Summer

Grace and Theo

I truly believe that we only lost who we were. Forgot, over time, our mannerisms, what to say in initial reaction, how to speak our minds. And it happened to the both of us at the same time, so we couldn't help one another.

We always spent our summers together. Schooltime, not so much. At school, we would barely smile at each another in the corridors - no, summer was when we really came alive.

Endless days spent as children, running around barefoot on our family's shared private beach. Buckets and spades, sandcastles, the sun on our backs - it was the perfect set up. We had time for each other and time for that life. A beautiful existence. Two honourable and loving families. Only a few expectations, really.

But that wasn't our problem. We could've made it through anything they threw at us. Our problem was us. The stress of school could've been it, your dad maybe, but we stopped. I hardly got out of bed that summer, you either. And when we did meet, there was no laughter. There was a shared sadness.

The sky was always white, a sheet of clouds handing out the cold. The sand wasn't soft, or wet. It was that unsavoury smooth middle ground. Always. We brought out deckchairs, an umbrella, and lemonade.

I always read out loud when I was reading, since you had nothing else to listen to. It was Greek, which we both understood, despite being British. It was part of the pact we made at age 15 - a pact we still hadn't managed to break.

I remember your legs crossing at the ankles, you leaning your neck back over the chair to face up, staring at the sky, big black sunglasses covering your face. You would exhale slowly, never speaking. Sipping the lemonade through a paper straw.

Anytime one of the many younger children from one of the families wandered down to our beach, they would only be disappointed to find us, the boring teens, reading poetry and smoking.

They never snitched, which was good of them.

I remember sucking in my breath when you stood on the beach the first day the next summer. You had a long white dress, see through, over a bikini. It blew in the wind. You looked like Helen of Troy, and you laughed when I told you.

You laughed again when I told you later, in bed. You really do, you know. You have her thoughts on your face.

I remember 16, or was it 17, when we discovered love? You came crying to the beach, where I was reading Plato. You said I looked so good in the blue polo shirts. You said come on Theo, please. You said I have my dad's car keys and a strong need for revenge. I said yes, yes yes yes yes because I hate him too, so so much. Then we did, and then we went joyriding and crashed it and now I'm thinking definitely yes we were 16. That was the first time we really got in trouble, and the best because it was new that time, and the adrenaline wasn't running out.

I'd kill to be sixteen again.

Then there was seventeen, and that was more fun. The beach again. I wrote Theo and Grace on the sand with my feet. You wrote Eva because she had died that year and we all missed my mother. She was the only good person in those two families, except the little kids.

We had two large houses, my room's window being the only with a view of our beach in all of my family's property. You were in the same situation, on the opposite side.

All I had to do was look out of my window, and if you weren't there, I wouldn't go. You wrote me a letter saying you were doing the same. We wrote a lot of letters that summer. The littles, now 8 - 13, used our beach.

The next summer was the worst. We reclaimed the beach, but we didn't do anything. We didn't sleep inside that year. We stole golden liquor and got drunk and made fires and burnt all my mother's things. We wrote in the sand, whatever we didn't want to say. Fuck you dad, and I will do what I want.