Ask Me Anything

Chapter 2

"Connor, wake up!" Carrie said, throwing a pillow at my head. "Man, you sleep a lot!"

I grabbed the pillow and threw it to the floor.

"Sleep is my escape from your crazy ass, so can you blame me?" I muttered sleepily, as I propped myself up on my elbow.

She rolled her eyes. She was standing at the doorway, dressed already in her bikini, her hair in a tight braid. "How early did you get up this morning, Car?"

She laughed. "6:30," she replied, all too awake. "I got up a for a run this morning. Come on, we only have today to go to the beach and relax before we start work on Tuesday."

I groaned into my pillow and threw the blanket back. "Fine, I'm up," I muttered. "Happy?"

"I'll be happy when you stop complaining," she laughed, heading back into her room.

I chuckled groggily. "I make no promises!" I called back and I slumped into the kitchen to grab some orange juice.

I was never very hungry in the morning for breakfast, which sucked because I know all about breakfast being the most important meal of the day and blah blah blah. Kylie was banging on the Keurig machine when I closed the fridge door after pouring my OJ.

"Um, is everything okay there, my friend?" I asked tentatively, wiping my eyes to see if I was hallucinating.

She growled. "I am going through coffee withdrawal and I need this little shit to work!" she yelled, opening the top and shutting it.

"Withdrawal?" I asked. "How long has it been since you've had coffee?"

She sighed and turned to me once the machine finally started churning out some of coffee into her mug. "Like a month," she said with an eye roll. "My crazy mother decided it was bad for me to get into the habit of drinking coffee before I'm even twenty, so she banned me from having it."

The machine dinged when it was finished. "AH!" she shouted, grabbing it faster than humanly possible and slurping loudly. A satisfied smile spread across her face. "There it is," she hummed.

I just shook my head. "Alright, Kylie," I said, backing out of the kitchen so I could leave her and Maxwell House alone for a minute. "You do you, sister."

I chugged the rest of my OJ and went back into my room to get changed. I slathered on the sunscreen when I had my bathing suit on. Thanks to my father's side of the family, I had incredibly Irish skin, meaning I burned like a snap of your fingers. I really would have preferred to have more Italian skin like my mother, so that I could get a nice tan and I wouldn't look like a Snooki wannabe, but it was just my luck to get stuck with easily burning skin.

"Abby, Kylie, don't forget to put a shit ton of sunscreen on," Carrie yelled from her room as she was packing up her bag. "You two burn after, like, two minutes in the sun. And we don't want a repeat of senior week."

"Shut up, Carrie," Abby yelled down to her from the second floor. "I've still got PTSD from that."

The year before when we had only gone down for a week, both Kylie and Abby got burned all over their backs. It was so bad that Kylie ended up passing out at one point, and Abby spent the night rolling around on the floor because her body ached so badly. We had to go to the nearest pharmacy and get some aloe so they didn't peel like crazy.

"I'm making sandwiches, who wants one?" Morgan called from the kitchen.

Like a perfectly timed choir, we all shouted in unison, "Me!"

I threw the sunscreen, my cell phone and my book into my drawstring bag and threw my cover up on over my head. Then, I grabbed my black hat and sunglasses and threw them on. I turned to look in the mirror, hoping I would look like all that and a bag of chips, but all I could muster was, "Meh."