Page 22 of Dead of Summer

“Last Friday, I think? I was out with Dad talking to some official down in the boatyard.” Orla had spent that evening with her stomach in knots waiting for David by the window and slowly losing hope as the dusk dissolved into night.

The idea of the two of them meeting without her and Alice not saying anything made her want to climb out of her skin.

David looked down the beach to where the others had gathered. Orla could make out the cups being passed around. A bonfire was growing in the midst of them, sending orange flames into the fading blue sky. “Oh, Jeremy’s here. I’m going to go get us drinks. What do you two want?”

“Gin and tonic,” Alice said quickly.

“You don’t drink gin,” Orla protested.

“I do now,” she said, and David chuckled like she’d said something clever. Again, Orla noticed something between them, a secret look that made her feel young and dumb.

“You saw David last Friday?” Orla hissed as soon as he started away from them. She didn’t know if she was more hurt by her friend or that David didn’t come to her first. “Why didn’t you say something?”

“I didn’t want to upset you. You were waiting for him all that time.” Alice shrugged. Orla could have killed her.

“Or maybe you didn’t actually want me to see him,” Orla fumed bitterly, stinging from the weird buzz of intimacy she’d seen between them. Her heart dropped at the idea of them alone together.

“That is such bullshit. I asked you to come with me,” Alice said, annoyed.

“You still should have told me!” Orla insisted, her voice rising. “I could have come down there and met you, I could have—”

“And then what, Orla?” Alice snapped. “You get there and he’s gone already, and I have to watch you freak out like you are now? Besides, I had other things to do. It wasn’t a big deal.”

“Not to you it wasn’t.”

“Orla, honestly, this obsession with David has gotten out of control. You two aren’t even dating.”

Orla reeled back from the hurtful words feeling like she’d been slapped.

Alice knew how much David meant to her, how close they’d been to kissing last summer, how he’d held her hand on the beach once as they’d raced back from a thunderstorm.

Orla sat in stunned quiet waiting for her to retract it. But instead, Alice stood up suddenly.

“This is stupid.” She picked up her purse as Orla watched in shock. “You’re ridiculous, you know.”

“ I am ridiculous?” Orla said, feeling her face get hot. “It’s ridiculous that you’d hide something like that from me.”

From above Alice looked angrily down at Orla on the blanket, her face barely lit by the flicker of the fire. “I have my own shit to deal with. Grow up, Orla. It’s not all about you.” She stormed off down the beach.

There was still time. Orla waited for her to turn around. She would accept an apology from Alice if she came back, she decided quickly. It wasn’t worth them fighting about. But Alice’s body got smaller and smaller as she walked down the beach.

“Where’s Alice going?” David asked, returning with the drinks.

Orla shrugged, taking a cup from him. She was relieved that it looked clear and fizzy like a Sprite. “She had something to do that she thinks is more important than spending time with her friends, I guess,” Orla said, a bitter edge to her voice.

David turned to look at her. “Has she been going off by herself a lot?” he asked, caring more than Orla wanted him to.

“No more than usual.” Orla realized as she said it, though, that because of the week she’d wasted waiting for David to show up, she hadn’t seen Alice much recently.

“This summer is weird, isn’t it?” she asked him, trying to bring his focus back to her. She took a big sip of the gin and tonic to show David that she was just as game, just as fun as Alice. She tried not to choke when she tasted how vile it was. Like Lysol.

“It’s been… interesting that’s for sure,” he answered cryptically, downing his own drink and grimacing.

Interesting how , she thought. But there was something different about David that year, something moody and unapproachable that stopped her from asking.

She leaned back into the sand and tried to look casual.

“I’m excited for your party this Fourth.

My parents aren’t going this year. They said I can come on my own.

” But David didn’t say anything. He gazed past her with a brooding look on his face.

A horrible plummeting feeling took hold of Orla’s chest as she looked behind her and realized that his eyes were still following Alice down the beach.

Orla can no longer see the paper well enough to keep working.

She lowers the pencil and sits back, raising her arms up in a stretch.

Drawing has taken away some of her anxiety, she’s pleased to notice.

It always does. The magic of focus , one of her art teachers always called the feeling of getting lost in the rhythm.

Orla holds up the paper, squinting at it now with a critic’s eye.

The linework is good enough; she’s always been a technically proficient drawer.

But it is missing something, the thing that at a gallery would make a person stop and look. To move closer.

She is about to tear it up when there is a sharp crackle of branches just beside the porch.

She puts her pencil down and peers through the screen out into the dark tangle of the woods waiting for a rabbit to scamper from the brush or a deer to emerge.

She holds her breath listening to the leaves, their papery rustle camouflaging whatever is out there.

The stillness makes Orla’s scalp prickle.

She gets the horrible sensation that someone else is out there too.

That they are doing the same as her, holding their breath, each of them waiting for the other to make a move.

For a moment Orla thought she saw her again, the figure of a woman slipping through the trees.

“Hello?” Her voice wavers as she calls out to the dark. “I know you’re out there. I can see you.”

At this lie there is a rush of movement between the trees. Orla jerks back from the screen, hands gripping her chest at the blur of snapping branches and moving limbs as someone crashes away from her into the woods.