I don’t have any time to dwell on how her friendship is slipping away from me before Shannon hits me with the next blow. “And now,” she says in her most tantalizing I-am-the-first-to-everything voice, “for the first time in Stratford history, please welcome the vocal stylings of … Jasmine Killary!”

She’s joking. She has to be. When did Jasmine even get here? But sure enough, there she is, stepping up to the mic and laughing with Shannon as everyone cheers. Her hair is in a glossy high ponytail that swirls around her shoulders—shoulders bared by cutouts in her skin-colored dress and glittering with a dusting of gold. I’m too short to see anything else, but she’s head-to-head with Shannon so she must be wearing at least three-inch heels.

She’s dressed to get every single eye in the room on her, and it’s working.

I couldn’t take mine off her if I tried.

The music starts—Shannon must’ve flipped it on—and my brain is such a blur it takes me a few seconds to figure out what song she chose. But there’s a lot of whistling from the hornier members of the football team who do know.

And, with the first word, it clicks.

Demi Lovato’s “Cool for the Summer,” a fucking anthem for girls exploring each other’s bodies.

Jasmine’s low, sexy voice can’t hit Demi’s higher notes, but she’s singing about fooling around with a girl and absolutely nobody gives a shit about her vocal skills. Behind me, even Chase is whistling, his hands on my shoulders, ironically the only thing to keep me steady when my body wants to shake uncontrollably. Every lyric cuts me like a knife, and I wait for her to make eye contact, to tell me to my face that she’s reducing our summer to a little curiosity, but she never does.

Instead, she goes all in, flirting with what feels like literally everyone else in the audience. Thanks to Shannon’s proximity, people are whispering, coming up with their own interpretations, even as Jasmine practically sits in Paulie Wolman’s lap. Everything about this is awful, except that it isn’t. Watching her perform is incredible, and when I close my eyes, her voice strokes me the way her fingers used to. I’m a horrible person, standing with my boyfriend and completely melting at a girl’s voice, at the memory of her touch. To make it worse, I suspect—though you can never know with Jasmine—this song was chosen to tell me to fuck all the way off and give up trying to have any semblance of a connection with her, that any deeper meaning to this summer was entirely in my head.