Page 104 of High Season
“She just… you know.” Hannah shrugged. “Seems a bit childish lately.”
Her mum laughed.
“Oh, sweetheart,” she said. “You’re in too much of a rush to grow up sometimes. One day you’ll look back and wish you’d hung on to being a child a little bit longer.”
“Mum. I’m seventeen.”
“The in-between years,” her mum said knowingly. “I remember those.”
She picked up a discarded T-shirt from Hannah’s bed.
“You and Josie are inseparable,” she said. “Don’t let growing up come between you.”
Hannah stood, her limbs stiff as if they had absorbed some of her reluctance.
“I’m already grown up, Mum.”
“Well,” her mother said. “Maybe that’s the problem.”
Josie was sitting on the wall outside of their apartment, scuffing her Converse in the dirt. Last summer the two of them had taken a Sharpie and decorated them with stars and hearts and tiny rainbows. Hannah could still see the faded scrawl of her initials close to the heel.
Josie sat up slightly straighter when she saw Hannah emerge, her face brightening.
“Hey,” she said.
Her eyes caught Hannah’s face and she grinned.
“Oh my god,” she said. “What’s that stuff on your face? You look like you’re doing fancy dress.”
Her laugh caught somewhere in her throat when she saw that Hannah wasn’t smiling, the sound hooked back by uncertainty.
“I think it looks good,” Hannah said.
What did Josie know anyway? Josie, in the same frayed denim shorts that she’d been wearing for two summers now, her eyelashes too pale for her face. Her hair so perpetually pulled back into a ponytail that it crimped when she let it loose.
“What are you all done up for, then?”
Hannah shrugged.
“Just trying something out.”
Josie’s eyes narrowed.
“It’s not for him, is it? You’re not getting all dolled up for Blake?”
“No,” Hannah lied. “’Course not.”
And then, with more conviction than she felt.
“Blake likes how I look, anyway.”
She caught a slight roll of Josie’s eyes.
“Sure,” Josie said.
She straightened, standing.
“Wanna go down to the beach? It’s so hot today. We could go for a swim, cool off?”
