Chapter 1: Cape Dismay

I was in the car, contemplating my existence and anticipating my imminent death. Who on earth had decided that a summer vacation on the beach was a good idea? The beach is the last place where an elegant, distinguished and posh individual such as myself would be seen. That, or 1) I cannot swim and 2) I am as white as a piece of paper, and laying in the sun does not do me any favours, unless I want to look like a lobster. I could not, however, put any objections, since it was our first "family" vacation and Dad was oddly excited about spending time at some random beach town with Carol and Finn. And Finn, well, he just wanted to eat ice cream all day and stare at girls in bikinis (I could not say much, though, since I was planning on spending my days staring at the shirtless men).

There was absolutely nothing that I was looking forward to about the holidays: I had mapped out a carefully-detailed plan of all the malls in Ohio that I just had to visit, and had calculated that completing said tour would take me, at the very least, four weeks. I was even going to go with Mercedes! And we had found a way to avoid Rachel at all costs, which was a notoriously difficult task to carry out. In my humble opinion, it was downright cruel for Mr. Burt Hummel to force me to cancel my plans, but I guess I am a mere teenager whose thoughts and feelings carry no weight whatsoever!

In all seriousness, though, it really wasn't all that bad, since we weren't going to some dingy cheap beach town in Florida, but to Cape May, so I could at least fantasize about being an old widow living in one of those Victorian houses next to the sea, reminiscing her past lover. I had also heard that there were many children's activities available, so thankfully Finn would be entertained throughout the trip.

Even though I had been lost in my own thoughts during the entire car ride, the '80's Hits' CD that Carol and Dad had brought with them did not go past me: the thing had over fifty songs and, for some reason, no Madonna song figured in it. Everyone, however (except for me, I avoided old guy music), was insanely pleased to find that 'The Final Countdown' by Europe started playing as we finally arrived at our destination. It had been eight hours of pure hell, therefore, it was only fitting that it would end with Carol, Dad and Finn singing the freaking 'Final Countdown'.

Once their screeching died down and the song ended, we stopped in front of a decent-sized house with a decent-sized lawn in what seemed to be a decent street.

'Come on boys, get out and start unloading the car!' Carol told us, already eagerly jumping out of the passenger seat and making her way to the porch to open the house. Lucky her.

'Coming!' Finn replied, followed by: 'Dude, this will be totally awesome, don't you think? I'll get to avoid Rachel all summer and I'll be able to stare at girls all day'

I looked at him incredulously 'Isn't Rachel your girlfriend, Finn?'

'Erm...well, let's start unloading, shall we?'

I arched an eyebrow and proceeded to do just that: unloading the bags. Although, admittedly, Finn did most of the work while I just took in my own stuff.

Now, you may be asking yourself, where was Burt while we were doing all of the hard labor and Carol was working on opening up the house and making sure everything was in place? Well, Dad had decided that listening to 'Eye of the Tiger' on the car radio was ten times more important than helping out, and coincidentally came out when all of the bags had been brought to the house.

'These holidays are going to be great, boys! Just look around! Isn't this a much nicer place to spend the summer in than Lima? I am convinced that we will have an amazing time here, as a family!' Dad using so many exclamation marks when speaking honestly freaked me out.

'Sure, Dad.'

'For sure, Burt.'

We decided to finally make our way to the house, and, upon entering what would be our home for the next four weeks, I could see that the decoration was, unlike the rest of the place, really indecent. You could see that the decorators had really...embraced the beach theme and had taken it to, well, an extreme: everything had either seashells or starfishes motifs, and blue and white seemed to be the most recurring color scheme. From what I could see, though, the size of it was pretty good! Yay Cape May house!

'By the way, Kurt and Finn, we forgot to tell you guys, but you'll have to share a bedroom since there's only two. We hope you don't have a problem with it.'

You know what, to hell with the Cape May House.

Upon learning this new information, Finn and I looked at each other, dread personified.

'NO snoring, Kurt.'

'NO leaving your dirty underwear lying around, Finn.'

'Dude, what do you mean?'

'What I mean is that I have seen the hell hole that is your bedroom, and I forbid you to bring your pig-like habits to our bedroom. And what do you mean, "no snoring"? I will have you know that I do no such thing.'

