“I don’t want to think about it,” I said. Which was true.
Mum put her scissors down and came round to hug me tight. So I clung as hard as I could.
“I don’t want to think about it either.”
I started crying. Never in the history of my life had I cried more in a summer.
“Sorry,” I said into the softness of her body, just above her breast, where my face was buried.
“It’s okay. I know it’s hard for you.”
Wasn’t it hard for her?
She let go of the hug. “So, you all set for this dance tomorrow? It’s usually pretty dramatic. Lots of the kids seem to think they’ve fallen in love with someone already, can you believe it? Aged eleven? We try to minimize the amount of slow songs the DJ plays, to limit the collateral damage.” She smiled, nudging me with her shoulder to make the joke funnier.
“Didn’t you have a whirlwind romance with Dad?” I asked.
Mum went rigid.
“It was…quick…yes.”
“You know, you guys never told me how you met.”
Mum went back to twirling ribbon. “Do we really have to talk about your father? You know things are…strained between us.”
“He’s never told me. I can’t ask him, he’s always with that psycho bitch.”
Mum laughed, then looked up, worried. “I shouldn’t have laughed at that. Sorry.”
“So… How did you meet?”
Mum put her scissors down again. “Amber!”
“Why can’t I know?!”
“All right.” Mum sat on her chair and looked off into nothing. I couldn’t believe it – she was going to tell me. She was finally going to tell me something. I should call Penny a psycho bitch more often. “We met when we were both travelling. In India. We met on the same bus going to the Taj Mahal…talked the whole seven hours there. By the end of the seven-hour journey back, we thought we had this special connection. We spent the rest of our travels together. He proposed on our last night in India.”
It was hard to imagine them like that, Dad more so. I could see Mum scurrying around the colours of India, taking photographs, bartering at stalls, making new friends in gross hostels. I couldn’t see Dad there though. The dad I knew who wore proper trousers, even on the weekend. Who organized his ties into colour order. Who left Mum for someone like Penny, and trimmed the grass in that way that makes it have light green and dark green stripes.
I said it aloud. “I can’t imagine Dad in India.” Mum laughed again.
“I know. I don’t think he was quite being himself. Maybe I wasn’t quite being myself either – thus the problem…” She trailed off, and was quiet a moment. “It’s easy to fall in love when you’re young and the sun is shining and you feel like the world is just there to have an argument with, with someone you adore by your side. But then life happens, and you start fighting against them, rather than with them…” She picked up the scissors again. “You should always pick someone who’s on your side, Amber. It’s too hard to be fighting the world, and the person you love.”
“Is Kevin on your side?”
Mum smiled slowly. “He is.”
“And Dad wasn’t?”
I didn’t know if she would answer. I felt like I was tiptoeing on broken glass, getting this out of her.
“He wasn’t on my side, no… Not when it mattered.”
When you became an alcoholic mess…
I realized something… I wasn’t on my mother’s side. Maybe outwardly, yes. But inwardly, I was still so angry, so resentful.
“How do you know if someone is on your team, then?”
She picked up crepe paper and twirled it using one blade of the scissors. “You test it. You have to test it. Then see what side of the line they’re on. Are they backing you up? Or are they shouting you down?”
I busied myself with tying some balloons together, the squeak of the rubber drowning me out as I mumbled my next question.
“What was that, darling?”
I coughed and put the balloons down. Still in disbelief that she was opening up, hoping I wouldn’t blow it. “I said, isn’t it good to not have someone agree with you all the time? Aren’t the best relationships supposed to test you?”
“Yes…” she admitted, slowly. “But there’s a difference between pushing you somewhere gently because it’s what’s best for you, and throwing you off a cliff and saying ‘Well, come on then, fly’.”
She was trying to hide it, but for a moment, the bitterness was there. A hardening of her eyebrows, the setting of her jaw. I saw then how much Dad had hurt her. By leaving her, by meeting someone else. By taking himself and me away so she had nothing left to do but self-destruct to a point where she knew she needed help… I guess it was good in the long run. I mean, she wasn’t dead. And there was that time we were told she’d be dead if she kept on drinking. But, still, for her, at the time, it must’ve hurt.
Mum tried to smile. “Now, can we please talk about something happier? And then, bedtime. I don’t know about you, but I’m exhausted.”
“Me too,” I said, thinking, But I won’t be sleeping tonight.
Kyle was already there when I got to the pier, laying out a blanket.
“Hey,” I said shyly, still not sure how to be around him.
“Hey. You’ve been a while.”
“I know. My mum… She wouldn’t go to bed.”
“Ha, it’s like she knows.”
“We’d know if she knew.”
I’d gotten so used to navigating camp in the darkness, I no longer found it scary. I wondered if it would jar – the crammed-together streetlights of England, the night never really being yours – when I got back.
When I got back… I didn’t want to think about that.
Kyle sat on the blanket and gestured for me to join him. I wanted to stop time, right at that moment. The way he looked, the open lazy smile on his face, the moonlight making his teeth look even more Hollywood white, the sound of the water lapping on the still lake…and the stars. I’d never seen so many stars. I didn’t let myself think about all the rules we were breaking by being there. Anyway, we’d agreed it would only be for an hour or two.
I sat next to him as delicately as I could, which was always an effort when you’re five foot eleven.
“Everyone asleep in the cabin?”
“Yes, and let’s pray to everything it’ll stay that way.”
There was always an awkward moment when we initially met, the bit before we started kissing. I lay back first and stared up at the sky.
“Oh my fucking wow,” I said. “The stars are, like, on steroids.”
Kyle laughed, lay next to me and held my hand.
“Do you not ever see them like this?”
“Seriously, Kyle, we need to report these stars to some kind of committee. They’re obviously on performance-enhancing drugs. We should check their urine.”
“Why are you always talking about urine and periods when I’m about to kiss you?”
“Oh, that? That’s my seduction act.” I made myself turn away from the infinite gloriousness of the sea of stars above me to look at him. “Is it working?”
Kyle put on the worst English accent the world has ever known. “You can bloody bet it’s working.”
With a whoosh, he was on top of me, nuzzling me with his nose, kissing my neck. I groaned, it felt so good. I stared up at the sky, letting myself feel happy, if only in this moment. Letting myself stay just there, if only for a while.
After huge amounts of kisses, we broke apart, and just lay there, catching our breath. I rolled onto my side, curled my legs up, and nestled my face in the gap between his arm and chest. He moved his arm to snuggle me in tighter.