Title: The Girls Next Door

Summary: Naomi works at the Fitch's Marina and spends the summer trying to win over Katie.

Disclaimer: I don't own anything related to skins.

Rating: M

Katie smiled down at me, her brown hair glinting golden in the sunlight. She shouted over the noise of the boat motor and the wind, "Naomi, when we're old enough, I want you to be my girlfriend." She didn't even care that the others could hear her.

"I'm there!" I exclaimed, because I was nothing if not coy. All the girls ate out of my hand, I tell you. "When will we be old enough?"

Her brown eyes, darker than the tree trunks behind her, seemed to glow in her tanned face. She answered me, smiling. Her lips moved.

"I didn't hear you, what did you say?" I know how to draw out a romantic moment. She spoke to me again. I still couldn't hear her, though the boat motor and the wind hadn't gotten any louder. Maybe she was just mouthing words, pretending to say something sweet I couldn't catch. Girls were like that. She'd just been teasing me all along-

"You ass!" I sat straight up in my sweat soaked bed, wiping away the strands of my hair stuck to my wet face. Then I realized what I said out loud."Sorry Mom," I told her photo on my bedside table. But maybe she hadn't heard me over my alarm clock blaring ADELE," Someone Like You."

Or maybe she'd understand. I'd just had another close encounter with Katie! Even if it was only in my dreams.

Usually I didn't remember my dreams. Whenever my adopted brother, Cook, was home from Uni, he was two years ahead in school, he told dad and me at breakfast what he'd dreamt the night before. Megan Fox kicking his butt on the sidewalk after he tried to take her picture (pure fantasy). Amanda Bynes dressed as the highway patrol, pulling him over to give him a traffic ticket.

I was jealous. I wanted to dream about Megan Fox kicking my butt. I had googled "dreaming" and found out some people don't remember their dreams if their bodies are used to getting up at the same hour every morning and have plenty of time to complete the dream cycle.

So why'd I remember my dream this morning? it was the first day of summer vacation, that's why. To start work at the Marina, I'd set my clock thirty minutes earlier than the school year. Lo and behold, here was my dream. About Katie: check. Blowing me off as usual: no! That might happen in my dreams, but it wasn't going to happen in real life. Not again. Katie would be mine, starting today.

I gave mom on my bedside table an okay sign - the wake boarding signal for ready to go - before rolling out of bed.

My dad and brother suspected nothing, ho ho. They didn't even notice what I was wearing. Our conversation at breakfast was the same one we had every summer morning since we were five years old.

Dad to Cook: "You take care of your sister today."

Cook, between bites of egg: "Roger that."

Dad to me: "And you watch out around those girls next door."

Me: (Eye Roll.)

Cook: "I had this brill dream about Anne Hathaway."

Post-oatmeal, Cook and I trotted across our yard and the Fitch's yard to the complex of showrooms, warehouses and docks at the Fitch's Marina. The morning air was already thick with the heat and humidity and the smell of cut grass that would last the entire summer. I didn't mind. I liked the heat. And I quivered my flip-flops at the prospect of another whole summer with Katie. I'd been going through withdrawal.

In past years, any one of the three Fitch kids, including Katie, might have shown up at my house to kick the football around or play video games with my brother. They might let me play to if they felt sorry for me, or if their mom had guilted them into it. And Cook might go to their house at any time. But I couldn't go to their house. If I'd walked in, they'd have stopped what they were doing, looked up, and wondered what I was doing there. They were Cook's friends, not mine.

Well Emily was my friend. She was probably more my friend than Cook's. Even though we were the same age, I didn't have any classes with her at college, so you'd think that she'd walk a hundred yards over to my house for a visit every once in a while. But she didn't: And if I'd gone to visit her, it would have been obvious that I was looking for Katie out of the corner of my eye the whole time.

For the past nine months, with Cook off at Uni, my last tie to Katie had been severed. She was one year ahead of me, so I didn't have any classes with her, either. I wasn't even in the same wing of the college. I saw her once at a football game, and once in front of the movie theater when I'd ridden around with Panda for a few minutes after a tennis match.

But I never approached her. She was always flirting with Mini McGuinness or Grace Blood or whatever glamorous person she was with at the moment. I was too young for her, and she never even thought of hooking up with me. On the very rare occasion when she took the garbage to the side of the road at the same time I walked to the mailbox, she gave me the usual beaming smile and big hug and acted like I was her best friend ever… for thirty heavenly seconds.

It had been a long winter. Finally we were back to the summer. The Fitches always needed extra help at the marina during the busy season from the end of May to the beginning of September. Just like last year, I had a job there – and an excuse to make Katie my captive audience.

I sped up my trek across the pine needles between the trees and found myself in a footrace against Cook. It was totally unfair because I was carrying my backpack and he was wearing sneakers, but I beat him to the warehouse by half a length anyway.

