a genius and that Paige’s dad had shipped in a team of Russian scientists to formally train him in physics and engineering. Either he was in the process of building a rocket ship that ran on pop tabs, or he was creating a naturopathic cure for canine anxiety. He was a myth inside of a fortress, and I was determined to break through with the cannon of my burgeoning womanhood.

Once we were sufficiently oiled, I turned to Paige and sighed what I hoped was the sigh of the wearily wealthy. “It’s a great house,” I told her. “The décor is to die for. Who all lives here?”