20. Twenty

We drive slowly down a rough dirt track, me with my arms still wrapped tightly around Alex’s waist in a way that’s far too intimate to feel even vaguely appropriate.

“You okay back there?” he shouts. I nod against his shoulder, not trusting myself to speak.

The truth is, I’m not totally sure how I feel ‘back here’, other than confused.

Me, Jamie, Alex, Chloe… It’s not a ‘love triangle’, like Chloe said, but it’s still all kinds of uncomfortable — and I’m not just talking about the way I’m perched on the back of this quad bike.

So I keep my mouth closed, and just focus on remaining upright, while trying to ignore the way Alex’s muscles feel under his thin shirt.

No, I am definitely not thinking about that.

As we emerge from the track into a more open area of the hillside, I look over Alex’s shoulder and see Chloe and Jamie up ahead. Suddenly worried about what Chloe could be saying to him about me and my reasons for being here, I nudge Alex sharply in the back.

“Can you catch up with them?” I yell over the roar of the engine. Alex’s body seems to tense beneath my arms, but, after a second, the bike picks up speed, and we draw level with Jamie. There’s just time for me to raise one hand to wave before our bike suddenly surges forward again, and I give a small shriek of fright and grab at Alex’s shirt again as we overtake them.

“Hey, what are you doing?” I yell, wondering if Alex can even hear me. “I meant drive beside them, not go in front.”

Alex’s shoulders rise in a shrug.

“Sorry,” he shouts back, not sounding the least bit sorry. After a second, though, I hear Chloe yelling something I can’t make out, and suddenly Jamie’s drawing level with us, before pulling back in front, Chloe waving regally as they sail past us.

Oh no, they didn’t.

Alex’s muscles flex under my hands as he pulls on the handlebars, then we’re speeding up again and pulling out, ready to overtake.

“Alex, don’t,” I shriek, swaying dangerously to the side. “Just let them go in front if it’s that important to them.”

But Alex either doesn’t hear me, or doesn’t care, because the next thing I know, we’re passing Jamie and Chloe again… then they’re passing us. We continue in this way for the next ten minutes or so, as the tour leader guides us along the parched dirt track, which takes us through a sparse kind of forest, clouds of dust billowing up from our tires as we go. One minute we’re in front, the next they are; then we swap places and repeat the process, and by the time we reach our destination — at a rocky viewpoint which looks out onto the mountains — it’s become very clear to me that I’m not the only one who harbored dreams of riding a motorcycle in high school. Alex and Jamie obviously did too: and now that they’re here, they’re determined to make those dreams a reality, with some weird kind of race that only they know they’re in.

Alex and I reach the viewpoint first, and he somehow manages to resist punching the air in triumph at his ‘victory’.

“What the hell was that?” I ask, dismounting and pulling my helmet off so I can give him the full force of my glare.

“What was what?” he replies innocently, unbuckling his own helmet. Underneath it, his hair is slightly damp, and his eyes very green. His bruise has almost gone now, and he looks every inch the sexy biker dude — right down to the amused smirk on his face as he looks at me.

“Oh, come off it,” I reply fiercely, tugging my fingers through my hair to try to smooth it out after the wind tore it apart. “You know exactly what I mean. You and Jamie and your little pissing contest back there.”

A short distance away, I see Jamie and Chloe pull to a stop. Chloe’s still clinging onto Jamie as if her life depends on it. Jamie doesn’t seem to have a problem with that.

I turn back to Alex, so I don’t have to look at them.

“Why are you smirking at me like that, anyway?” I say crossly. “It’s not funny, you know. You could’ve gotten us killed, driving like that.”

“I’m sorry,” he replies, looking like he’s stifling a laugh. “It’s just … well, here. See for yourself.”

He pulls his phone out of his pocket and opens the camera, reversing the lens before handing it to me.

“Oh my God, is that really what I look like?”

I stare at my reflection in the phone’s camera, horrified. My reflection stares back at me, hazel eyes shining out from the only clean spot on my face. Every other square inch of me is coated with a thin film of the reddish brown dust I’d noticed flying up from the floor of the desert … or whatever this barren wasteland we’ve been traveling over is.

My hair, meanwhile, is so tangled by the wind I look like I’m cosplaying as Medusa — albeit a very grubby, ginger Medusa who would be spectacularly unlikely to inspire anything but laughter in her victims.

“Summer! Oh my God, look at you!”

Chloe comes strolling towards us, looking like she’s fresh from the salon. Her blonde hair has somehow managed to survive the ride intact, and it’s almost as if her skin has acquired the ability to repel dirt, because there’s barely a spec of it on her.

“Oh, wow,” says Jamie, joining us. “Look at you, Summer. Are you okay?”

Jamie also looks totally normal; as does Alex, come to think of it.

Wait: why am I the only person who looks like she’s been on one of those game shows where they tip a bucket of ‘gunge’ over your head when you get an answer wrong?

“I’m fine,” I reply, with as much dignity as I can muster. “Absolutely fine.”

“Are you sure?” asks Jamie doubtfully. “It’s just, you look—”

“Terrible!” Chloe finishes for him. “I could write my name in the dirt on your forehead.”

