That summer bore a heat so unrelenting that the broadcasts kept circling back to it. By day, the air pressed with moisture, making every breath feel laborious at times, and by night the sheets clung to skin like a damp shroud, sparking dreams that wandered into the strange. People attempted to carry on with their routines, and for the most part they managed; yet as they moved through errands and chores, the expressions on their faces revealed a shared ache: this isn’t living, and many longed to withdraw and endure the worst of it in slumber.
During those humid days and restless nights, a girl I hadn’t met appeared at the end of the street, moving into the brown house. She arrived one afternoon, as if out of nowhere, in the back of a blue car that crawled along as if the driver wasn’t sure where to stop. When it finally neared the brown house, the car almost passed it, braking abruptly only when Old Mrs Dickie—peering from behind the curtains—threw the front door open and waved. The girl and the driver stepped out and began unloading her belongings. Old Mrs Dickie slipped back inside, then resurfaced to hand something to the driver. I watched him nod and carry the girl’s luggage—two mismatched suitcases and a small red holdall—into the house while Mrs Dickie kept the door open and the girl waited outside, her backpack pressed to her chest.
Once the driver had gone, Old Mrs Dickie and the girl stood facing one another for a moment. Then Old Mrs Dickie smiled. The girl returned the smile, though from this distance I couldn’t quite gauge its sincerity. Then something peculiar happened: she reached out and offered her hand to Old Mrs Dickie, who shook it in return. The oddness wasn’t in the handshake itself, but in the fact that it had been the girl who initiated it.
Old Mrs Dickie guided her inside and closed the door behind them both. I watched everything from our porch, feeling as if I’d melted into the rocking chair and trying to persuade myself that a breeze existed even though it did not. I had spent many long summer hours in that chair; I was often alone, and there wasn’t much else to do. Yet there I could read without interruption, drink lemonade, and chew on ice cubes. It made me feel as if there was nothing else I needed.
I remained perched in the rocking chair for another hour, but the girl did not reappear, and eventually my mother called me in for dinner. I must have fallen asleep when she returned, because I hadn’t seen her come home. Even at that hour it remained so hot that I could barely eat, though I knew I should since my mother had taken the trouble to cook. As always, she seemed preoccupied with something other than me. I told myself, if she looks up from her plate or away from the old TV in our kitchen, if she asks me a question, any question, then I will eat everything she’s placed on my plate. I counted ten minutes exactly – I could tell from the clock beside the fridge – but she said nothing. I thought perhaps she hated me, so I finished anyway, because I wanted her to know how wrong she was.
*
Joe came by on his new bicycle the next day. He was my only friend in the neighborhood at the moment, though it hadn’t always been that way; there had once been a small group of boys I used to see nearly every day when school was out for summer. We would ride around on our bikes and spend afternoons at the public swimming pool, where we would soak for hours in the lukewarm water. I had little in common with these boys beyond the time we spent together, and sometimes they said things and made jokes that made me think they enjoyed themselves more when I wasn’t there. I didn’t know this for sure, but I believed my suspicions to be reasonable, and the thought was painful enough to push me to try hard to make them like me. Until one summer, when a pool manager called my mother to report a complaint: someone had accused me of swimming topless, like a boy. They had overlooked it so far because we were children, but perhaps it wouldn’t be okay any longer now that we were growing older, so would she mind making sure I wore a proper swimsuit from then on?
I was listening from the kitchen table when my mother took the call. I didn’t know who spoke, but she looked so embarrassed that I could tell it must have been bad. After she hung up, she looked at me for several seconds, then left without another word and returned forty-five minutes later with a one-piece swimsuit she told me I needed to start wearing if I wanted to keep going to the public pool; I was too old now to wander around half-naked. The swimsuit was purple with a pink hem, and it fit me perfectly. I liked it; I liked the way I looked in it, and I was pleased to have something new to show off to the boys. The next day, when they didn’t cycle past my house as they usually did, I went to the pool by myself. When I arrived, I could tell they had already been swimming without me all morning. I walked over to their end of the pool, but they barely acknowledged my arrival, except Joe, who had always been the nicest to me. He told me he liked my new bathing suit. I left half an hour later, feeling mortified. They must have known about the complaint. There was no other explanation for why they suddenly could not look at me. It was as if my mother’s embarrassment had spilled into me, and from there spread to them. Perhaps if I had pushed through the embarrassment, if I had kept following them around until they had no choice but to look at me again, things would have returned to normal. But I didn’t. I never went back to the pool, and the purple bathing suit faded from memory.
But that had been a long time ago. I was sixteen now, and Joe, who was a few months younger than me, was the only one I still spoke to. We met from time to time and wandered around town, eating ice cream and muttering unkind things about the people we passed. Here he came now, cycling very fast; I watched him round the corner with his head bowed over the handlebars until he came to a dramatic stop in front of the rocking chair. I set my book down.
“Did you hear there’s a new girl who’s moved into Old Mrs Dickie’s house?” he said, shielding his eyes from the sun.
I nodded.
“Her name is Clara,” he said. “She’s sixteen.”
“How do you know? Have you spoken to her?”
He was balanced on his bike, standing on the pedals, twisting the front wheel this way and that.
“Ma told me. She ran into Old Mrs Dickie yesterday. She said her granddaughter was coming to stay with her for a while because her parents are away on a business trip.”
He finally lost his balance and had to put his feet down. He looked up at me, squinting.
“You need a hat,” I told him.
“Ma thinks the story about the business trip isn’t true,” he continued. “She says she heard from her friend who plays rummy with Old Mrs Dickie that there’s more to it, but they’re not sure what.”
“Maybe her parents got divorced and couldn’t decide what to do with her.”
Joe lowered his eyes for a moment, then looked up again.
“Ma says we should go and introduce ourselves, since she’s our age. Shall we go this afternoon?”
“You mean when you’re back from seeing your friends?” I replied, picking at a thread that had come loose from the hem of my T-shirt.
Joe didn’t answer, and he stared at the ground again, frowning. I felt guilty for making him feel bad, and foolish for still caring about something that had happened years ago.
“Your mum just wants us to befriend her so we can uncover all the gossip,” I said, rolling my eyes. He laughed, relieved, then said goodbye and rode away.
I drifted off and dreamed I was playing tennis with the new girl. I couldn’t see her face clearly because the sun was in my eyes, but I knew it was her. She wore green shorts with white pockets, and white canvas sneakers. I looked down at my own shoes, also made of white canvas, and understood this as a sign. She appeared very serious, and every time I tried to ask a question, she simply smiled and shrugged, as if she couldn’t hear me. Then the dream dissolved into something else; I can’t remember what.
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From First Summer by Ekin Oklap. Used with permission of the publisher, Summit Books. Copyright © 2026 by Ekin Oklap.
