Welcome to Corbet's Inlet, North Carolina, where the teenagers act like adults and the adults act like teenagers. It's Griffin Connolly's favorite place in the world. And while she may not be good at making decisions when it comes to her own life, s...
Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
Charlie scrubbed harder at the edge of a gold-rimmed dinner plate. "I swear to God, Evan. I swear to God. Enough with this shit."
"What do you mean?!" Evan said. "This shit's fucking brilliant! How many times did you almost drive up to Wake Forest our freshman year to try to talk to Griffin? This is your chance, dude!"
Charlie shoved him out of the way and opened the dishwasher.
"Do you remember how delusional I was that year? You were the one who had to keep convincing me not to do it!" Charlie argued. He wasn't used to Evan saying Griffin's name out loud so casually like this. It made his pulse thud in his eardrums.
Evan crowded closer to the sink. "But now you actually have a legit reason to go!"
Charlie pushed him away again and picked up another plate to rinse. The only reason he'd volunteered to do the dishes tonight after Thanksgiving dinner was to give himself a freaking moment to breathe. Now he couldn't even have that.
Between Charlie's mom and stepdad (Brent) pretending everything was perfectly perfect, and Max pretending like he understood the bullshit answer he got when he asked why Charlie's dad wasn't invited this year, and Evan's parents pretending like it wasn't one gigantic awkward fucking circus every time they came over...... The last thing Charlie needed right now was Evan pretending like it was a good idea to crash Griffin's group project presentation at Wake Forest. Charlie could be a stubborn idiot, yeah, but he drew the line at stalking.
"Just think about it, dude," Evan pressed. "You're a main character in the story. That's your excuse right there to go! Play it off like it was planned all along. Part of the show, you know? The crowd'll go nuts."
"What makes you—ah, FUCK." Charlie yanked his hands out from under the faucet. He'd accidentally cranked the water to scalding. Evan tried to hand him a dish towel, but Charlie ignored it. "What the hell makes you think a crowd's gonna be there, Ev?"
Evan laughed once, then again, and then his eyebrows shot up. "Wait, you're serious? Have you not looked at the response their announcement got?"
"I'm still on the Fourth of July chapters."
"Dude." Evan yanked his phone out of his back pocket and thumbed frantically at the screen. "It's got, like, over a thousand comments so far..."
Charlie turned back to the sink and pulled a deep breath in. He and Evan were the only two people in his mom's excessively decorated kitchen, but Charlie felt tight and cornered and more overwhelmed now than he was at the crowded dinner table earlier.
"Ha!" Evan said behind him. A phone appeared right in front of Charlie's face. "Eighteen hundred comments. Look at this shit! People are losing their minds."
Charlie jerked sideways to avoid looking. "So what?"
"So what? What do you mean, so what?" Evan pulled his phone back.
