Girl News: Things To Do With Girls In The Summer

There is a dark side – like, a regular dark side, plus a dark side that is located many fathoms below a sea of dark, cold, sharky waters – to girl-on-girl friendship, which very often feels more like girl-on-girl crime. I guess when your entire culture is structured to prevent you from getting along with your best friends, civil war will happen sometimes. But did you know that girls are actually the best, and did you know that girls are extra-the-best in the summer? It’s true. Something about the synaesthetics of hanging out all heat-stoned and sweating love, trading gas station shades and sunblock. Do these things with girls this summer.

HAVE SLEEPOVERS
The best thing to do in the summer with women is have a sleepover. Hands down. Not a “sleepover”, which is code for sex when your hook-up’s boss monitors his or her email account, or a “sleepover” like crashing on the couch because it’s late, but a motherfucking slumber party! Here’s why: this is what we did all summer long as kids (what’s your mum going to say, “It’s a school night?”) and once June happens (even in hot-all-year places like California; I’ve seen it) there is a lilac-tequila-Hawaiian Tropic-mnemonic that reminds us how amazing it is to stay up all night and not think about having to work in the morning, ever, because work doesn’t exist and Endless Summer and who cares.

Remember whippits? Those are ideal for a sleepover. It’s pretty corny to go out of your way to find the sleepover items of your youth, like Mall Madness and Girl Talk and Harry Potter DVDs, so instead just get some booze (an empty bottle will be excellent for Spin the Bottle; you will want to “practice kissing” aka generate material for when you rub it out in your sleeping bag later, shhh) and paper and pens (M.A.S.H., hello) and Blondissima, because even if you’re too pussy to go full Kurt, you can do matching Rayanne Graff blonde streaks and same diff. This is the more committed version of friendship bracelets, which thanks to Proenza Schouler are sanctioned fashion now. At four or five in the morning, it is imperative to leave the house in bare feet (though not in New York, please) and run the fuck around, which you’ll be able to do because of how spazzed-up you get on no sleep after the age of 20. See, here is where having money and being of-age is the best: Get cigarettes and Cokes and sit on the curb in the summer morning fog and plot out the rest of your life, high on adrenaline and your potential, which is realer than you are. Whoah.

GO ON A ROAD TRIP
This is one area where I will, in fact, square off girls and guys. Because: 1. Girls still smell pretty good after not showering for a little too long. 2. Girls who grew up in the suburbs have their motherfucking driver’s licenses whereas guys are all “I just rode my bike and got rides” hey GROW UP. 3. Girls – and by this I mean the kind of girls you want to be friends with, not the Manic Pixie Nightmare variety who are over-experienced in shitty fathers and beta guys giving them everything they want, and therefore are kind of awful to everyone else – anyway, girls are usually more conscientious about things like splitting gas, anticipating what a motel costs, being reasonable about halving the little pack of peanuts and raisins. Just kidding: Girls will take all of the M&Ms and leave you with the raisins, but overall, women are more economically responsible, which is why we get the micro-loans from FINCA. 4. Our feet look better up on the dashboard. 5. Less bogarting of the radio/iPod. 6. Girls will not complain about how long you’re taking if you decide that an outlet mall in a terrifying stretch of the Florida coast is a good time since it’s raining and make you leave early even though you had all these other stores to check out! True story!

HAVE A PICNIC IN THE PARK
Girls have picnic game. Because we read all of those blogs about how our shitty apartments would look better if we lived in entirely different apartments, there is this aspirational thing of “Oh I can get that toile blanket for twenty bucks and that would be so nice and if I rip off my bike basket that would be a great thing to put this fruit in” and so forth. There will be tiny, delicious, summery food (grapes!) and there will be cutlery, and there will be napkins, even. There will be occasion for some weird accessories, too, like that hat they got and are “Uhhh?” about, because a picnic is a time to be weird with girls, and girls know that.

TIP: Don’t bring any magazines to a picnic in the park. It feels like a good idea, but unless you want to snooze while your friends read them and ignore you, just don’t. I guess if you are some kind of social degenerate who doesn’t care about what Britney’s extensions are getting up to (you guys, they’re so bad right now) and you bring fresh tabloids, congratulations: You will be honoured at this year’s Best Friend Forever banquet.

ROLL DOWN A HILL
There must be some kind of phenomenology about off-brand physical activities and gender but there exists (REALLY) a divide where men, who were socialised to do it, will climb trees and fences but won’t roll down hills, and women won’t climb trees and fences (usually), or at least not well (I have a really hard time climbing a fence under the male gaze; like, nobody ever taught us this, and then we got tits, and are not reliable jeans-wearers like dudes, and it’s fucking hard!), but will roll down hills. Why? I don’t know. It’s so fun! Do this at night, especially. Oh, I just figured it out: girls can throw our bags off to the side but because men have all their worldly needs caked onto their butts, it hurts them.

FUCK
Definitely fuck a girl in the summer. I mean midday, mid-summer, no air conditioning. Everything good and holy about female sexuality is so totally amplified by heat: that coma-haze of a couple of orgasms is deeper and heavier than usual (have you ever gotten drunk in a hot tub? It’s like that), and that hallucinatory impasse before coming lasts longer, and a couple orgasms beget another orgasm and another one, and then another one, all of them attended by extra doses of the warm stick of pussy and the fine drip of girl-sweat, and that drugsy, low-lidded day-sex look they’re doing at you after coming so much. At a certain point you’re both just wet, and that’s when you pour the glass of cold water you’re drinking all over yourselves (best/most obvious sex trick ever) and keep going. Also, the only other thing to do in real city heat is go to the movies, so….

DECIDE TO BELIEVE IN BULLSHIT PHILOSOPHIES TOGETHER
It’s hard to convince yourself that The Secret is real when you’re by yourself, but when you have a comrade it’s really easy, just like it’s easy to pretend anything at all when your friend is like “Yes! Obviously! I know! I think so too!” One time, my friend Amy and I got very daytime-high at my cottage and then she had a nap while I read The Secret on the dock and when she woke up I was in a cult, basically. Since we were isolated by the free time and opportunity that summer creates and demands – even now, as real adults with no summer vacay, my friends and I just take weekends off from our pathetic careers to breathe on each other – we had occasion to pretend that The Secret is real (it iiiiissss). It’s a good idea to theme (meme?) your summers according to what you want out of it, and “Believe in bullshit philosophies together” is definitely one of the most fun.

Follow Kate on Twitter @KateCarraway