Page 2 of That Last Summer

BRITISH SCHOOL, EIGHTEEN MILES FROM THAT LITTLE TOWN IN ALICANTE

Priscila was playing happily in the school’s playground with her friends and her brother Adrián when someone broke the news.

“Alex St. Claire has bust his head open!”

Alex and Priscila hadn’t actually exchanged words yet. They ran into each other—around their neighborhood, in the schoolyard, at the bus stop, in the town, at the street fair—but there was no indication they knew each other at all, and of course they never waved or said hello when they crossed paths. But she knew immediately that “Alex St. Claire” was her neighbor, even if nobody had introduced them properly.

The only time they were together—within a four-meter radius, and for more than a minute—was in the swimming pool. And that only happened in the months of June, July, August, and September.

Alex loved diving into the water and swimming; it was his whole life, or at least it was at the age of nine. He spent hour after hour doing laps in the pool, tirelessly, loosing track of the time. One cloudy day in June, Priscila began counting his laps, and from then on, she never stopped doing it. She was sitting cross-legged on a hammock under a garden umbrella when she started: “one, two, three, four...” as far up as she knew. And when she didn’t know how to continue, she asked her brother River.

“River, which number goes after twenty-nine?”

“Thirty.”

“And after thirty?”

“Thirty-one.”

“And after thirty-one?”

Her brother, who had been answering out of habit, barely paying attention to her—too busy looking at the girl who lived two houses away from theirs who had shown up at the pool in a yellow bikini that fitted her so nicely—lifted his eyebrows, suspicious. He thought his little sister’s sudden interest in numbers was kind of odd, but guessed it was nothing more than the mere curiosity appropriate to her age.

And thanks to her neighbor, Priscila learned how to count to one hundred.

Alex, of course, was unaware of this; when he dived into the water, he forgot about the world around him and he only stopped swimming when his big brother came to pick him up and take him home. He didn’t care about his five scandalous neighbors, that went without saying. If they were there, fine; if not, even better.

Until that thing happened at school. The event that marked Alex St. Claire’s right eyebrow forever: the laceration.

It was the last day before summer vacation. Alex was leaving the gym after an especially hard physical education lesson; he was distracted, walking and talking with a couple of his classmates, when he crashed into one of the access doors with such bad luck that he hit his face against a metal bar at eye level. It was pretty spectacular, and as most wounds on the face are, super bloody—the sort that makes people close their eyes because they can’t bear to look. His fellow students, crowded around him, saw that blood running and all came to the same conclusion: the medical profession? Not for them.

The boy couldn’t contain his tears, though he gathered all his strength to do it. “Boys don’t cry,” his older brother used to say. But it was impossible, Alex couldn’t help it—he couldn’t remember ever experiencing such excruciating pain before.

Word of the incident spread all around the school with the force of fifty horses at full gallop until it came to the Cabanas’ ears, and specially to Priscila’s. When the girl heard “Alex St. Claire” and “bust his head open” in the same sentence, she jumped off the swing she’d been playing on and asked whoever she found in her way what had happened.

She was told her neighbor had been taken to the nurse’s office, so there she went. She knew the way by heart, one of the perks of having four wild brothers prone to accidents and blood loss. She was breathless by the time she arrived. She stopped at the threshold, panting and gasping, not knowing what made her go there, where that impulse came from. But the thing was, she did go there.

She sat on one of the little blue chairs in the waiting room, and with her hands on her knees she... waited. She heard a few cries, but Priscila would never tell anyone. Instead, she focused on the music coming from the speaker on the wall—songs she’d heard countless times in the last few months: The Cardigans’ “Lovefool,” “La flaca” by Jarabe de Palo and The Spice Girls’ “Wannabe,” one of the hugest hits that year.

Inside the nurse’s office, the school doctor was trying to reach Alex’s parents. He couldn’t find them; no one answered at home, and when he dialed the newspaper he was told the St. Claires weren’t in at the moment—the message would be passed on.

Alex was feeling much better now. The worst part had been the antiseptic, and after an unsuccessful attempt to check his wound in the mirror—that gigantic gauze covered everything—he left the infirmary to find himself face to face with Priscila. That was the second time in their lives they’d caught each other’s eye. And it was perfect timing, because Alex had never needed a hug as much as he needed one right then. In that precise instant, Alex looked at Priscila for the first time. Truly looked at her.

Bump! The girl’s heart thumped in her chest once again.

“Hello, Priscila,” the doctor said with a warm smile. “Are your brothers okay?”

“Yes. I was waiting for him,” she explained, gesturing toward her neighbor.

The neighbor in question looked at her as if an angel had just shown up in front of him, exactly the same way Priscila had looked at Alex the first time she saw him. And then he studied her shoes in amazement: they were navy blue—it was mandatory for all the students—but hers had huge blue pompoms and lots of glitter sprinkled all over. He thought they were the most hideous shoes he’d ever seen, but he also thought they looked great on the girl. They fit her.

“Oh, okay, walk him to class, then. He hit his head hard, but he’s behaved like a champ.”

The kids stood side by side and began walking together in silence. It was Priscila who broke that silence first.

“Did they give you any stitches?” she asked, curious. She didn’t fully understand the meaning of that word, but stitches was something she heard a lot when her brothers fell or crashed into something.

“No, but it was really close.”