It was so hot that summer that they kept talking about it on the news. During the day, the air was so thick with moisture that it was hard to breathe sometimes, and at night the bedsheets stuck to your skin like a shroud and made you dream strange dreams. People tried to carry on as normal, and for the most part, they managed; but as they went about their business and ran their daily errands, you could tell from the looks on their faces that they all thought this was no way to live, and that they would much rather hibernate their way through the worst of it.
In that summer of wet hot days and restless nights, a girl I had never seen before moved into the brown house at the end of the road. She arrived one day, seemingly out of nowhere, in the back of a blue car that moved slowly up the road as if the driver were unsure where to stop. When it finally reached the brown house, the car nearly drove straight past it, braking abruptly only when Old Mrs Dickie – who must have been watching from behind the curtains – flung the front door open and waved. The girl and the driver got out and started unloading her things. Old Mrs Dickie went back into the house, then reemerged to hand something to the driver. I saw him nod at her and carry the girl’s luggage – two mismatched suitcases and a small red holdall – into the house while Old Mrs Dickie held the door open and the girl waited outside, her backpack against her chest.
After the driver was gone, Old Mrs Dickie and the girl stood staring at each other for a moment. Then Old Mrs Dickie smiled. The girl smiled back, though because of the distance, I couldn’t really tell whether she meant it. Then she did something strange: she held out her hand to Old Mrs Dickie, who shook it. The strangeness was not so much in the handshake itself, but in the fact that it was the girl who’d initiated it.
Old Mrs Dickie ushered her inside and closed the door behind them both. I watched it all from my spot out on our porch, feeling as if I had melted into the rocking chair, and trying to trick my mind into believing in a breeze that wasn’t there. I had already spent many summer hours in that chair; I was often alone, and there wasn’t much else to do. But there I could read undisturbed, and drink lemonade, and chew on ice cubes. It made me feel like there was nothing more I needed.
I sat cratered in the rocking chair for another hour, but the girl did not come back out, and eventually, my mother called me in for dinner. I must have been asleep when she got back, because I hadn’t seen her come home. Even at that hour it was still 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 put on my plate. I counted ten minutes exactly – I could tell from the clock next to the fridge – but she said nothing. I thought that maybe she hated me, so I finished my food 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 neighbourhood, though it hadn’t always been that way; he had once been one of a small group of boys I used to see nearly every day when I was much younger and 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 almost nothing in common with these boys except for the time we shared, and sometimes they said things and made jokes that made me think they must also be spending time together without me, time in which they had more fun because I wasn’t there. I didn’t know this for sure, but I believed my suspicions to be reasonable, and in any case even the thought of it was bad enough. So I tried very hard to make them like me, and it seemed to work most of the time. Until one summer one of the managers at the pool called my mother to tell her that someone had complained about my swimming without a top on, like a boy. They had turned a blind eye so far, they said, because it hadn’t really mattered when we were all still kids, but perhaps it was no longer appropriate now that we were getting older, so would she mind making sure I wore a proper bathing suit in the future?
I was watching from the kitchen table when my mother took this call. I did not know then who was calling and what about, but she was so embarrassed that I could tell it must be something bad. After she hung up, she looked at me for several seconds, then left without another word and came back forty-five minutes later with a one-piece bathing suit she told me I needed to start wearing if I wanted to keep going to the public pool; I was too old now to still be running around half-naked. The swimsuit was purple with a pink hem, and it fitted 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 got there, I could tell they had already been swimming without me all morning. I went over to their end of the pool but they barely acknowledged my arrival, except for 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 seemed unable to look at me all of a sudden. It was as if my mother’s embarrassment had been too great for her body alone to contain; some of it had spilled over and into me, and from there spread to the boys. 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 gone back to normal. But I didn’t. I never went back to the pool, and quickly outgrew the purple bathing suit.
But all that had happened 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 up occasionally and wandered around town, eating ice cream and making uncharitable comments about the people we passed. Here he came now, cycling very fast; I watched him round the corner with his head bowed low over the handlebar until he came to a dramatic stop in front of the rocking chair. I put 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 balancing on his bike now, standing on the pedals, twisting the front wheel this way and that.
‘Mum 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 back down. He looked up at me, squinting.
‘You need a hat,’ I told him.
‘Mum 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.
‘Mum 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 say anything and looked at the ground again. He was frowning now. I felt bad for making him feel bad, and stupid for still caring about something that had happened when we were children.
‘Your mum just wants us to make friends with her so we can find out all the gossip,’ I said, rolling my eyes at him. He laughed, looking relieved, then said goodbye and cycled away.
I fell asleep in the rocking chair and dreamed that I was playing tennis with the new girl. I couldn’t see her face properly because the sun was in my eyes, but I knew it was her. She was wearing green shorts with white pockets, and white canvas shoes. I looked down at my own shoes, which were also made of white canvas. In the dream, I knew this to be significant. She seemed very serious, and every time I tried to ask her a question, she just smiled and shrugged, as if she couldn’t hear me. Then the dream turned 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.
