Page 7 of High Season
Josie turned around. The girl was putting her exercise book down beside her.
“Are you…” she said. “Where are your parents?”
Josie shrugged. Scuffed her shoe against the pavement.
“Back at the house,” she says. “We just moved in.”
“Which house?”
“Up over the hill.”
“You walked all the way down here by yourself?” The girl tilted her head to one side. “Do they mind? You must only be—”
“I’m ten.”
Josie couldn’t stop a note of defiance creeping into her voice. She was small for her age, the smallest in her school year back in Kent. People often thought she was younger than she was.
“They don’t mind you coming down here on your own?” the girl repeated.
Josie shrugged again, slowly this time, reluctant.
“They’re fighting,” she said. “Anyway. Thanks very much.”
She stepped back again, toward the footpath.
“Wait.”
The girl was standing now.
“I was actually thinking of going for a swim,” she said. “I’ll come with you.”
She brushed sand from her thighs. Sand seemed to get everywhere, out here.
“I’m Hannah, by the way.”
“Josie.”
Hannah smiled.
“Let’s go,” she said. “The waves are perfect at this time of day.”
Now, Josie and Hannah left the Draytons’ pool and walked to the beach, back to the exact place where they swam that first day. They’d been like sisters since then, inseparable for the last six years. Josie, who turned up here without being able to speak a word of French. Hannah, who was bilingual by dint of having a British father but had never quite made friends with the other kids at the international school over the hill, on account of always having to spend her weekends helping out at her parents’ dive shop. Who, Josie now knew, had only gone down to the beach with her that first day because she had seen a small, lost girl and been afraid of what might happen to her. What could come of a child who didn’t yet understand the sea. Its depth and currents. The way a wave could seize hold of you and fill your lungs.
To Josie, they fit together like salt and sand, even though they made a strange pairing: Hannah, who at seventeen was almost six feet tall, with long, thin limbs and a sea of strawberry-blond hair; Josie, who was barely five feet, with a squat, compact frame and short, dark hair that she only ever wore tied up. Hannah, who had developed a way of making herself smaller, hunching her spine and folding her arms across her newly blossomed chest. Josie, who was loud and outspoken. Who had a habit of saying the wrong thing at the wrong time. Who never really cared when she did.
“I’m going in,” said Josie. “Want to come?”
Hannah shook her head.
“It’ll take forever to dry out now the sun’s gone down,” she said. “I’ll wait here.”
Josie stripped off her shorts and T-shirt and waded out until the waves lapped against her waist. Then she held her breath and plunged beneath the surface.
The water was dark, the twilight sky pale and high above her. She closed her eyes. She started to swim. When the beach was a distant sliver, the hill a black shadow against a hollow sky, she flipped onto her back and spread her arms and legs out wide. She floated, starfished, her ears beneath the surface so that she could hear the beat of her own heart.
This was where she felt happiest. Most peaceful. On the edge of something bigger than herself.
When Josie had been submerged for so long that she could feel her skin begin to soften and salinate, she swam back to shore. Short, sharp strokes that made her arms ache. Hannah was waiting exactly where she’d left her, tracing shapes in the sand with a stick. A star. A sun. A spiral.J + Hin large, twirling letters. Josie collapsed down next to her, scattering sand across the sun.