She looks like she’s about to try it, too, but Alex steps up to join us.

“She looks fine,” he says shortly. “It was pretty dusty out there.”

“Only because you kept trying to overtake us,” says Jamie. “You were churning up the ground with your tires.”

“Yeah, and if you’d just kept to your own pace,” replies Alex, fixing him with one of his trademark unflinching stares, “You’d have been fine.”

“I was fine,” says Jamie, easily. “I’m just pointing out that you didn’t need to keep on trying to over-take if you didn’t want to get dirty.”

“I don’t mind a bit of dirt,” says Alex, who’s as ready as ever for an argument.

“Knock it off, you two,” I burst out. “We get it; you’re both super-cool biker dudes. You can stop showing off now.”

Everyone stares at me.

“Sorry, I mutter,” feeling like I’ve overreacted. “I’m just a bit thirsty after that ride. It’s making me cranky.”

“I’m not surprised,” says Chloe. “You look like you’ve swallowed half the desert. Come on, I think they’re handing out drinks.”

She links arms with me as we head over to one of the picnic benches that are scattered around the viewpoint, while Alex and Jamie go and join the queue for drinks, which the group leader is distributing from a cool box attached to the back of his bike..

“What’s up with you?” Chloe asks as we sit down. “Are you not enjoying yourself? I’d have thought you’d be in your element, with two men fighting over you.”

“They’re not fighting over me,” I reply incredulously. “They’re just… fighting. Actually, it’s not even that. I think they’re just showing off.”

“Right. And they’re doing that for no reason, obviously. None at all. They’re not trying to impress anyone in particular. They’re just being boys, right?”

Chloe raises her perfect eyebrows to show how dense she thinks I’m being.

“If they’re trying to impress anyone, it’s much more likely to be you than me,” I point out. “At least you’re not going to be bringing half the island home in your hair.”

Chloe looks at me thoughtfully.

“You know, for the clever one, you can be surprisingly oblivious sometimes,” she says, smiling to soften the words. “Here, let me try to do something with that hair of yours.”

She delves into the bag she’s got slung across her body and produces a brush, which she starts dragging through my hair, trying to untangle it. I sit there and let her, and as she tugs away at my head, it occurs to me that there are two Chloes, layered one on top of the other. There’s the Chloe who combs my hair, lets me borrow her clothes, and makes me laugh more than anyone else I know; then there’s the Chloe who sees life as a competition, and me as the permanent runner-up.

The problem is, you never really know which Chloe you’re going to get on any given day; and today is no exception.

“Look, they’re coming back,” she tells me now, putting the brush back into her bag. “For God’s sake, Summer, stop frowning like that; you’re going to give yourself wrinkles.”

Alex and Jamie join us on the bench, both carrying bottles of water. I take mine gratefully and sit sipping it while Chloe holds court, chattering on about the bike ride, and the scenery, and what she’s planning to wear to dinner tonight. Now that we’re all sitting together, without the distraction of the bikes, I’m once again having flashbacks to last night, and Chloe’s big revelation to Jamie, which neither of us has had the opportunity to mention.

Should I mention it, though? Or should I just leave it?

I rest my chin on my hand and watch as Jamie laughs at something Chloe’s saying. The fact that he’s here at all suggests that either he doesn’t remember what she told him last night, or he isn’t phased by it; which I guess is a good thing. Could it also mean that he might actually be happy about it, though? Because that would be —

“Summer?”

I emerge blinking from the fog of my own thoughts to find Jamie watching me from across the table. He smiles as we make eye contact, and I instantly blush, then hate myself for it.

“You sure you’re okay?” Jamie asks. “You were miles away there.”

“Yeah, I’m fine,” I say quickly, casting about for an excuse. “I was just thinking about… er… going to get another drink.”

“You’ve still got half a bottle of water left,” Chloe says, but I pretend I haven’t heard her and get up anyway, walking over to the cool box, which is just far enough away from our table to give me a bit of time to compose myself.

“Hey.”

Jamie’s voice behind me makes me jump in fright and spill some of my water.

“Oh. Hey. Do you… do you want some water too?” I ask stupidly, holding out the bottle to him.

“No. No, I’m good. I was, er, hoping we could have a chat, actually?” he says shyly. “I was hoping we’d have a chance earlier, but well…”

His eyes flick over to the picnic table, where Alex and Chloe are sitting openly watching us. A low hum of anxiety starts up in the pit of my stomach as I realize what it is he wants to talk about.

“Look,” I say, clutching my bottle of water as if it’s a lifeline. “If it’s about what Chloe said last night, you don’t have to worry; she was just trying to get you to stay out with us for longer. You know what she’s like; anything to keep the party going.”

“Right,” says Jamie, looking unconvinced by this, which I suppose is fair enough under the circumstances.

“So you didn’t come out here just to see me?” Jamie asks now, his expression unreadable. “Because when I bumped into you the other day, you said you were here on holiday. I thought it was just a coincidence, us meeting like that.”

“It was,” I say quickly. “It was just a coincidence.”

