8. Eight

Back in my room — which I find at last, after a long walk down several identical corridors — I find I don’t have much of an appetite after all, so I scrape together a sad little snack consisting of the single chocolate the housekeeper has left on my pillow, plus a bag of salted peanuts left over from the plane, and take them out to the balcony, along with my battered old blue diary.

Day one of my trip is going really well, then.

The temperature has been boiling all day, but now the sun’s started to sink towards the ocean, there’s a slight chill in the air, so I grab a sweater from the wardrobe, and settle in to watch the sunset while not thinking about how annoying Alex Fox is. Which might be easier said than done.

“Hey. Mind if I join you?”

I give an embarrassingly high-pitched shriek of fright, almost knocking over the patio furniture as a familiar head of floppy dark hair pops over the wall separating my balcony from the one next to it.

“You have got to be kidding me,” I splutter in disbelief. “Please tell me this is your idea of a joke, and you’re not actually staying in the room next to me?”

“Oh, it’s no joke,” Alex says. “I don’t have a sense of humor, remember? I’m uptight and bossy. My soul is as black as the night sky. I’d never do anything as puerile as making a joke.”

“It must be the universe’s idea of a joke, then,” I say, still struggling to believe the cruel twist of fate that has thrown the two of us together, not just once, but three separate times now. “It’s as if it’s determined to make us keep bumping into each other.”

“It must be fate,” mutters Alex, with unmistakable sarcasm which I decide it’s best to ignore.

The sky in front of us is slowly turning from soft pink to liquid gold as it starts to set over the island of La Gomera, which floats in the sea in front of us, lights twinkling along its distant coastline. It’s so beautiful that the sight makes even Alex and I stop bickering while we watch it.

“If you watch really closely, you can sometimes see the green flash in the second before it sets,” says Alex quietly, from the other side of the wall. I get up and go to lean on the balcony, and, after a second, he comes to join me, the barrier between us low enough to make it feel almost as if we’re standing together.

The sun reaches the rugged tip of the island, and, just as Alex said, there’s a short flash of bright green just before it sets, leaving a pale wash of pink on the horizon.

“Beautiful, isn’t it?” he says, softly. I nod, my eyes still fixed on the sky.

We stand there until the sun has completely disappeared, then he glances over at me cautiously.

“Look, about earlier,” he begins. “I’m sorry if I upset you. I wasn’t actually trying to. I know it probably didn’t seem that way, but I took it too far. I swear I don’t go around trying to make women throw things. Well, not all the time, anyway.”

“It’s okay,” I sigh, pulling my sweater around me as I go to sit back down at the little table on my balcony. “It wasn’t your fault. I shouldn’t have said that. I’d tucked the tablecloth into my dress. I’d have pulled it off like that no matter when I stood up.”

He looks at me thoughtfully.

“Peace offering?” he says, holding out a small packet of salt and vinegar pretzels, which I recognize from the minibar.

“It’s fine,” I tell him, waving them away. “I’ve already got some of my own. And anyway, those things are like 5 euros a pop. Are you sure you want to be eating them?”

“I’ve decided to join you in living recklessly,” he says, sitting down at his own table, which is in an identical position to mine, with just the low wall separating us. “Although, be warned, this packet of pretzels is as reckless as it gets for me. I’m not operating at your level.”

“That’s a shame,” I reply, glancing over at him. “Think of all the fun you could have destroying dinner tables and waiting for childhood crushes to call you back.”

I look down at my phone, which I’ve placed carefully on the table next to my diary, so I’ll hear it the second it rings.

Which it hasn’t.

Damn.

“That’s true,” Alex says thoughtfully. “And you haven’t even tried to ride a motorcycle yet. Although, if tonight’s performance is anything to go by… well, just remind me to make sure I’m somewhere far away when that happens, okay?”

“Aren’t you supposed to be making peace with me after you were so horrible earlier?” I ask, eyebrows raised.

“Um, yes. Absolutely. So, er, what else is in this diary of yours, then?” he says quickly. “Or do I not want to know?”

“You know you don’t,” I point out. “You think it’s weird and stupid and I know you’re only asking to make up for what happened earlier. Or so you can have something else to make fun of me for.”

“I promise I won’t make fun of you,” he says solemnly. “Scout’s honor.”

He gives a little three-fingered salute, which may or may not have something to do with the Scouts.

“Anyway,” he goes on, spoiling it slightly. “I got more than enough ammunition from you on the plane and at dinner tonight. You won’t have to do anything stupid for ages now.”

“And here was I thinking you didn’t have a sense of humor,” I reply dryly. “God, I can’t believe you’re actually staying in the room next door. What did I do to deserve this?”

“You must have been really bad in a past life or something,” Alex replies, tearing open his bag of pretzels and settling back in his patio chair. “I’m assuming you believe in that kind of thing, too?”

