Four Things My Geeky-Jock-of-a-Best-Friend Must Do in Europe by Jane Harrington Read Free Book Online Page B

Delia.)
    Pushing my left hand under my leg, I pointed to Noori and AJ who were (thankfully) arriving. “Look! Our drinks!”
    “Lahn was wondering why it says ‘geeky jock’ on your hand,” Tatyana said to me, apparently not falling for my attempt at diversion.
    “Oh, really?” I responded. “And you told him . . .”
    “I told him it means you’re smart and strong,” she said.
    Feeling a little better (and hoping she HAD said that, but how would I know?), I got up and jumped into the pool. I almost drowned when my T-shirt covered my nose and mouth, but after that it was fun.
    Noori got in the pool, too, and we pretended we were mermaids by swimming with our feet together. At some point—just when we were getting bored, luckily—Gilligan got on the DJ’s microphone, and told everyone it was time for the “BIG SURPRISE!” We were going to “MIX IT UP!” He told us to go around and find “SOMEONE SPECIAL!” with a matching wristband, and “HEAD TO THE DANCE FLOOR!”
    “This should be entertaining,” I said, floating on my back and watching the crowd. Predictably, the “it-girls” (there are at least ten Britney Spears look-alikes on this boat, I SWEAR) immediately began shrieking and running after all the guys, checking out their wristbands. The “cool” kids (in their sunglasses, even though it’s night) acted as if they hadn’t heard anything Gilligan said (which is a real possibility, actually). Then the gamers got all activated when one boy yelled, “TOURNAMENT!” and flung his wristband at the sea god statue, just catching one of the teeth of the trident and starting a tidal wave of wristband-flinging.
    “Blue,” Noori, who was standing in the water next to me, said. “AJ’s got blue—just my luck. I’ve got orange.”
    I noticed, then, that AJ was at the edge of the pool holding his arm up and pointing at his wristband. “What color do you have, Brady?” he was calling out.
    “Yeah, just MY luck, too—I’ve got blue,” I said, thinking it might be time to FIRE my favorite color for betraying me in this way.
    But THEN, thinking quickly (as, of course, I’m known to do), I grabbed Noori’s hand underwater, did a little switcheroo, and—TA DA!—I pulled my arm out of the water and pointed at MY wrist, which now sported an ORANGE wristband.
    “NOORI HAS BLUE!” I called out to AJ.
    And before he could react, Noori was out of the water and pulling him off to the dance floor through the spray of flying wristbands.
    (I’m sorry for doubting you, Color Blue. You remain my fave.)
    Uh-oh. I guess I lost track of time. Mi madre is standing at the door of the cabin, CLAPPING at me to get up.
    Maybe encouraging her to be our tour guide was a bad idea. The power seems to have gone to her head.
    Adios—

Just after sunset, Tuesday night
----
    Dear Delia,
    Now I will tell you about my day in Barcelona. And I’m going to do it at the same speed my Nazi tour guide—er, mother—set for the day. I think reading it will be sort of like that day in class when we read those Faulkner stories, which had these whole long paragraphs that were just one sentence, and we read them real fast and tried to only take a breath after each period. Well, it’s like that, only worse. So, take a very deep breath to start and GO!
    The first thing we saw was a statue of Columbus, which had a sign in front of it that said (and I’m not making this up, although I could be leaving out an accent mark, but what-ev) “COLON,” causing me to wonder if the Spaniards know that word means “intestine,” which doesn’t seem like a very flattering thing to call a person, seeing how it’s a bodily organ that’s filled with, uh . . . well, you know what it’s filled with; but I couldn’t ponder that for long, because my arm was in sudden danger of being separated from the rest of my body since my mother was “guiding” me to the Gothic Quarter, which is a super old and stony place, where we stood in the very