Page 99 of High Season
“Seriously?”
She nods.
“Technically it’s what I got you last year. But I never got a chance to give it to you.”
She digs in her pocket and pulls out a small jewelry box.
“It’s nothing special or expensive or anything,” she says. “You probably have much nicer stuff at home. But I saw a place doing them, down by the beach, and I thought they were cool, and…”
She trails off as Tamara prizes open the jewelry box. Inside is a small, delicate pendant. A heart on a silver chain.J Tinscribed against its surface. A tiny, delicate rendering of a tulip, their shared favorite flower.
“I thought it was kind of like a grown-up version of the friendship bracelet?” Josie says. “I got one for myself, too. I know yours broke years ago and—”
“I love it,” Tamara says.
She doesn’t tell Josie that she kept the heart from the broken friendship bracelet. That she strung it onto a gold chain. Still wears it, sometimes, beneath her clothes.
She snaps the jewelry box shut.
“Hey, Josie?” she says. “Do you want to go for that swim now?”
Up at the pink house, they pull the cover off the swimming pool, one at each side, rolling the weight of it back to expose the sheet of blue beneath.
“You know,” says Josie. “Me and Hannah broke in here before the season started to use the pool. Mum went nuts.”
Tamara lowers her hand into the water to check the temperature.
“You should break in more,” she says. “It’s crazy that this house sits here all year with no one using it.”
In the light of the pool, Josie looks beautiful. She is wearing a white one-piece borrowed from Tamara that glows iridescent in the light.
“How’s your diving these days?” Josie asks with a grin.
In response, Tamara crouches and executes a sloppy, half belly flop of a dive into the water. From the side, Josie mimes holding up a scorecard.
“Ten!” she says.
Tamara is laughing. Josie takes a running leap from the side, contorts her body in the air so that she performs the perfect swan dive into the water. When she surfaces, she’s beaming.
Tamara had almost forgotten that they could be like this.
Josie paddles toward her, and they lean back against the side of the pool, their shoulders submerged.
“I’ve missed this, you know,” Tamara says.
She only meant to think it, but then there it is. Out in the world between them. I miss you. Something close toI love you. Something close toI’ve thought about you every day, and I can’t tell you.
Close, but not quite.
Josie nods.
“I’ve missed this, too,” she says. “When did it all get so complicated?”
“I don’t know,” says Tamara.
But maybe she does know. Maybe, if she thinks about it, she can piece together how a thousand moments, a thousand things, made her and Josie drift apart. How all the ease and simplicity of girlhood slipped into popularity contests, and who your parents were, and who you loved. How the fact that Tamara went back to London every autumn started to feel awkward, a demonstration of the things Tamara had that Josie did not. How, so slowly that neither of them had quite seen it coming, their early morning swims had begun to feel like an impossibility.
But mostly, it was Tamara’s feelings for Josie that had shifted, and Tamara who had pushed her best friend away. She had closed herself off to Josie, because it was the only way she knew how to deal with this new, unknown thing that had reared its head inside her.
