Kook by Birth, Pogue by Association // JJ

8. the one where we ruin midsummers

Ugh. The day I've been dreading for months now. Midsummers. A country club event filled with booze and fancy food and tone-deafness, especially this year. While thousands of lights hung and twinkled around the patio and gazebo at the club, not three miles away, people in the cut were without electricity. I didn't like the event the first time I had to go last summer, and I loathe it even more this year. I have too much on my mind to deal with bougie assholes all night.

Another contender for worst reason why I'm not looking forward to the event is my parents. I hadn't seen them since Christmas, and they had insisted on coming to Midsummers to seem me and check up on me and my life.

Country club parties were their lifeblood. They lived for drinking overpriced liquor in fancy clothes with boring people. Tonight would be no different. My mother had made a tremendous deal about my choice of dress for the evening. Lucky for me, she had been okay with the idea of my going shopping with Kie and her mother as they looked for her dress. Kie would be my saving grace tonight, the one rose in a WASP-y nest full of thorns.

My mother had made it clear that I needed to have a full formal look for this event. "No air dried hair or a bare face," she had reiterated over and over. She knew me too well. She knew I spent most of my days in a bikini, no makeup, with ocean water as the product of choice for my hair.

To appease her, because defying her in a den of kooks wasn't an option, I had showered and shaved meticulously, blow dried and curled my hair into long bouncy waves, and highlighted my face with foundation, blush, and mascara. I preferred my usual, more natural look, but I did have to admit I looked pretty, all things considered.

"You almost ready kid? We need to head out," Blaine calls up the stairs.

"Yeah, just about!" I reply. I take one last look in the mirror at my reflection, gazing at my dress. It's long and silky, ocean blue and form fitting to accentuate my curves. I had had it altered a bit so I could wear flat sandals with it, a demand I would not budge on. Mom had given in to avoid a fight.

I head downstairs and see Blaine in a crisp linen suit. He looks at me and smiles. "Hey, you clean up pretty nice for a Pogue!" he jokes.

"Kook by birth, Pogue by association," I joke. "I'm ready I guess. Lets get this over with." I sigh.

"Wow, don't get so excited to see your parents that you haven't seen in six months," he says sarcastically, grabbing his keys. I follow him out to his car.

"You don't like them any more than I do," I remind him, and he chuckles.

"Can you just be civil? It's one night. They go back to the mainland in the morning and you can pretend they don't exist for another few months," he says.

"Fine," I say with a huff.

When we arrive at the country club, Blaine hands the car off to the valet and we head inside. We find my parents pretty quickly.

"Alexandria!" my mother says, floating over to me. She already smells like liquor.

"Mother," I say unenthusiastically. I give her a limp armed hug.

"You look beautiful. Did you come with a date?" she inquires.

"I came with Blaine. I don't associate with any of these people," I tell her.

She frowns. "But what about your friends? They'll be here, right? I'd love to meet them."

"I have one friend that will be here. And you've already met her," I say.

"Then who do you spend all your time with? Blaine says you have a whole group of friends you're with every day," she says.

"My friends aren't really the country club type, mom," I explain. "They're the opposite, actually."