Page 8 of High Season
“Good swim?”
“Beautiful.”
Josie leaned back, her elbows in the damp sand.
“I hate this bit,” she said. “Waiting for them all. Feeling like we’re on hold until they get here.”
Josie always felt restless as summer approached. To her, the divide between the end of spring and the start of summer was clear and defined. Before summer, this place seemed to belong to her and Hannah. The beach was desolate. The villas that dotted the hill were quiet, dust sheets thrown over furniture, vast bellies of emptiness. They would roam the rooms of the Draytons’ house, where Josie’s mum had gotten a job working as a housekeeper after Josie’s dad walked out just a year after they arrived in France. They would sneak onto the terrace to watch the sunset. They would do their homework at great wooden dining tables made to seat fifteen people.
Then, high season would begin. Cars pulled up in driveways, families filled the grand estates, and beaches heaved with day-trippers. Hannah’s parents would work late. Josie’s mother would be perpetually exhausted and irritable, run ragged by the Draytons. Josie would often have to help out, babysitting the youngest Drayton kid or doing errands down in the town.
At night, there would be bonfires on the sand, the teenage children of their employers carrying down crates of beer, leaving bottles scattered like seashells. The bay that belonged to Hannah and Josie for most of the year would belong to them instead, and the two girls could only slip in through back doors, handing out drinks at parties or accepting twenty-euro notes in exchange for babysitting work, or the occasional tutoring job for parents who wanted to improve their children’s French.
Hannah tossed the stick that she had been drawing with.
“I don’t know,” she said. “I’m kind of looking forward to it this year.”
Josie snorted.
“Looking forward to having to work every weekend and be at some posh person’s beck and call twenty-four hours a day?”
“Oh, come on. You hardly have to work. Looking after a few kids for a couple of hours a week. And we could use the extra money.Youcould use the extra money. Aren’t you saving?”
Josie had been saving for as long as she could remember. She had showed Hannah her piggy bank the first time her new friend had visited the dilapidated house up on the hill that her dad had insisted was afixer-upperbut then refused to so much as replace a lightbulb.
“I’m going traveling, soon as I turn eighteen,” she said. “I’m going to see the world.”
Now sixteen, she stuck pictures of far-flung places up on her bedroom wall, dreamed about different cities the way that her classmates talked about their dream universities. Hanoi. Buenos Aires. Sydney.
“Don’t you think it can be fun?” persisted Hannah. “Everything comes to life in summer, you know? It’s how this place is supposed to be.”
A quiet fell between them. The soft roar of stones rolling beneath the waves.
“I like it better when it’s just us,” said Josie at last.
Hannah stretched out so that her face was turned toward the sky.
“I have a good feeling about this year,” she said. “I think this is going to be the best summer yet.”
FOUR
2024
The flight is short, but there’s something about airplanes that drains Nina. She always emerges exhausted, her body tightly wound and her muscles sore, even though Ryan insisted on paying for business-class seats.
“Remind me,” says Ryan, as they queue at passport control. “What’s your mum’s new boyfriend called again?”
“Jonas,” says Nina. “You met him at Christmas, remember?”
Ryan frowns.
“Small guy?” he says. “Going bald?”
“No, you’re thinking of Hamish. Hamish was at least two boyfriends ago. Keep up.”
Ryan shakes his head.
“I don’t know how you keep track of them all,” he says. “Your mum’s boyfriends just seem to blend together, after a certain point.”
