Golden Hour

The first properly warm day of junior year arrived the way good days do, without warning. One Tuesday the sky was the color of rinsed glass and the quad smelled of cut grass and someone's spilled iced coffee, and I thought: this is the day everything starts.

I was sitting on the bench outside the science wing, dark hair lifting off my neck in the breeze, squinting against the light because my eyes are blue and blue eyes are useless against that much sun. I had my notebook open on my lap but I wasn't writing. I was watching him.

Eli crossed the quad with his dirty-blonde hair falling into his face, the way it always did, and he was carrying two cans of lemonade from the vending machine, one in each hand, and he didn't see me yet. He had that walk. You know the one. The one that's only a walk but it makes the back of your throat tight. Blue eyes, faded jeans, a sunburn starting across his nose from helping his dad with the boat that weekend. Protective. That was the word for Eli, the one everyone used, but it was truer than they knew. He watched doorways. He checked locks twice. He put his body between mine and the street when we walked.

"Hey," he said, handing me a can, sitting close enough that our knees touched. "You're burning already."

"I'm not."

"You are." He pressed his cold can to my cheek and I yelped and he laughed, and the sound of it folded into the rest of the afternoon like it belonged there.

That was the day Mae found us. Mae was my best friend in the way that only one person gets to be, the way that means she knew where I kept my spare key and which songs I play when I'm sad. She came across the quad with her boyfriend trailing half a step behind, and she was already talking before she reached us.

"Cottage," she said. Not a question. A verdict.

"Mae," I said.

"Cottage," she said again, louder, and dropped into the grass beside the bench with the gracelessness of someone who has decided the ground is fine. Her boyfriend, Theo, stayed standing. He had that way about him, like he was always slightly apart from whatever group he was in, observing. Nice teeth. Quiet smile. He watched Mae the way you watch a fire, fond and a little wary.

"Whose cottage?" Eli asked, already suspicious of the logistics, which was very Eli.

"My uncle's. He never uses it in May. It's ours for the taking." Mae sat up on her elbows. "Four days. Maybe five. Lake. Fire pit. No parents. No midterm review sessions. Tell me what part of that is a bad idea."

Theo said, in his unhurried way, "It's a good idea." And because Theo rarely committed to ideas out loud, his saying so made it feel decided.

Eli looked at me. He didn't ask if I wanted to go. He asked, softer, just for me, "You okay with the four of us?"

I was. I wanted to say yes in a way that meant something, so I just leaned into him and felt his arm come around my shoulders, and that was the answer, and the afternoon kept going, golden, ordinary, a day that was about to turn into the last ordinary day any of us would have.

We didn't know that then. We made a plan, the four of us, heads together over my notebook, writing grocery lists and debating who would drive. The sun moved. The bell rang. We ignored it. Mae wrote LAKEHOUSE in block letters across the top of the page and underlined it twice, and I remember her pen, a red one, and how the ink soaked into the paper like a small bright wound.

Later, much later, I would think about that red ink and wonder why I didn't see it. But you never see it. That's the whole trick of a day like that. It hands you everything you want and it takes everything you have, and it doesn't warn you which it's doing.