─── JEALOUSY (⌗ ♥︎! ) 一 the summer i turned pretty ❜
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For the teenagers and young adults who spend their summers at Cousins Beach or live there year long, summer doesn't start until the night of the bonfire. On said night, they would gather around a bonfire and reconnect with people they hadn't seen in a year. It was a way of welcoming everyone back into town or, for the newcomers, a chance to meet people.
Conrad Fisher attended his first bonfire when he was fifteen. A pretty girl whose family used to rent the house next door invited him, and they went together. Steven and Jeremiah joined him the following year. That was how the boys' tradition began. They would ditch the first-night movie marathon with the moms and Belly and instead go to the bonfire.
This year, after a very weird? Unexpected?- Avery isn't sure how to begin to describe it, - dinner, where Susannah handed her and Belly invitations to be debutants at their local country club debutant ball; the boys invited her to go with them before the moms could get the chance to ask her to stay for the movie night.
She said yes to them. Going meant being part of one of the boys' traditions and getting to be part of their group, and she wasn't planning on letting that opportunity get past her. - Also, she had told Conrad she wanted to go to parties this summer. So, after agreeing on what time they would be leaving, she went to her room to change.
The moment she closed her door, she threw the one piece of clothing she had wanted to get rid of for the past few hours. Conrad's hoodie. The same hoodie he ran up the stairs and then gave her in front of the Conklin's.
They were always sharing clothes, but this had been the first time it made Avery feel uncomfortable. Maybe it was because of the jealous feelings that had been messing with her head or the way Belly kept eyeing her ever since Conrad said it was his hoodie when he gave it to her.
Avery hated that she noticed how Belly's face would light up every time she looked at Conrad and how jealous that made her feel. She hated knowing she kept looking at Belly, how girls at school used to look at her.
Avery has always wanted to become friends with the younger girl. Yes, she had always envied that she and her family got hers for the summer, but that didn't mean she didn't like the girl. She has always wanted to befriend her and, according to Susannah and Jeremiah, so has Belly. Yet things between them have felt weird from the moment they met - and Avery hated knowing that the cause of said weirdness was her best friend.
She wasn't going to let whatever jealous feelings she had yet to find a reason for; feelings that only seem to want to appear when it comes to Belly and Conrad, not Belly and Jeremiah - a detail that she was trying her best not to think of, - get in the way of her possible friendship with the younger girl. Just like she was going to make sure that feeling would stop.
