The Last Summer of Us by Maggie Harcourt Page A

see whether I’m still angry with Steffan. I am, I suppose, but he’s my friend. You get angry with friends, don’t you? That’s kind of the whole point: that you get angry, and they understand why and you move on – and they try not to be such a dickhead in future. Or something. And they don’t ever, ever touch your phone again; not if they want that hand to be able to touch anything else afterwards.
    What’s the point in dwelling on it, anyway? He deleted a voicemail. He was trying (in his tactless, hopeless, usual bloody way) to help – and for that alone I guess I have to forgive him. After all, if anyone understands the way I feel now, it’s him – although sometimes, I do wonder…
    But you push on, don’t you? It’s not worth losing a friend over. Nothing is. Not a friend like this; a friend like him.
    They’re still frowning.
    â€œYou want to go find the elephant.” He thinks he’s humouring me. I’ll show him.
    â€œListen to what you just said, Jared. It’s an elephant. An elephant . Here. We’re not exactly tripping over exotic animals roaming the woods of west Wales, are we?”
    Steffan mutters something about “ town on a Saturday night ”.
    We both ignore him.
    â€œIt’s not real,” says Jared, bluntly.
    â€œOkay, so why, for the love of god, would someone pretend to be an elephant all the way out here where there’s no one to even hear them?”
    â€œWell, there’s us.” Steffan shrugs. “We heard it.”
    â€œExactly. Wait. No. What was I saying? No. Never mind. Come on . Aren’t you even curious? At all?”
    They answer almost simultaneously: “Not really,” says one. “Nah,” says the other.
    â€œYou’re crap. The pair of you. Where are your balls?”
    â€œLook who’s talking,” Steffan says with a barely disguised snigger.
    I thump his arm. “Oi! What’s that supposed to mean?”
    Somewhere in the back of his head, a little alarm bell apparently starts ringing. I can see him very carefully considering what to say next – just in case he triggers what he only semi-affectionately refers to as “the femrage”. This is the charming nickname he’s come up with to describe the look on my face when I’ve caught him being…well, a bloke. It’s a fairly loose category which includes (but is not limited to) making smutty comments and whispering to Jared in Welsh whenever one of the Year Thirteen girls walks past the common room. Like I don’t know him well enough to know exactly what he’s saying. And don’t even get me started on the wallpaper on his computer. Seriously.
    Finally, Steffan decides he’s figured out a way through the minefield. “Didn’t you need Jared to go hold your hand in the changing room because of the scary, scary druggies who left a load of crap around?”
    I’m going to let it go – purely because he was as worried about it as I was. He’s teasing me. It’s his way of checking whether normal service has been resumed, or whether I’m going to try and punch him in the kidney the second he turns his back. Tempting as that may be, it’s not really in line with my whole “friends” policy. More fool me.
    â€œWhatever. Elephant .”
    The elephant in the woods trumps everything.
    We leave the tents where they are for now; there’s nothing much in there to steal and none of us can be bothered to take them down yet. Besides, it’s bad enough that Steffan insists on taking the violin back to the car and hiding it under a load of junk in the boot. I don’t want to wait any longer. Because, you know, elephant .
    I say we’re out in the middle of nowhere. Technically speaking, for round here at least, that’s not strictly true. There’s the pub, a couple of villages within ten minutes’ drive, a handful of farms,