Lie Until You Laugh

18- Beaches

“I can’t believe we’re finally doing this!” Stella cheers excitedly as she’s driving out of the campus parking lot on Saturday towards the beach that is apparently just a five minute drive away. I’m sitting in the front beside Stella while Mason and Brian are in the back holding hands because they’re just that cute.

“This is an important moment for you, Sienna,” Mason tells me excitedly. “We’re popping your beach cheery.”

“For real this time, because there’s no mishap with a certain asshole instructor,” Stella adds with a grin.

I sigh, leaning back in my chair. I really don’t want to think and/or talk about Penn at all. “It’s very exciting. Can we please build a sand castle?”

“That’s one of the mandatory things that you have to do when you go the beach,” She says with a nod. “Of course we’re going to build a sand castle.”

“I already packed the shovels and buckets in the trunk,” Brian informs me from the back seat. “So we’re all set.”

“Sunset or Jameson?” Stella wonders.

“Those are the two beaches,” Mason informs me. “Jameson has better sandcastle-building sand, so I say we go there.”

“Good point,” Stella nods. “But we can watch the sunset if we go to sunset.”

“You can’t see the sunset from the other beach?” I wonder.

She shrugs. “Well I mean, you can, but there’s trees in the way kind of and it just looks better at Sunset. We’ll go to Jameson though and maybe some other time, we’ll catch the sunset at Sunset.”

“You have to turn here to get to Jameson,” Mason tells her, pointing to the street in front of us.

When Stella parks in one of the busy parking lots, we all file out of the car. I grab my bag that has my towel and stuff in it and then we all go to the trunk where there’s a large blanket, a big bag of beach toys, and then a few inflatable rafts and noodles for the water.

The sun is scorching on top of us, so it’s a good thing that Stella and Mason both brought sun screen. I don’t have any, so I just plan on using theirs when we get to the beach that is hidden behind a wooden fence at the moment. The fence separates the parking lot from the beach and then there’s this wooden walkway that we have to walk on to get to the beach. There’s a few showers along the walkway for people who are leaving the beach and need to get sand and ocean water off of themselves which is nice.

When I follow them into the sand, we start walking and I can feel the sand throwing itself at the top of my thighs. I look back to see why the sand is hitting me and I see that my flip flops are flicking sand onto my legs.

"So, what do you think?” Stella asks me eagerly.

“I think this sand is really hot,” I comment. “But it’s really beautiful.”

“It is, isn’t it?” Mason laughs as she walks by my side while holding hands with Brian. “Let’s go swim for a little bit and then we can get building. Oh, and don’t worry about the sand- it’s not that hot when you get closer to the water.”

She’s right, of course, as we neared the lapping ocean, the sand cools down exponentially, so I slip my  flip flops off of my feet and we take about five minutes to set up our spot on the beach because we plan on being there all day. There are birds flying around above us and there are a lot of people walking around. It seems like exactly what I thought it would look like except for the attractive lifeguards.

I toss my gray cover up in my bag so that it doesn’t get sandy and I pull my hair up into a messy bun just like Mason and Stella do.

“Salt water is a bitch to your hair,” Stella informs me. “So if you can help it, don’t get your hair wet.”