To be fair, this is technically true, too. I had no idea the tour bus was going to drive right past us like that, did I? Jamie, however, is rubbing his chin now, as if he’s trying to figure something out.

“But then, last night, after you’d gone,” he says, “I remembered that you’d been to the bar the day before, looking for me. And, after what Chloe said, I wondered—?”

I twist the water bottle nervously in my hands.

“Um. Okay,” I say at last. “Here’s the thing. I’ve been… well, I’ve been kind of going through some … some stuff lately.”

“Some stuff? What do you mean? What kind of stuff?”

“Oh, you know. The usual. Existential angst. Feeling like I’m not good enough. Wondering what to do with my life. You know how it is.”

Jamie smiles.

“Not really,” he admits sheepishly. “I thought you were doing okay? Better than okay, actually. From what you said at lunch the other day, everything seemed great?”

I bite my lower lip nervously.

“I might not have been completely honest about that,” I admit, turning to look out at the view so I don’t have to see his reaction. “I’m not doing brilliantly. I mean, on paper, I guess I am. I have a flat, and a job — well, I think I still have a job. But I want more than that, you know? I just keep having this feeling, like, is this really all there is? Do I really just have to keep getting up every morning and doing the same old thing on repeat? And for what? It’s like Biff Loman said: ‘to suffer fifty weeks of the year for the sake of a two-week vacation, when all you really desire is to be outdoors with your shirt off.’ You know?”

I glance around at Jamie, but it’s clear from the blank look on his face that he does not, in fact, know what I’m talking about. There’s absolutely no recognition on his face at all. None of what I’ve said is resonating with him. Not even the bit about Biff Loman, which I was sure he’d have remembered from our high school English class.

How can he not remember Biff Loman?

“You want to take your shirt off?” he says, glancing eagerly down at my chest. “It is really hot today.”

“No, of course not. I just … it’s like that song I used to like in high school, remember? Fast Car?”

Jamie’s face clears.

“Tracey Chapman? Yeah, I love that one.”

“Me too. And I guess I just felt a bit like the woman in that song. Like I wanted to be someone, going somewhere, and it didn’t really matter where. I just wanted things to be different.”

“So you came here?”

“Yeah. It sounds stupid now, but I came across your Instagram. You know, the one for the bar? And when I saw that you were out here, it seemed like as good an excuse as any to make this my starting point.”

Jamie nods slowly, but I can tell he’s still not quite getting it. Too late, I remember that Fast Car is a sad song; that it doesn’t have a happy ending. That the woman in it doesn’t actually escape.

And all of a sudden, I’m much less certain that I will, either.

“So, you kind of did come here to see me?” Jamie says. He smiles disarmingly, a brief echo of the person he used to be. But it’s too late. All I can think about is how Jamie Reynolds is not the kind of person who knows what it’s like to want to escape your life. To him, Fast Car is just a cool song to play on the guitar, and Biff Loman is a character in a play he can’t even remember reading.

Which I guess makes me just some girl he knew in high school, and that shared history I thought we had nothing but a memory.

“Not really,” I tell him carefully. “I came here for me. It was just something I had to do. It didn’t really have anything to do with you.”

The words come out a little more bluntly than I’d intended them to, but as soon as I say them, I know they’re true. I’m not really here for Jamie, despite what I’ve been telling myself ever since I found that diary. I’m here for me. Which is actually quite a liberating thought.

“Look, Summer,” says Jamie, who doesn’t seem to be listening. “I was thinking. Maybe we could get together later? Just me and you, I mean? I could swing by your hotel room later, maybe pick up a bottle of wine on the way. You could wear that red dress you had on last night. Well, for a few minutes, anyway.”

He licks his lips in a way that reminds me of the way our family dog, Snoop, used to beg for a treat. He’s grinning at me as if he thinks he’s said something really clever, and I suddenly have the horrible impression he’s used this line before.

“What d’you think?”

What I think is that a hotel-room tryst with Jamie Reynolds sounds spectacularly unappealing to me right now. In fact, Jamie Reynolds is spectacularly unappealing to me right now; which isn’t something I ever thought I’d say.

But I don’t know this man. Or particularly want to know him any more. Because, all of a sudden, it’s crystal clear to me that what I told Alex last night was true: I’ve been nostalgic for something that didn’t actually exist. Jamie wasn’t the first love of my life. He wasn’t special. He was just one of those people who are popular for being popular; and once you take them out of high school, and away from the people who used to surround them all the time, you realize there’s not much to them, really. Or nothing of substance, anyway.

He might have been popular, but he’s definitely not ‘cool’. And I’m not sure I want to be that either, any more.

“No thanks, Jamie,” I say firmly. “I think I’ll give it a miss, if it’s okay with you. Sorry.”

He blinks in surprise.

… I just thought—”

“I know what you thought,” I tell him, “And I’m sorry. But I just see you as a friend.”

I smile kindly. Then, before he can say anything to this, I turn and walk away.

I just turned down Jamie Reynolds.

My teenage self would never forgive me.

But my current self feels pretty damn good about it, actually.