10000 Things I Hate About You

My lips twist. “You mean, fuck with his head by making him think you want to get back together, when really you’re just using him for sex?”

“I mean, he’s a big boy,” she says, grinning as she grabs her purse from beside her lawn chair and pulls out a pink lip gloss. “If he’s as tired of breaking up and making up as he says he is, then he’ll tell me no.” She smoothes on a coat of gloss before plunking it back in her purse and adding in a devilish whisper, “But he won’t. You cool with catching a ride home with Pete or somebody? He has his van and is the designated driver for their crew. I have a feeling Greg and I are going to end up in the backseat of my love sedan on a backroad somewhere…steaming up the windows.”

I assure her I’ll find another ride, wish her luck, and watch her go, relieved to have at least one potential competitor for Derrick’s attention out of the running.

But Leslie is far from the only woman with her eyes on Daddy Olsen.

The early, twenty-something bank teller chicks perched on the hay bales nearby have been whispering behind their hands about him all night. And Lala, the nineteen-year-old Spanish exchange student, has swiveled past him twice in her skintight spandex dress, the one that’s way too skimpy for a cool spring night.

Her nipples are sticking out half an inch through her dress and it’s only a matter of time before Derrick notices them and the rest of Lala’s gorgeous self. And she has the added advantage of being outside Evie’s friend group, someone Derrick didn’t know as a child, and fully legal.

But then…I’m fully legal now, too.

Since Derrick was home for Christmas, my eighteenth birthday has come and gone. I’m a woman now. I can vote and join the military and drink in Australia and Ireland.

There’s no reason I can’t express interest in another fully grown adult…aside from my certainty that Derrick has no interest in me in that way, of course. I’m positive the thought of kissing me has never crossed his mind.

Then change his mind. And his perspective.

Since when do you sit on your ass, waiting for someone to give you what you want?

You’re a go-getter, Harlow Raine. You’re a force to be reckoned with, who just scored a full scholarship to Duke.

And besides, what do you have to lose?

I try to remind the inner voice of the risks—mortification, shame, upsetting Evie, that weird rash I get on my chest sometimes when I’m really nervous—but she’s had too much beer.

The inner voice is a cocky drunk and I’m a frisky one.

It’s a bad combination, so bad that by the time I polish off the last of my Nasty Light and pop a mint from Leslie’s car stash to banish the taste of cheap beer, I’ve concocted a plan.

It’s a wild, semi-bonkers plan, and one that could easily go hideously awry.

I make one last attempt to reason with the scheming side of myself, reminding it that girls who go wandering into the woods with strange men often end up the focus of a true crime podcast. But my gut insists that Derrick won’t let anything happen to me.

He might not seem to be paying attention to my side of the field, but I’ve crushed on this man for nearly a decade.

I know him, and I know that if Evie, our other best friend, Jess, or I are anywhere in Derrick’s vicinity, we’re on his “protect and destroy potential threats” radar. I’ll be lucky to get all the way into the woods before he’s there, doing the surrogate big brother thing.

That’s why I have to be ready.

Prepared to make a move the moment he intervenes…

Popping another mint into my mouth and pulling in a deep, bracing breath, I remind myself that fortune favors the bold and, like the drunk idiot I am, head right for the most dangerous man at the party.

Chapter Two

Harlow

Edgar Smithfield-Watson III…

If you were to simply hear his name in passing, you’d probably think he was a posh guy. Or that he came from money at some point in the not-too-distant past.

You’d be wrong.

The Smithfield-Watsons, on the whole, are lovely people, but they’re solidly lower middle class. They live in a family compound of faded gray houses by the shore, sell ice cream out of antique carts on the beach every summer, and reproduce at a staggering rate. At any given time, there’s a Smithfield-Watson in nearly every grade at the local elementary school, and it’s been that way for as long as anyone can remember.

So, it makes sense that one or two members of each generation are going to be assholes. It’s not bad parenting or anything in the DNA, it’s just…statistical probability.

Victoria Smithfield-Watson fed my mom ex-lax brownies at Girl Scout camp when they were kids, Bartholomew Smithfield-Watson tried to cut Jess’s pigtail off when we were in second grade, and Edgar Smithfield-Watson III, at the tender age of just twenty-three, has already knocked up half the town.