“No, I don’t, actually,” I reply. “I’m really quite sensible most of the time, I’ll have you know.”

“If you say so. So, are you going to read some more of this famous diary, then?”

I look down at my phone again.

Jamie still hasn’t called me; or even messaged.

Why hasn’t he called?

Maybe I shouldn’t just have assumed he’d know who ‘Summer’ was? Maybe I should have written down my surname, too? Then again, how many women called ‘Summer’ can he possibly know?

“Er, I meant for you to read it out loud,” Alex says from the next balcony. “Not in your head. I’m not a mind reader, you know.”

I hesitate, running my hands over the worn cover of the diary. I don’t really trust him to keep his word and resist making fun of me over it. But I am still desperate to talk to someone about Jamie, and Alex is the only person available, so…

“Okay, but you have to remember you promised not to take the piss out of it, right?”

“A Scout always keeps his word,” he replies, closing his eyes.

I open the diary at random and begin…

We have a new girl at school this term. Her name’s Chloe Gardner, and she looks just like a Disney princess, with blue eyes and all this wavy blonde hair down her back. Well, her eyes aren’t down her BACK, obviously. That would be weird. Her eyes are in the normal place, and she has these really cool pink glasses that kind of go up the ends. She can hardly see without them. I’m going to the optician next week for a check-up and I’m SO hoping it turns out there’s something wrong with my eyes because Mum says she won’t buy me glasses like Chloe’s unless I actually need them.

(She’s also got these weird thick-soled shoes which she said she has to wear because she has “flat feet”. She really hates them, but I think they’re quite cool. I’d quite like a pair.)

Anyway, she’s just moved into a house near us, and it turns out she’s a massive Taylor Swift fan, like me, so she came round after school to listen to music and stuff. After a while, Chloe asked me what I want to do when I leave school, and I wasn’t really sure how to answer her. I mean, I know I want to be a famous singer, obviously, but I’ve noticed that most people just laugh when I tell them that, so at first I said I didn’t really know: that I don’t want to pick just one thing, because, a) it’s much too stressful, and b) if I pick ONE thing to be then I would lose the opportunity of all the rest. Like, if you decide that you’re definitely going to be a train driver, then you can’t very well go off and be a helicopter pilot, too, can you? (Unless there are train driving helicopter pilots, and I don’t think there are, but I’ll ask dad about it later.)

The thing was, though, Chloe kept on saying I had to pick something — which I guess is true, because that’s how life works, isn’t it? So in the end I just blurted out that I want to be famous and sing on stage, and of course, she laughed at me. So I pretended I was just joking, and that I want to be a beauty therapist, like her, even though I can’t imagine anything worse than having to get up and do the same job, every single day, over and over until you basically just die of either boredom or old age. I just can’t.

Chloe says that’s just life, though; that not everyone can be the next Taylor Swift, and I know she’s right, but then, at choir practice last week Jamie Reynolds was standing behind me and when we were done, he tapped me on my shoulder and said I had a really nice voice. He said it like he meant it, too. Like, I don’t think he was just trying to be nice? But as soon as he started speaking to me, I went bright red and I couldn’t say anything back. It was so embarrassing. I wanted to die. He’ll 100% know I like him now, so I’m having to wait until I see him leave for school every morning so there’s no chance of me bumping into him outside the house and making it even clearer.

I stop reading and glance over at Alex, who’s still leaning back in his seat with his eyes closed and his hands folded neatly in front of him, looking for all the world as if he’s fast asleep. Which is probably a good thing, considering what an utter cringe-fest these particular diary entries turned out to be.

I close the diary and get quietly to my feet, hoping to make it back into my room before he wakes up.

“I can’t believe you wanted flat feet just because your friend had them,” Alex says, without opening his eyes.

Damn.

“I was thirteen,” I point out defensively. “I expect you were busy doing good deeds and selflessly thinking of others at that age, were you? Saving cats from trees and stuff?”

“Well,” he says seriously, “We weren’t allowed pets at the orphanage, of course, so there were no cats to save, but we were encouraged to do good deeds, yes.”

“You wouldn’t be trying to make another joke now, would you, Alexander Fox?” I ask, looking at him sternly over the top of the diary.

“Who, me? The… what was it you called me? A ‘dementor’, wasn’t it? Surely not?”

He pouts in fake outrage. It’s actually quite sexy. Or it would be if it wasn’t, you know, him.

“If I apologize for saying those things, will you be serious for a minute?”

“I’m always serious, Summer. I’m a serious kind of guy.”

“Yeah, I got that. You didn’t actually grow up in an orphanage, though, didn’t you?”

He grins.

“No, I grew up in Brighton. What about you?”

“Margate,” I admit, waiting for him to snigger at this — most people do, when they find out I’m from Margate — but he’s uncharacteristically quiet.

