The Worst Summer Vacation Yet!

Snowball jumped for joy, flinging her arms in the air, and shouted, "The scorching hot sands!"

I wiggled my uncomfortably hot toes. "I feel like my soles are being slow roasted."

"The beautiful blue skies!"

I checked the weather on my phone. "County-wide heat warning in effect until noon, at which point the weather service predicts heavy rains possibly resulting in flood conditions. Great."

"And tying it all together, the very essence of the beach itself: the endless, shining sea!"

"The sea? You mean the toilet of the earth? No thanks. I think I'd rather not swim around in a salty stew of fish excremen—"

"Oh, come on!" Snowball put her hands on her hips and smiled wide. "Quit being such a Debbie Downer! Chin up, and let's have some fun! After all, we're at Waxing Bay! The most cursed beach in the world!"

#

Yes, you read that right. Waxing Bay, the most cursed beach in the entire world. That's where I had found myself that fateful day. It all started when summer vacation rolled around. Now, I know what you're thinking. Something along the lines of: "Sweet! Summer break! Two and a half whole months of no school, no homework, no worries, and more free time than you even know what to do with!"

Right?

Wrong!

Remember: this is my life we're talking about.

What was my problem this time? More like "who."

Of course I'm talking about Matchstick, my pet genetically engineered chupacabra.

Matchstick was created by Snowball, the mad scientist who fell in love(?) with me at first sight when she transferred to my school. She grew him all on her own, in a petri dish, from the tiny little single cell he started as all the way to the fully grown chupacabra he is today, and all so that she could gift him to me as a pet. She even gave him his name, since she knew how bad I was at naming things. "Matchstick," she told me, "cause I know you two are gonna be a perfect 'match' and 'stick' together forever! No — five-ever. Hehehe!"

Snowball couldn't have been further from the truth. Me and Matchstick ended up having about as much affinity for each other as a germaphobe has for a junkyard. Usually, we were at each other's throats, sometimes literally. If I wasn't getting on Matchstick's nerves, he was getting on mine, though more often than not, we were both under each other's skin at the same time, an ouroboros of sheer annoyance.

Who knew that being a pet owner could be so tough?

And it all came to a head right at the start of summer break. Snowball was over at my place and I was venting to her about the nigh-unlivable conditions Matchstick was forcing me to put up with.

"And you're not gonna believe where I found him. In my room. Sleeping on my favorite pillow!"

"The pink one? With the frilly lace border?"

"Yes! I've told him about a million times that pillow's off limits. I even got him his own pillow just like it, for crying out loud. But noooo. He just has to sleep on mine. Even worse: he was drooling on it. Only I'm allowed to drool on that pillow, dangit! I've even been drooling a satellite-photo-accurate map of the world onto it for the past three years. And then Matchstick just goes and suddenly makes western Antarctica 30% darker than the Andaman Sea!"

"Umm…

"I mean, come on! Where's the sense in that? Where's the logic?"

"Umm."

"Where's the cartographic integrit—?"

"UMM!"

"What?" Snowball's whisper-yelling finally snapped me out of my rant.

"Shhhh," she said, finger to her lips. Her voice was low and hushed for once, softer than a feather falling onto a pile of cotton balls. "He's sleeping now too."

She nodded to Matchstick, who was asleep on the living room floor.

"Oh." I scratched the back of my neck. "He's uh. He's probably just tuckered out after, uh."

Snowball cocked her head to the side and gave me a look. An accusatory one.

"After I, uh… Uh… used his water bowl as a frisbee?"

"And?"

"And, uh, left it in the park when I was done with it instead of bringing it home?"

"And?"

"Let the squirrels steal it?"

"And?"

"And did nothing to help Matchstick get it back after the squirrels worked it into one of the siege engines they've been building as part of their world domination plans, ok! I admit it. So what? I'm not the perfect owner, sure. But Matchstick sure isn't the perfect pet either, so we're even, right?"

"Want to know what I think?" Snowball slid down to the floor, sitting next to where Matchstick was sleeping.

"What?" I didn't like where this was going. Especially since Snowball was starting to cuddle up to him.

"I think you and Matchstick need to make up. Deep down, I know he loves you. And I know you love him too. But you're his owner, so it's your job to lead with example."

My job? Since when? Did she forget she was the one who foisted this mandibled menace on me to begin with? If only she knew what it took to keep him fed, she might not be so easy on him.

"So get down here, give Matchstick a big hug, and say, 'I wuv you, Matchstick!'"

"Heck no. Even if I wanted to do that, which I don't for the record, that's super embarrassing."

But the look Snowball slung at me then was more accusatory than any way I've ever been looked at before, and in the end, I guess I did kind of owe Matchstick an apology. I'd been just as cruddy to him as he'd been to me after all. So maybe Snowball was right. Maybe we should try to start fresh. And maybe that started with me.