'I'm pretty sure that, if our friends in Lima miss you, the sound of your snores at night will help them keep you in their thoughts.'

In that moment, I wished that I had the ability to laser-kill people with merely an intense and icy gaze. I decided that giving him the middle finger was an equally good option.

'How about if we go check this room out? If we're lucky, maybe there won't be an alive octopus waiting to greet us.' Suggested Finn, and I wasn't sure if he was joking or not.

'I can just hope that we at least have separate twin beds, because at this point I would not put it past Carol and Dad to make us sleep in bunk beds, or worst, in a double bed.' I shaked my head at that horrible thought. Gross.

We walked up the stairs and, after accidentally walking into Dad christening the toilet, we finally found what would be our bedroom for the next month.

Now, while there wasn't a talking octopus that said 'Hello!' when we entered, there was a painting of an octopus. A scarily realistic one, at that. There was also a poster with the most common sea species that could be found in Cape May, and a lamp that had the shape of a blowfish.

We did, at least, have separare twin beads. Hurray!

'Well, it could have been worse, I guess. Now I'll only have to worry about seeing a giant blowfish everytime I look at the ceiling.' I said. Finn just looked excited to finally see a bed, and proceeded to fling his gigantic body on top of it and fall asleep in a matter of seconds. I looked at his sleeping figure disbelievingly, and decided that I would actually bother with unpacking my bag and taking a shower, hoping to wash away the dirt and the painful memories from the car ride.

After everyone had settled in and Finn had woken up from his nap at eight in the evening, we decided to order Chinese food for dinner from the only Chinese restaurant in the entire town.

While we were sitting at the table (yes, the pattern of the tablecloth was a bunch of small sea knots), opening up the food boxes, a brilliant question came to mind.

'So, what are we going to do while we're here?' For some reason, no one had told me anything about the actual contents of this vacation.

'So many things: Cape May has a lot of activities, and your Dad and I have already decided that we could do a few, since they seem pretty family friendly.' I arched an eyebrow, nothing good could come out of "family friendly" activities.

'But...aren't we like seventeen years old, Mom? I thought we were just gonna do our own thing.' I assumed that Finn was disappointed about the prospect of having to do other things besides laying in bed all day and eating chocolate sundaes.

'Last time I checked you guys were fifteen.' Dad mumbled to himself. He had a tendency to forget our birth years.

'Actually, Finn, Burt and I have decided that we will be participating in as many sea-related activities as possible! It's a luxury to be so close to the ocean, so we must make the most of it while we're here, which is why tomorrow we have rented a couple of kayaks! The woman seemed way too excited considering she was talking about kayaks.

'Dude, seriously? That's so rad.' Finn also seemed too excited considering we were talking about kayaks.

'Oh, and Finn, they organize these fishing trips around here so I signed us up for one next week. Kurt, I assumed you wouldn't wanna come, so I didn't sign you up. I think you're still on time, though, buddy.'

'I can't tell if you're being sarcastic or not, Dad.' I most definitely did not want to go fishing with him and Finn.

'Anyhow, we thought that we could go to the beach tomorrow morning since it's going to be a hot and sunny day!'

'And Kurt, you don't have to worry about your "sensitive" skin, since we have made sure to rent sunbeds and parasols for the next couple of weeks.' They really, really, really seemed to want me to participate in the horror that is going to the beach.

'That sounds great, Dad, I'm sure it'll be just fantastic.' I said with a radiant smile. I tried to do so in a way that only I would notice the sarcasm, but I was not sure if I succeeded.

Once we had discussed these exciting plans, we moved on to more interesting aspects of the vacation, like where the restaurants were located. Finn and I decided that, since the malls-in-Ohio tour couldn't be done, we could do a restaurants-in-Cape-May tour, so that it would at least appeal to both parties.

After we had decided that tomorrow would include some suspicious-looking Spanish restaurant by the dock, we promptly made our way back to our bedroom, to get a good-night's sleep, since the day after would be one filled with adventure, mischief and hopefully no sun burns.

Cape Dismay…here we come!

No, I couldn't take myself seriously after thinking that either.