“Hi.” I half wave as Papa floats off, and plonk myself in the grass next to her, the dew soaking through my pajamas. Her sketchbook is full of doodles of the garden.
“You realize I can literally say it’s a jungle out here?” Sof waves her pencil at the wilderness as Umlaut bounces, then disappears into the grass. All the flowers have long wilted and burst in the heat. They straggle across the bushes, limp balloons after a party. In the winter, Norfolk’s beaches are shrouded in bleak white fog, and you can’t imagine spring will ever break through. The garden has that same air of loneliness now.
“Do you think your mum would come over?” I ask. I don’t have the right to ask her for a favor, but I know her mum would want to help. “Help us, I don’t know, prune?”
I wouldn’t blame Sof if she told me to piss off, if she was only here to say that. Or maybe she’s here to see Ned, and Papa’s misunderstood.
“Ask Mum yourself, later today,” she says. “She’s running the plant stall at the fair.”
Ah, the fair. Holksea’s annual jamboree of cake competitions and donkey rides marks the end of summer—for the village. For me, I had Grey’s party for that. I always thought of the fair as the start of autumn. A new beginning.
“You could come with me…” Sof croaks so quietly, I almost miss it.
“You’d want me to? I thought you’d still be pissed off at me.”
“I was,” she says, then off my look, adds, “Okay, I still am, a bit. Look, last year? Not telling me you were ditching art, ditching me, it sucked. Worse than getting dumped. But I understand it, now. I mean, you lost your dad.”
I blink at the oddity of her mistake. “My grandfather.”
“Nah. I’ve been talking to Ned about this. He was your dad. Your papa’s your dad, obviously. But Grey was his and your dad too. He was, like, all of our dads, or something.”
“Yeah, he was.”
I sigh and lean my head on her shoulder. She puts an arm round me and we sit there for a bit, both waiting for it not to be awkward. Maybe it always will be. I look at my feet, seeing how tanned they are. And dirty. The earth is definitely between my toes, and the cherry-red nail polish I put on at the beginning of summer is nothing but chips. I’m ready to fall asleep on Sof till autumn, when she pulls away.
“Please? I want to see pig racing! And eat cake—I’m going to go crazy and have gluten and dairy. And sugar! And the vegetable sculpting! Pleeease,” she begs. “I can’t go alone.”
“What about Meg? And—is it”—I can’t remember the name of her latest girlfriend—“er, Susie? Or won’t Ned go with you?”
“Meg will be there. Susie’s old news. And Ned’s playing with Fingerband. But anyway, I wanna go with you.” She prods me with her pencil, and I giggle, reluctantly.
“Fingerband? You didn’t want to perform as Jurassic Parkas?”
“I like rehearsing,” she muses. “And singing at the party was fun. But I think I prefer being behind the scenes. Being looked at is ugh.”
She full-body shudders. I take in her gold-sequin T-shirt, Hawaiian-print trousers, pineapple hairdo. I don’t know if we’ll stay friends. But I do know that if Sof can simultaneously be spotlight-reluctant and wear this outfit, and all that contradiction can be contained in one person, well: we might be more than the sum of our past.
*
Without Thomas, the fair is devoid of drama. My righteous anger at him has burned away and I kind of miss the chaos he might have caused.
After the pig race, Sof and I wander through the village green—sheep shearing, bric-a-brac, the world’s smallest petting zoo. Distantly, I can hear Fingerband squawking. By unspoken agreement, we avoid the cake competition tent.
“What about the Bunting Belles?” says Sof as we get to the food stands, peddling everything from organic veggie burgers to hot fried doughnuts. “Girls-only touring band visiting summer fairs around the country. All our songs have hand claps in them.”
“Supported by doo-wop duo the Marquee Men. Bratwurst?” I point to a hot-dog stand. Sauerkraut will soothe my soul.
She shakes her head. “The worst. We’ll travel in a gingham-themed bus.”
“And live off farmers’ market food.”
Sof keeps wrinkling her nose at said food until I suggest ice cream, then gleefully scampers off to line up for soft-serve, while I sit down on the grass to watch the world. Children tugging on their parents’ hands, a girl crying for her balloon that’s floating off miles into the sky. People from school, a handful of faces from the party, swigging cider in milk bottles and eating jerk chicken and coleslaw from Styrofoam trays. A few wave at me as they walk by. I smile back shyly.
And then, sloping towards me through the sunshine: Thomas.