Aiden puts the brown glass to his lips. “What’s the weirdest thing you’ve ever written?”

“The weirdest?” I shake my head.

“Yeah. I’ve drawn some pretty weird things over the years. I went through a phase where I only drew fingers. I’d draw pages and pages of them. My sisters thought it was super creepy.”

“That is weird. Why fingers?”

Aiden shrugs and smiles. “We had to draw them in art class one day and I was just really good at drawing fingers.”

I know what I should say, but I don’t want to. Because for all of Aiden’s little comments about being weird, I’m not quite ready to embrace that just yet. Of course, there’s a little—slightly drunker—voice in my head that tells me not to care. The one that’s always reminding me that this is just for the summer. I don’t need to impress him, or make myself something I’m not. Aiden never makes me feel like I need to, anyway.

“I wrote a short story once—early middle school, maybe—about a girl whose mom gets turned into a dog, and then she takes her mom-dog to the pound.” I cover my face with both hands and let out a strangled groan. “I never finished it. Which was probably good, because it could have gotten pretty dark.” I take a drink from the little pink bottle covered in strawberries. “I was working through some things.”

“Obviously.” Aiden laughs and I don’t know if it’s him, or my impending departure, but it feels good to just be myself. To not feel like I have to try too hard to be a certain way, a certain kind of person.

Zander didn’t even know that I hated his cologne. Hated it. I loved the way he smelled right out of the shower—the freshness of his shampoo, the coolness of his soap. He loved that cologne. So much that he wore it to the Christmas dance last year, even though I told him it gave me a headache. We danced to this song about running away to Paris, and he kissed me in the middle of the courtyard, and it should have felt really special, but all I felt was annoyed. And nauseous. When we got back to his house I took two Tylenol, and then I took his stupid cologne.