Cruel Summer | ✓

chapter one

Six years ago. That's the last time I was truly happy. It's a tragic realization, that I've been on autopilot since I was eighteen, trying to make it through each day because surely the next stage will be easier. Surely college will be fun and living with my college friends after graduation will be amazing and of course I'll get a great job the minute I cross that stage with my diploma in my hand because why wouldn't I? But nothing is getting easier. Nothing is making any more sense the more I try to muddle through and I don't understand how my roommates have landed on success while I keep falling flat on my ass.

My mind keeps wandering back to six years ago, the last time I spent a summer at the lake with my family. My whole family — both my parents; my four brothers; two uncles and their wives and my seven cousins — all together for one last summer before Uncle Harry dropped a bomb on us. He and Aunt Jessica were getting divorced. Their lake house, my solace for every summer that I could remember, was collateral damage. Goodbye to long summer vacations in Idaho. Goodbye to lazy afternoons reading on a lounger tied to the dock. Goodbye to spending eight straight weeks with my cousins and brothers, the twelve of us terrorizing the small town of Fisher and its beautiful lake. Our lake. The town swelled in summer, vacationers from Boise and beyond returning to their summer homes with their kids and dogs in tow, but we felt like we owned that place. Even at eighteen, way past old enough to know better, there was a kind of magic in returning to the lake, like slipping a crown onto my head and holding up a scepter.

Eleven years separate the oldest of us from the youngest. Grayson is twenty-seven now, Oliver sixteen, but it never mattered. Nothing mattered once we got to Fisher each summer, to the cabin that my mom's big brother and his wife bought thirty years ago as a project, before they had kids. A doer-upper for their spare weekends when they could make the seven hour trek from their home in Bear Lake County. Somewhere that became a haven for us. A meeting point that joined our families, the three Martin siblings who ended up in three different states. Uncle Harry in Idaho. Mom in Montana. Uncle Edward in Washington. Fisher, the small town on Pine Lake, was neutral territory. An even playing field. At least one of the six parents was there at all times during the summer, the adults taking it in turns to be around to keep an eye on us when they didn't have to work, and for one week — sometimes two — we'd all be there together.

It's been downhill since then. Since I started to spend my summers working. Since I started my degree and had cynicism ground into me. Since I graduated and realized the world is an awful place. Since my parents, the epitome of a solid, stable relationship, announced that they were splitting up and moving across the country in opposite directions. Since my roommates, my best friends, landed incredible opportunities at the same time as each other, which just so happens to be the same time I was made redundant, which means that in three days' time I will be homeless and friendless and I can't even go back to my parents in Montana because they don't live there anymore.

If life is a bunch of chocolates then I'm lactose intolerant and allergic to sugar.

I paint on a bright grin and pull myself out of my head when Gaby holds up a green dress and asks, "Keep or thrift?"

For the last hour, my roommates and I have been culling our things for the Big Move Out. Gaby landed a huge promotion and when the head office in San Diego offered her a position in person, she couldn't say no. Right as I started sifting through my mental rolodex of potential replacements for her room (spoiler alert: there's nobody, I only have two friends), Tay announced that her boyfriend's bid for a transfer to LA had been accepted and they were going to move together. In two days, they're both heading west to California and I'm staying right here.

At least, that's what they think.

I haven't had the heart to tell them about my redundancy. How the data analysis firm I work for has gone under and I didn't get any severance pay and I've been applying to every single job in Austin but no-one wants me. Nobody cares about my 4.0 GPA all throughout high school or the three summers during college that I worked at a sleepaway camp or my bachelor's degree. Turns out studying political science for four years does not help when it comes to applying to jobs in coffee shops and fast food chains and bookstores and even the university itself: I am undesirable, and I have no idea why.