“This Jamie,” he says, after a short silence. “I hate to ask such an obvious question, but why was it so awful for him to figure out you liked him? It would have saved you all this drama if you’d just told him at the time, wouldn’t it?”

“But then I wouldn’t have had the pleasure of meeting you,” I reply in a tone that mimics his. “And anyway, I couldn’t tell him I liked him, because he might not have liked me back. And that would’ve broken my heart.”

“So you chose to miss out on the possibility of this great love affair, just so you didn’t have to risk having your heart broken?”

“Well, it wasn’t just because of that. But partly, yeah. I suppose that sounds ridiculous to you.”

There’s another silence — a longer one this time.

“No,” he says eventually. “No, I get that. It’s the fact that you’ve suddenly decided to risk it all now that’s the puzzling part. What changed? And please don’t say it was the Wise Old Crone, I’m begging you.”

I give a gasp of indignation, even though that is what I was about to say.

“I think it was the KPIs,” I tell him instead.

“The what?”

“The KPIs,” I reply. “Key Performance Indicators. They’re an incredibly boring set of statistics that no one should have to waste their lives thinking about. But I did end up spending my life thinking about KPIs, and I think that was the final straw, really.”

I tell him about the message from Linda on New Year’s Eve, and how she’d expected me to drop everything for the sake of some dull report that I’m 86% sure no one ever reads, anyway.

“And I realized that I might not have become a beauty therapist, like Chloe, but I did almost die of boredom anyway, in a meaningless job that felt a bit like being on a treadmill, day after day,” I finish, tipping the last of the salted peanuts into my mouth.

“So you told Linda to screw her KPIs, and jumped in a taxi to the airport,” Alex says, rubbing his chin as if he’s trying to make sense of this. “Quite a ballsy move, really.”

“You’ve changed your tune,” I say, surprised. “I thought it was risky and ridiculous?”

“Oh, it was,” he says. “But that doesn’t mean it can’t be brave, too.”

“Really?” I feel my cheeks turn red at the unexpected compliment.

Thank goodness it’s too dark for him to see me properly now.

“I, er, didn’t do that exactly, though,” I admit, feeling like a bit of a fraud. “I didn’t book the taxi until hours after I got her message. Or tell her to screw anything. And I did call her to let her know I wouldn’t be in.”

“Just take the compliment, Summer,” he says warningly.

“Right. Sorry.”

We lapse into a silence that suddenly feels awkward. I turn the diary around nervously in my hands, wondering if I should just get up and leave.

“So, did you ever get to sing on stage?”

I glance over at him.

“Not unless you count the school choir,” I say. “No, I gave up on that idea years ago. Not everyone can be the next Taylor Swift, as Chloe said.”

“Maybe not. You could be the first Summer Whatever-your-last-name-is, though.”

“I doubt it, somehow. And it’s Brookes, by the way. Summer Brookes. I can’t believe I’ve told you all this… this stuff about me, and you don’t even know my last name, or… or what my first pet’s name was. That’s weird, really, isn’t it?”

“Not really,” he shrugs. “We’re making polite conversation, not trying to hack each other’s accounts. And you don’t know any of that stuff about me, either. That’s how holidays work. You meet people, then you never see them again. Not much point in getting to know everything about them, is there? Here, let me see that.”

He leans over the wall separating us and takes the diary out of my hand, opening it at the front page.

“Why did you cross out ‘jump out of a plane?’” he asks, scanning the text.

“Because I don’t want to jump out of a plane,” I reply quickly.

“You don’t want to?”

“Yeah. I just wrote it because any time you see someone in the movies who decides to change their life, or even just work their way through a bucket list or whatever, they always end up jumping out of a plane. So I thought I should do that too.”

“But then you changed your mind, because you’re afraid of flying?”

“And even more afraid of heights,” I confirm, nodding. “I figured just getting onto a plane — which is resolution number 2 — would be more than enough interaction with planes. So I replaced it with climbing a mountain, which also involves heights, but… well, it’s just much less scary, isn’t it? At least mountains can’t crash.”

“Well, you’ve come to the right place,” Alex says, closing the book and handing it back. “Mount Teide is the highest peak in Spain. And you go up it by cable car, so you don’t even have to climb if you don’t want to.”

“Really?”

I gnaw my thumb nail, thoughtfully.

“Can cable cars crash, though?” I ask cautiously. “What if something goes wrong?”

Alex sighs.

“Anything can go wrong, Summer,” he says, getting to his feet. “Anything at all. Even the things you think are safe.”

He pushes open the sliding door on his balcony, which is identical to the one on mine.

“Anyway,” he says quietly. “It’s getting chilly out; I think I’m going to turn in. ‘Night.”

“Night,” I reply, looking down at the diary in my hands as the doors close behind him, leaving me alone in the darkness.

Anything could go wrong.

But that means it could also go right.

And all I have to do is figure out which things are worth the risk.