In Deep Waters (The Summer House series #1)

5

Blake Richardson was one of the most beautiful girls you had ever seen. She was classically gorgeous, with long toned legs, sparkling blue eyes, and golden blonde hair that fell in tight ringlets all around her face and shoulders. She had perfect skin, not a pimple in sight, a face with all the right symmetry and high cheekbones that could cut. She had the kind of figure every girl wanted. Blake was the girl you went to high school with that you would see on the cover of Vogue magazine a few years later. Blake was a cool girl. She was the 'it' girl. And not just sometimes, every single season. It was like she was designed without a mistake. We were all flawed, but Blake wasn't. She couldn't be.

And it wasn't just Blake herself, it was her family, and the lives that they lived. Blake's life was champagne with breakfast every morning, those summers at Newport of chocolate-covered strawberries and mimosas by the pool Grier and I would hear all about, debutant balls, new cars and new houses, endless shopping days in New York, and flying out on the Richardson's private plane the next. But it was also the people Blake was surrounded by, the world she came from. The company she kept were some of the most affluent young people you could imagine, Rhode Island's finest. At sixteen, the three of us were the same age. Me, Grier, and Blake. But we couldn't be more different in this way.

If we were to get right down into it, because money seems to make the world go around these days, it wasn't that the rest of us were living without. But we were not rich, and we were certainly not Richardson's. Blake was the heir to an entire fortune that stretched a long way back. And the rest of us, well, Grier's family had a bit of money from the Sullivan's law firm, but we were just pretty ordinary if you boiled it right down. Privileged, but ordinary.

My parents were both accomplished accountants, and Austin's parents ran one of the most successful car dealerships in town. As far as Rhode Island went, we were all just your average, comfortable, middle-class kids from Middletown.

Behave, listen to your parents and come back home on time when you're told. Don't get into trouble, and work hard in school so you can get a good job because Mom and Dad can't support you forever.

That was life for the rest of us. And I preferred it that way. But it also didn't mean I wasn't intrigued as to how people like Blake lived their lives. I had to wonder what this summer would be like in Newport. I knew that we were all going to stand out like sore thumbs.

When we had met Blake in elementary school, a nine-year-old Grier and I had thought she was a princess. She had always been the prettiest girl in the class since the very first day. Blake had looked almost exactly the same as she did now, just a younger, smaller version. Her hair had been a more whiter sort of blonde, her eyes a little wider and more nervous, and she looked so dainty and small that if she was to fall over she might break. And then there was that tiny little pearl necklace she had always worn around her neck.

We all had to write short stories for homework one day, and Blake had written about the summer house at Newport. Everyone was starstruck. Grier and I were convinced from then on. If we became friends with Princess Blake, we were going to be taken away with her to her summer house where we would never have to do homework, do our chores, or make our beds ever again. And we did become friends with her. Best friends. We were attached at the hip. And Blake was the sweetest princess, and only princess, that we had ever met.

But every summer we never quite ended up being able to visit the summer house. And then we got older, Blake grew up fast, and so did we, and so did the world. Blake was still a princess, just not the kind of one that we had imagined when we were kids.

The world around us changed. And we realised that we were never going to get an invite to the summer house. And then we realised a little more, and finally figured it all out, and it became more clear. We weren't quite good enough. Just not quite enough. And after all these years this was the summer it was going to happen. I had to wonder sometimes whether it had really been Blake after all. Who could you blame? Maybe it had been her parents this whole time? Or maybe it had just been her, her very own fault for getting so lost in it all that she couldn't make sense of who her real friends were anymore.