Today
This morning, as I turned onto a street in the city where I live now, I thought I recognized his face, his walk.
An absurd idea, of course: So many years have passed since that fateful summer that he would be greatly changed. And it would have required an unlikely combination of circumstances for me to bump into him here.
And yet, like some strange detective, I couldn’t help following that figure simply because it struck me as familiar, trailing after a stranger based purely on his resemblance to the man that he might have become.
I found myself shoving my way through crowds on busy sidewalks, crossing roads amid the blare of car horns. I would slow down whenever he stopped, cursing the stoplights that turned green at the wrong moment, then hurrying after him again. At last, unable to bear it any longer, I sped up so I could pass him and turn to face him.
Because I needed to see. To be sure.
If you want to know the truth, I have never managed to rid myself of that story. It has never left me. It’s still there, somewhere, lurking in the depths of my memory, and now and then it surfaces. In fact, this was not the first time I had been suddenly drawn to a shadow, a shape, a fleeting apparition.
Nostalgia? Perhaps. A longing for our lost carefree youth.
A sort of absence? Probably. As if this particular void could never be filled.
Guilt? Yes . . . The guilt of not having seen it coming.
Tell me, reader, do you know why the most beautiful stories must always end badly?
*
1985
I am eighteen, and it’s summer. The beginning of summer.
From the deck of the ferry that connects the mainland to the island, I look down at the rows of vehicles below me, in the belly of the ship. Some of these families, including ours, have had to wait hours before boarding. Some children running between the lines of cars catch my eye; I was one of them, not so long ago. Then my gaze lingers on the sailors who are steering the boat, their white uniforms dazzling in the sunlight. Soon they won’t be needed anymore; a bridge will be built, because important people have decided so. Finally I look up at the seagulls, aloft on the wind. You would swear that they are motionless in flight.
And I close my eyes.
I breathe in the mingled scents of diesel and salt, I listen to the crash of waves against the ferry’s hull, I feel the steady swaying. I don’t know if I am sad or happy. Probably a bit of both. I think about the academic year that has just ended—twelve months spent cramming for exams at prep school—and I imagine the future that awaits me, in Rouen. It’s far away, Rouen, far from my native Charente, and I have a feeling that nothing will ever be the same again, that my adolescence is over, even if I would like to cling to it a little longer. I think about the classmates I have known since middle school or high school and whom I will no longer see as often, if at all. It’s a heartbreaking feeling. Already, at such a young age, I find it unbearable to lose people. And yet I am smiling a little. Or, even if I’m not smiling, I can sense that my expression is calm. Not only because of my closed eyes. Nor because of the warm sunlight on my skin. No, this sweetness is from the knowledge that I will soon be on the island again.
When I open my eyes, there’s a little boy, about six years old, standing in front of me. He’s watching me—examining me—with an odd look on his face. To be more precise, it’s my T-shirt that he’s staring at. The T-shirt is faded, with a low neckline, emblazoned with an image of Mickey Mouse. Presumably he thinks I’m too old to be wearing a T-shirt like this. Or maybe he’s a Disney fan and he imagines we might be friends. I let him observe me in silence. I don’t know how to speak to children. I always feel awkward around them. I look down.
My brother wasn’t with us that summer, I can’t remember why. Maybe he was working at Venthenat, the plastics factory in Barbezieux, to earn some money. In July and August they would hire students to replace the workers who had gone away on vacation. Anyway, my brother has never really liked the island. I think it was the islanders that he didn’t like. He couldn’t understand their mentality—what he saw as their isolationism and their prejudices, even if he never phrased it like that. So this summer it’s just my parents and me. They signal to me that I should head back to the car because we’re approaching the wharf.
