I was at the pool earlier, looking super-cool lying on my Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles towel and reading A PRINCESS OF MARS, when this girl came over to me and said, “Hey, that towel is really cool. Where did you get it?”

I told her I couldn’t remember, but that I was pretty sure that I’d had it for a while.

The girl was pretty hot. Wore some kind of tiny yellow bikini. A bit young-looking, though. Not so obviously young as to be a middle-schooler or anything, but still. Made me a bit uneasy.

She sat down in the beach chair next to me. We talked for a couple of minutes about meaningless shit, then the conversation turned to the subject of summer. But she referred to summer differently than me, like it was more of an event. Not summer, but Summer. A quiet warning bell went off in the back of my head. Okay, I thought. She’s probably a college student or something, because no way she could still be in high school, right? She just doesn’t look that young.

And then she mentioned the SATs and ACTs. Specifically, how she had taken them the past year and done pretty well.

I nodded, still continuing to smile, and slowly backed away . . .