7 Minutes Until the Rest of Our Lives

Chapter 3: Friends

“Look who decided to show up.” Ezra said as me and Peter walked up to our friends. 

“Sorry it took so long, we had to change our clothes.” Marcy’s eyebrows raised for a second before she shook her head. 

“Yeah, shake that thought out of your mind.” I laughed. We all started towards the beach with the boys carrying everything; me and Marcy not too far behind them to pick up anything they ended up dropping. We found a good spot in the shade before the boys dropped everything onto the sand floor. 

“Alright, let's get this party started!” Ezra said, as he dusted himself off. Me and Marcy started laying out our towels while the boys ran to a more open space on the beach to play football. After about 30 minutes of the girls tanning in the sun and the boys rough-housing, we hear Peter’s voice through all the commotion on the beach. 

“Marcy! Anna!” We take off our sunglasses to see the boys in the water, waving at us like crazy people. Me and Marcy exchanged glances before we got up and started running towards the water, just to be tackled before we hit the wet relief. Peter on me and Ezra on Marcy. The other two were having a private conversation while Peter was laughing while on top of me. I stared into his eyes as he laughed. The way they dilated and lit up when he looked at me. I never noticed that before. How happy he is when he’s with me and our friends. He noticed me staring at him and asked, 

“What?” You could hear the smile in his tone. I chuckled to myself. 

“Nothing. Just noticing how you have a roll of coins in your pocket.” His smile suddenly dropped, as he jumped off of me and ran into the water. After a couple seconds in the water, he glared at me. 

“Liar!” He yelled at me. I just laughed at his stupidity. Marcy and Ezra gave me a puzzled look as I just shrugged at them, as if I had no idea what Peter was talking about. I got up from the warm sand and ran into the water, tackling Peter to the ocean floor. Ezra and Marcy weren’t far behind. As we splashed around in the water and ran around on the beach, we lost track of time. Soon enough it was 5:26 and we were all worn out and hungry from our adventures on the sand. 

“Wanna go grab a bite to eat? I'm starving.” I said as we gathered our things and walked back to the cars. 

“Sure,” Ezra said, before adding, “But I’m kind of sick of everything here. Why don’t we try something out of town?” Everyone exchanged glances before pulling out our phones to look up restaurants in the neighboring cities. 

“How about KBBQ?” I asked them. They gave me a puzzling look. “It’s a Korean restaurant. Barbeque style. Has grills you can cook the food yourselves on and has a bunch of options for food.” All three exchanged glances before shaking their heads simultaneously. I chuckled a little at their correlation. We went through a few more places we had never been to before. Nothing sounded good so we settled to just go to AppleBees in a different city. It was about an hour drive when we finally reached our destination. We were all in Ezra’s car since we decided to not take 2 cars. After we dropped my car off at my house and Peter and I changed into nicer clothes, we went to Marcy’s and Ezra’s so they could change too. Even though we were still kids at heart, we could look mature when we wanted to. I was wearing a red, body-clinging dress with spaghetti straps with my hair in a messy bun and light makeup. Marcy was wearing the same dress but in blue with her hair in braids. She wore light makeup also. Then the boys wore suits to match our colors; Ezra in blue and Peter in red. They styled their hair to where it looked messy but cute in a way. It looked like we were going on a double date even though two out of the four weren’t dating. 

“Hi! How many will it be?” The hostess asked us. 

“Four.” I said, smiling. She smiled back at me and asked,