When we dock in Sablanceaux, it all comes back to me in an instant: the road with all its potholes from the thousands of tourists who drive along it, the shapes of the stone pines, the reassuring presence of the beach, the smell of seaweed at low tide. And, soon after this, the campground where I have spent so many days, and where Christian—my father’s best friend, whom he met during his military service—runs a popular stall selling French fries. A little farther on, there’s a square with a carousel and a pétanque court, some low dark stone walls, some houses with bottle-green shutters, a bend in the road, and we’re headed to La Noue. This is where Christian lives, with his wife and two children. This is where we will stay.
When we arrive, we are greeted with hugs. There is nothing bourgeois or affected about this; it’s a sincere, spontaneous expression of how much we’ve missed each other since last summer, how happy we are to see each other, to be together again. I am the kind of teenager who can sometimes be a little surly or rude—or so people tell me, anyway—but with them I am never that way. It’s impossible.
Christian and Anne-Marie, his wife, are the only adults with whom I can show affection in this way. I keep my uncles and aunts at a distance, seeing them as little as possible, because I don’t have anything in common with them. I do not subscribe to the convenient myth about the kinship of blood; I have already learned that we choose the people we love, that we should not let anyone else make that choice for us. I am not particularly interested in my parents’ other friends either. When they come to our house for dinner, I barely speak to them, often getting up and leaving the table. Nobody takes offense at this, and nobody misses me when I’m gone. With Christian and Anne-Marie, things are different. Not because they’ve seen me grow up—this is also true for my relatives—but because I have always been happy in their company. With them, I’ve never been moody or bored or crabby or whatever. It’s always been easy. And, with them, there is always the summer, always the sun.
François, though, is not there to welcome me. His mother explains his absence: “He’s gone into town. He probably went to buy cigarettes. He thinks I don’t know that he’s started smoking. He thinks I’m a fool.” She says fool, not idiot. Anne-Marie doesn’t use words like that.
I go upstairs to leave my bag in François’s room, which I will share with him during the vacation. He and I are almost exactly the same age; I’m a few weeks older. We haven’t grown up together, but we’ve grown up in parallel. We meet up every summer and we’re used to each other. He could get annoyed at having to share his room with me, but he doesn’t. I notice that he’s tidied up a bit, hiding the usual chaos, and he’s already put my mattress on the floor at the foot of his bed. In the evenings we always talk for a long time before falling asleep, even after it’s dark outside and we can hardly keep our eyes open. During the first few days, we like to catch up on each other’s lives. After that, we chat about anything and everything. That’s what awaits me—awaits both of us—this summer. I take comfort in the unchanging nature of these habits. After dropping my bag on the mattress, I go back down to the yard. The grown-ups are sitting around the table and Anne-Marie is serving drinks; I can see a bottle of Pernod, another of Martini Rosso. I don’t hang around. I’m eager to go off in search of my friend.
I walk up Rue de la Cailletière. The sidewalk is so narrow that I am constantly brushing against the walls of houses, the hooks that hold shutters open, the branches of hollyhocks. Then Place des Tilleuls opens out in front of me. I look at the café and see François sitting on the front steps, a cigarette dangling from his lips. He is wearing his usual black tank top, jeans, and flip-flops. Beside him, standing against the wall and also smoking, is a boy I have never seen before. I approach without a word. Suddenly, sensing my presence, François looks up. Sunlight glares in his face, forcing him to squint, but despite the dazzling light, despite his half-closed eyes, he recognizes me instantly and jumps up to give me a bear hug. Unlike most boys our age, he doesn’t coolly shake hands, but wraps his arms around me. (Has he caught this craze from some American TV show?) The other boy watches us, looking vaguely surprised, so François introduces us: “Philippe, Nicolas. Nicolas, Philippe.” This is all he says. First names are enough, for now. We can fill in the blanks later.
Then, squeezing my shoulder and smiling with genuine pleasure at seeing me again, he asks: “When did you get here?”
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Excerpted from The Summer Boy. Copyright © 2026, Philippe Besson. Reproduced by permission of Scribner, an imprint of Simon & Schuster. All rights reserved.