The Fitches had gotten to the warehouse before us and claimed the good jobs, so I wouldn't have a chance to work side by side with Katie. Effy was helping take boats out of storage. She wanted Cook to work with her so they could catch up with their lives at two different Uni's. Katie and Emily were already gone, delivering the boats to customers up and down the lake for the weekend. Katie wasn't round to see my outfit. I was so desperate to get going on this "new me" thing, I would have settled or a double take from Emily or Effy.

All I got was Mrs. Fitch. Come to think of it, she was a good person to run the outfit by. She wore stylish clothes, as far as I could tell. Her brown pinstriped hair was cut to flip up in the back. She looked exactly like you'd want your mom to look so as not to embarrass you in public.

I found her in the office and hopped onto a stool behind her. Looking over her shoulder as she typed on the computer, I asked, "Notice anything different?"

She tucked her pinstriped hair behind her ear and squinted at the screen. "I'm using the wrong font?"

"Notice anything different about my boobs?"

That got her attention. She whirled around in her chair and peered at my chest. "You changed your boobs?"

"I'm showing my boobs," I said proudly, moving my palm in front of them like presenting them on a TV commercial. All this can be yours! Or, rather, your daughter's. My usual summer uniform was the outgrown clothes Cook had given me over the years: jeans, which I cut off into shorts and wore with a wide belt to hold up the waist, and T-shirts from her football team. Under that, for wake boarding in the afternoon, I used to wear a one- piece sports bathing suit with full coverage that reached all the way to my neck.

Early in the boob-emerging years, I had no boobs, and I was touchy about it. Remember in middle school algebra class, you'd type 55378008 on your calculator, turn it upside down, and hand it to the flat-chested girl across the aisle? I was that girl, you wanker. I would have died twice if any of the boys had mentioned my booblets.

Last year, I thought my boobs had progressed quite nicely. And I progressed from the one-piece into a tankini. But I wasn't quite ready for any more exposure. I didn't want the girls to treat me like an attractive cutlet of the girls they could have.

Now I did. So today I'd worn a cute little bikini. Over that, I still wore Cook's cutoff jeans. Amazingly, they looked sexy, riding low on my hips, when I traded the football t-shirt for a pink tank that ended above my belly button and hugged my figure. I even had a little cleavage. I was so proud. Katie was going to love it.

Jenna Fitch stared at my chest, perplexed. Finally she said, "Oh I get it. You're trying to look hot."

"Thank you!" mission accomplished.

"Here's a hint. Close your legs."

I snapped my thighs together on the stool. People always scolded me for sitting like a boy. Then I slid off the stool and stomped to the door in a huff. 'Where do you want me?"

She'd turned back to the computer. "You've got gas."

Oh, fucking great. I headed out the office door, towards the front dock to man the gas pumps. This meant at some point during the day, one of the girls would look around the marina office and ask, "Who has gas?" and another girl would answer, "Naomi has gas." If I were really lucky, Katie would be in on the joke.

The office door squeaked behind me, "Naomi," Mrs. Campbell called. "Did you want to talk?" Noooooooo. Nothing like that. I'd only gone into her office and tried to start a conversation. Jenna had three daughters. But she still didn't know how to talk to me. My mother had died in a boating accident when I was four. I didn't know how to talk to a woman. Any conversation between Jenna and me was doomed from the start.

"No why?" I asked without turning around. I'd been galloping down the wooden steps, but now I stepped very carefully, looking down, as if I needed to examine every footfall so I wouldn't trip.

"Watch out around the girls," she warned me. I raised my hand and wiggled my fingers, toodle-dee- doo, dismissing her. Those girls were harmless. Those girls had better watch out for me.

Really, aside from the specter of the girls discussing my intestinal problems, I enjoyed having gas. I got to sit on the dock with my feet in the water and watch the kingfishers and the herons glide low over the surface. Later I'd swim on the side of the dock upriver from the gasoline. Not now, before Katie saw me for the first time that summer. I would be in and out of the lake and windy boats all day, and my hair would look like hell. That was understood. But I wanted have clean, dry, styled hair at least the first time she saw me, and I would hope she kept the memory alive. I might go swimming after she saw me, while I waited for people to drive up to the gas pumps in their boats.

I was just folding a twenty into my back pocket when Katie and Emily came zipping across the water in the boat emblazoned with Fitch's Marina down the side, blasting Nickelback from the speakers. They turned hard at the edge of the idle zone. Three-foot swells shook the floating dock violently and would have shaken me off into the water if I hadn't held onto the rail. Then the bow of the boat eased against the padding on the dock. Emily must be the one driving. Katie would have driven all the way to the warehouse, closer to where they'd pick up the next boat for delivery.

In fact, as Katie threw me the rope to tie the stern and Emily cut the engine, I could hear them arguing about this. Katie and Emily argued pretty much 24/7. I was used to it. But I would have rather not have heard Katie complaining that they were going to have to walk a whole fifty extra yards and up the stairs just so Emily could say hi to me.

Katie jumped off the boat. Her weight rocked the floating dock again as she tied up the bow. Then she straightened and smiled her beautiful smile at me, and I forgave her everything.