I got down next to the both of them on the floor.

"Go on. Tell him you wuv him."

"I… err… l-love…"

"WUV."

Dammit, Snowball. "F-fine, sheesh. I, uh, w-wuv y… y-y-y… Ah, dammit, no way I'm saying that!" I shot to my feet and stormed off to my room. Childish of me? Maybe. But there was no way I was following that script, especially not to Snowball's letter. I tended to make enough of a fool of myself as it was, and that was without even trying. No way I was gonna start this summer vacation off willingly humiliating myself like that.

When I got to my room, Snowball was already there.

"Wh-what the…? Wait, are you Snowcube?" I was so suspicious of her speed that I thought the mad scientist in bunny slippers sitting on my bed might actually be Snowball's identical twin sister Snowcube.

But nope. It was Snowball alright. I knew because of what she said next.

"Nope. I'm Snowball alright."

See?

"When you keep a clear head," she said, "it's not hard to be faster than someone who isn't thinking straight."

Seriously? This ditz was the last person qualified to give me — or anyone, for that matter — a lecture on clear heads.

"I even dry cleaned your pillow for you."

She underhanded my pink, lacey pillow at me. Catching it in both hands, I noticed it was spotless again. Or at least as spotless as a pillow with a satellite-photo-accurate map of the world drooled onto it can be. The point is: the inaccuracies Matchstick had drooled onto my work were gone and the map was restored to perfect satellite-photo-accuracy. That was Snowball for you. I had no idea how she did it, but she could pull almost anything off with all the crazy contraptions she had built in her short yet already legendary career as a mad scientist.

"Th-thanks."

"You're welcome."

"Look, sorry, alright? I think I just need some time away from Matchstick. We've been driving each other up the wall lately." And I meant that literally, but that's another story.

"Well, you're in luck then!" A smile that made my stomach drop spread wide across Snowball's face. I knew that smile. It was the smile of my nightmares. The smile Snowball smiled whenever she was about to do, say, build, or outfit with a bedazzled hydrocutter something that was going to make my immediate future much, much harder. Or at least much more stupid. "Take a look at this!"

Snowball whipped out her phone and handed it to me. She had a social media app opened to the page for some tropical resort it looked like, with a feed of nothing but white sand beaches, crystalline water, lazily swaying palm trees — the works.

"Waxing Bay?" I read. "Is that the name of the beach? Who the heck would want to go somewhere named that?"

"A lot of people!" Snowball said excitedly as she grabbed her phone back. "Including me! It says here that it's — ta-da! — the most cursed beach in the world!"

"What?"

"Ta-da! The most cursed beach in the world!"

"No. I. I heard you. Just. What's that even mean?"

"Beats me! But I bet it'll be super fun! Let's go!"

I gulped. Go? As in go go? As in, physically relocate ourselves from where we currently were to the specified location?

Yeah, how about no? Going to Waxing Bay with Snowball would be like that time someone asked for their steak with a side of glass shards at my old restaurant job. A recipe for disaster. I couldn't take Snowball to a goddam cursed beach. Hell, I couldn't even take her down the street without almost dying half the time.

Luckily, I had the perfect excuse. I literally couldn't take Snowball anywhere because…

"I can't drive though. I'm not even 16 yet. How are we gonna get there?"

Ha! I thought, like I was so smart. Take that, stupid cursed beach! I'm gonna be enjoying my summer vacation to the fullest, without a trip to you, thank you very much!

The problem with that excuse was that according to her forged school record, Snowball was already 16. She could drive.

Even worse: she did.

"Don't worry about that one!" she exclaimed with a smile brighter and more irritating than the summer sun. "I've got it all covere—"

"Oh, no you don't," I interrupted. "You know exactly what happened last time you got behind the wheel."

As did I, since I was, unfortunately, sitting in the passenger's seat at the time. Well, holding on for dear life and screaming like a little girl in the passenger's seat, if you want to get technical.

"Aw, come on. If you haven't gotten into a game of chicken or three with a shotgun-wielding moose, you haven't lived, I say."

"And I say you're plain crazy and should've had your license revoked thirty times over by now is what I say," is what I said.

Surprisingly, Snowball actually acquiesced after that. "You know, you can be such a worrywart sometimes. But that's ok. That's one of the 459,873,608,473,047,329,570,275,055,465.87 reasons why I love you! You always talk me out of all of my bad decisions!"

Yeah, I wished. Well, at least I had talked her out of this one, I thought.

"So you mean you're not gonna drive to the beach?"

"Nope."

"Thank god."

"Why would I drive when we can just get Snowcube to take us? That way you and me can play games in the back seat the whoooooole way there!"

And that's how I ended up having to buy Snowball a brand new Nintendo Switch after I threw up on hers multiple times as her sister drove us to the worst beach in existence.

Dammit, Snowball, you know I can't look at screens in moving vehicles!

To be continued!