Read Online The Last Summer of Us by Maggie Harcourt - Free Book Online Page B

anyway). And Jared has complained about the Rust Bucket’s clutch a grand total of forty-three times. I counted.
    There are bags piled up on the ground beside them. The Rust Bucket’s a few minutes’ walk back through trees and a couple of fields, parked in a lane where it won’t get in anybody’s way. Basically: the arse-end of nowhere.
    â€œBetter get used to roughing it, Lim,” Steffan had laughed as Jared turned off the ignition.
    â€œYou’re not serious.”
    â€œCourse I am. The great outdoors, isn’t it? Sleeping under the stars…”
    â€œNaff off.”
    â€œCooking food over a campfire. Washing in the river…”
    â€œYou’re definitely not serious.”
    â€œSays who?” He’d blinked at me with such sincerity that he had me believing him.
    The horror. It was only when his face crumpled and he burst out laughing, shaking his head and saying “Your face!” over and over again that I realized he was messing with me.
    â€œI hate you both.” I tried not to pout. “When you said ‘camping’, I kind of pictured an actual…campsite. Some of them have shower blocks. Some of them even have – shocker – pools .”
    Steffan shook his head. “Round here. In this weather. Like there’d be anywhere with space in the summer holidays.”
    Jared snorted. “And like anywhere would let us in.”
    Fair point.
    He carries on. “See that shed over there?” He pointed through the windscreen to a low, white-painted building squatting at the far side of the nearest field. “That’s the St Jude’s changing rooms. And over there?” He pointed the other way. “A mile or so down the road, there’s a pub. No cooking over a campfire. Promise.”
    Everyone knows what happened at St Jude’s. At the start of the year, the young PE teacher got accused of…well, doing something he shouldn’t have been doing with a Year Ten pupil in the changing rooms after a football match. Needless to say, he didn’t stay a teacher at St Jude’s very long. I don’t know what happened to the kid, but the teacher was gone pretty sharpish and no one’s seen him since. That’s the thing about small towns and reputations. They’re like tinder, dry as anything – it only takes a single spark, and before you know it the whole forest’s burning. Anyone who’s ever lived in a town like ours could tell you that.
    The upshot of this particular conflagration, however, is that the St Jude’s changing room building no longer has a lock on its front door…
    â€œYou’re a genius!” I said as I figured it out. No lock means that a hot shower is there for the taking.
    â€œNot so hateful now, is it?” Steffan grinned. He’s not quite right; it’s just that I’ll probably hate them less after a shower.
    â€œYou’re holding it upside down.”
    â€œBollocks I am.”
    â€œMight as well be holding those, all the good it’s doing you,” Jared mutters out of the side of his mouth at Steffan, who makes a rude gesture with the rod he’s holding.
    I’m bored. And I tell them so.
    â€œHow can you be bored?” Jared peers at me over the top of the instruction sheet. “Here, surrounded by the glory of nature…” He waves his arms around as if to make a point.
    From my tree stump, I peer past him at the clearing in the middle of a crappy little collection of trees that is our campsite for the night.
    â€œThe glory of nature? Since when has the glory of nature included an empty wine bottle, three rusty lager cans and…” I squint, just to make sure. “An upside-down shopping trolley sitting in the river? And how the hell did that get all the way out here, anyway? Who’d be so determined to dump a trolley in this particular spot that they’d haul it through a load of