Working. Not exactly my idea of the perfect summer vacation. Oh, wait. Work, by definition, is not a vacation. What was my dad thinking when he came up with this plan?

He was thinking I needed to experience the real world. I wasn’t quite sure how a water park designed to look like a tropical island in the middle of north Texas was the real world, but whatever. I hadn’t been able to talk him out of his insane idea. So I was trying to make the best of what I considered to be a bad situation. I mean, really, who wants to work during the summer? Well okay, I had met a couple of girls who actually wanted to work – but their motivation was money. I didn’t need money.

“David, don’t pull all the way up to the gate,” I said from the back of the limo as he turned into the parking lot at Paradise Falls.

He looked in the rearview mirror. Our eyes met. His brown. Mine green.

“Right, Miss Whitney,” he said very formally in his really cool British accent. He brought the car to a stop, got out, jogged around, and opened the door for me.

I’d tried to get him to let me open my own door, but he’d insisted that he “simply couldn’t allow that.” When I was little, I liked being treated as though I were a princess. Not that I really was one. But my dad enjoyed spoiling me. Now that I was older, though, sometimes I got tired of being pampered. Makes no sense, I know, but that was how I was feeling today. Like I just wanted to be more independent than my dad and his staff would allow me to be.

“Thanks,” I said. “ Please don’t follow.”