Prologue Part 1
KENNA
August 9, 2015
I should have known this would be a bad idea.
‘You need a little break’, she said, ‘some quality time spent sunbathing on the beach’, she said, ‘no boys allowed’, she said, and now… the ugly truth comes to light.
I sigh. I honestly don’t know why am I even surprised in the first place: I shouldn’t put anything past Veronica at this point.
The fact that she was all sweet and caring when she brought it up should have been my first warning: she’s never particularly nice to me if she can help it.
We have been roommates for the last three years or so, it was luck of the draw really: we were randomly paired to share a room in the dorms at UNF.
We were pretty much strangers sharing living quarters, then I decided to move out and live off-campus. Rents are pretty steep in Jacksonville if you’re a student working a low-pay part-time job while you try to get your degree and all I could have afforded was a ratty hole-in-the-wall shoebox too far from school, so when Veronica suggested we should pool our resources together and get a bigger place in a nicer neighborhood, I was all for it.
For a while there, I even hoped we could really become friends despite our differences, I’m a bookworm, she’s a party animal, I don’t date, she flits from guy to guy, and she was –and still is– always so critical of everything I say and do that my hope soured pretty fast.
I’ve never once seen her actually studying and she’s forever jumping from job to job because she gets fired all the time, not that she cares since her father covers all of her expenses.
In fact, I’m pretty sure that if she wasn’t such a fashionista, she could probably afford to rent a bigger place and keep it all to herself, but she has too many ‘weaknesses’ as she calls them and that’s why she’s stuck with me, again her words.
I’ve always kept my mouth shut no matter the way she saw fit to lead her life, I don’t like to pry and if she’s content who am I to judge, though sometimes it’s difficult to keep a cool head when she brings guys over and I hear them try my doorknob in the middle of the night, but I got wise pretty fast and now when she comes home with some frat boy, I just leave the apartment and go to the library on campus to spend the night power-studying.
And really, with the passing of years, these incidents have lessened and she rarely spends the night in, alone or otherwise. She’s still a mess to live with and doesn’t know the meaning of the words ‘house chores’, but our cute apartment is only a stone-throw away from campus and I’m not prepared to leave so I make it work.
My only problem with her is how she plays the concerned friend only to be snarky and critical of my lifestyle, my chubbiness, my choice of clothes, and pretty much everything I say and do.
I’ve told her countless times to keep her opinions to herself, but it has yet to get through her thick skull, she has no freaking filter whatsoever and can’t seem to understand how hurtful she is when she stares at me with every cookie I eat and asks me if I really think it’s a good idea to have another bite.
She actually thinks she’s helpful when she’s being a bitch to me, like if you call me ‘sweetie’ while you’re telling me that I look like a whale in my favorite blue sundress, somewhat that makes it okay to take digs at me.
I really tried to be friends with her, especially over that first year, but it soon became clear she had her social circle and no intention of introducing her nerdy roommate into it anytime soon.
I’m shy and it isn’t super easy for me to be social and when I do, I have the worst luck and only end up meeting people that want something from me and couldn’t care less about being my friends.
My dad’s girlfriend, Melania, whenever she bothers speaking with me, says I’m too trusting which is her ‘nice-but—not-really-’ way of telling me she thinks I’m too-stupid-to-live and that people take advantage of my goodness, which again, in her book is code-speech for ‘you’re a gullible idiot’.
I guess Veronica also agrees with Melania’s definition of me since she lied her ass off and managed to drag me here under false pretenses, and maybe they are right, about me being too naive, after all, I’m the one who really believed this mini-break was an olive branch and even if Veronica has proven many times she can’t be trusted, I thought I would give our friendship one final shot and went along with her plan. Big effing mistake.
She spent four days talking my ear off at any given turn about this little beautiful oceanside town not twenty minutes away from UNF by car, Plumeria. I’d never heard of the place, but I have to admit it’s truly lovely.
She showed me all these gorgeous pictures of the little quaint B&B we ended up booking a room with twin beds in, and of the breathtaking beach with the white, unpolluted sand and the crystalline azure waters, and in the end, even if I have two exams to prepare for, and tons of research to do for a paper, I let her talk me into taking this weekend-long mini-vacay.
When I mentioned studying, she was like: ‘you need to loosen up, sweetie, you need a break and so do I, don’t be such a stuck-up boring nerd, come on!’.
She said we would relax, catch some sun and generally have no-boys-allowed fun times, she said she was concerned about how many migraines I’ve been getting —which really is true, I’ve been getting a lot of them, and it totally made me feel like she really cared— and then she told me how much she needed the downtime to recuperate after her latest breakup.
She said it had been particularly hard on her, that she really felt like she was falling for the guy and then he cut her loose.
I really felt bad for her and in the end, I thought I could more than afford less than three days away from textbooks and homework to help cheer her up and get some rest myself so I said yes, even made the mini-break my treat when she told me she was broke –yet again– and she needed to borrow some money to cover her part of the expenses.
We got here last night and we just hung out by the beach. Veronica kept looking around like she was waiting for someone and tapping away at her phone, but I didn’t think anything of it, she’s practically glued to the thing and as for the way she glanced around, I figured she really liked the scenery, the sunset was a thing of beauty and she had to immortalize it into close to ninety selfies.
Now early this afternoon, after more of her jumpy behavior and general even nastier than usual bitchiness, I got the big reveal.
Turns out she’s here to get together with a guy she met online and dragged me along in case he ends up being some kind of creep.
And now she’s insisting I doll myself up to go play third wheel to her and this guy, whoever he is.
I mean, I will go: I could never forgive myself if the guy was some psycho and hurt her –not that I could do much to stop it, I’m only 5’2’’ tall and while I do have some mass to my tininess it’s definitely not muscle, only very soft, ample curves- I don’t see why I have to do it while wearing something this revealing and totally slutty to the outing.