The Summer Was Ours

I was sixteen the first time I thought I understood my family. It was probably the worst age to try.Beechwood Island had a way of making everything look better than it was. The water, the houses, the long summer afternoons. Even the people seemed different there, as if crossing the water meant leaving all their problems behind.They didn't, of course.My grandfather still had his opinions. My aunts still wanted things from him. My mother still had a particular idea of who I should be, and I was getting very good at disappointing her without saying anything.The Sinclairs were good at pretending. We had beautiful houses, expensive things, photographs in which everyone looked happy. We could sit around a dinner table with people we hated and pass the salt like we weren't secretly hoping they'd choke on it.Okay, that might be a little harsh.But you get the idea.Nobody in my family ever seemed to say exactly what they meant. A compliment could be an insult. An apology could be a way of ending an argument without admitting you were wrong. Money could apparently fix anything, provided you had enough of it.Then there was Gat.Gat never seemed to understand why everyone accepted things just because Harris Sinclair said them. He asked questions that made people uncomfortable and had absolutely no interest in pretending not to notice things.I used to find that amusing. Especially when he'd say something at dinner and everyone would suddenly become very interested in their food.But I liked it.He made me question things I'd never thought to question before. Being around him made the world feel bigger than Beechwood, and I think that was part of why I liked him so much.Mirren was the sort of person who could make you feel comfortable without trying. She noticed things, even when everyone assumed she wasn't paying attention. Johnny could make a joke out of almost anything. He was loud, ridiculous, and sometimes so annoying that I wanted to throw something at him.I miss that.I miss having someone around who could irritate me for absolutely no reason and somehow make the day better.The four of us were always together. We swam, played games, talked about nonsense and spent long afternoons doing things that probably wouldn't have been interesting to anybody else.There was no great meaning to most of it. We were just kids on an island, trying to enjoy our summer.We were Liars.We had our own little world, somewhere the adults couldn't reach us with their arguments and expectations. At least, that's what I thought.After Tipper died, things started getting ugly.The black pearls became a problem. My aunts argued over them, and my grandfather sat there like a king deciding which daughter deserved a piece of his kingdom.These were grown women with children and husbands and entire lives of their own, yet everything seemed to come back to what Harris Sinclair would give them.I wondered what my grandmother would have thought.There were so many things nobody wanted to discuss. The affair. The video. The arguments. The way everyone talked about family loyalty while doing things that made loyalty seem like a joke.We were expected to love one another because we were Sinclairs. That was the rule. It didn't seem to matter how badly we treated one another as long as we showed up for dinner afterwards.Gat saw the unfairness of it all. He wasn't impressed by the money or the houses or the way my grandfather could make people change their behaviour simply by entering a room.I think I began to see it, too.We wanted something to change. We wanted the adults to understand that they couldn't keep treating each other like this and expect the rest of us to grow up untouched by it.So we made a plan.We were teenagers. We were angry, and we thought we knew what we were doing.We wanted them to see what they had done to the family. We wanted to make things right.It sounds ridiculous now, doesn't it? Four young people thinking they could fix years of selfishness and resentment with one plan.But we thought we had time. Time to make mistakes, time to figure things out, time to fix whatever went wrong.We didn't know how badly things could go wrong.Then came Summer 17, and I couldn't remember what had happened.My head hurt. My family kept giving me half-answers, and whenever I asked about that summer, the conversation changed. Nobody wanted to tell me anything useful. Mum worried about my migraines, Grandpa had his own version of events, and everyone acted as though forgetting was something I should simply learn to live with.Then I saw the Liars again.Gat. Mirren. Johnny.Seeing them felt so normal that I didn't question it. They were there, and I was there, and for a little while, I could pretend that nothing had changed.Except something had.I knew there were missing pieces. I knew I had forgotten something important, and I was tired of everyone deciding what I could handle. I wanted to remember my own life.So I started looking for answers myself.I went through Johnny's phone, searching through messages and trying to make sense of the things I found. There were clues, but none of them gave me the complete story. Every answer seemed to lead to another question, and the people who could have helped me were right there, refusing to tell me what I wanted to know.Whenever I pushed too hard, Gat tried to redirect me. He told me that maybe my mind was protecting me.I hated hearing that.Protecting me from what? Why did everyone seem to know something about my life that I didn't?I thought they were keeping secrets from me. I thought if I could just find the right piece, everything would finally make sense.I didn't understand that they were trying to spare me something I wasn't ready to face.Eventually, I stopped waiting for the answers to come to me.I asked the Liars to help me remember. We played Scrabble, using words connected to that night to bring the memories back. Little by little, things started making sense.I remembered the plan.I remembered setting Clairmont on fire.I remembered the dogs and going back into the burning house to save them.And then I remembered that the dogs hadn't survived.But that wasn't the whole story. There were still gaps in my memory, and I couldn't understand why I had ended up in the water or what had happened to the people who had been there with me.I was still searching for answers when Grandpa gave me the black pearl necklace for my eighteenth birthday. It brought back another flashback, another piece of the night I had spent so long trying to remember.I couldn't keep running from the questions anymore.I pushed the Liars for the truth. I wanted to know what had happened after I went back into the house. I wanted to understand why I couldn't remember losing the people I had spent all summer trying to find.And then I learned what had happened to them.Gat. Mirren. Johnny.They had died in the fire.I had survived, but they hadn't.For a moment, I couldn't make sense of it. These were the people I'd spent the summer with, the people I'd laughed with, argued with and turned to whenever everything else became too much.How could they have been dead all that time?I had seen them. I had spoken to them. I had been so frustrated with them for refusing to answer my questions that I hadn't understood what their silence meant.They weren't keeping the truth from me because they didn't care.They were trying to protect me from the moment I would have to face it.I thought about all the moments I'd taken for granted. Johnny's jokes. Mirren's quiet observations. Gat looking at me as though there was always something more to the world than what my family wanted me to see.I thought about Johnny being afraid of burning again. I thought about Mirren crying that nobody was ever going to see her. They had been young, too. They had wanted to be understood, to be loved, to have lives that belonged to them.They had wanted more time.So had I.For so long, I'd been searching for the missing pieces of my life, convinced that remembering would put everything back where it belonged. Instead, remembering showed me exactly what I had lost.The truth didn't bring them back. It only made their absence impossible to ignore.And perhaps that was the cruelest part of all. My mind had given me another chance to be with my friends, even if I didn't understand what it was giving me. I got to laugh with them again. I got to see their faces and hear their voices. I got to believe, for a little while, that they were still there.Then I remembered.I was sixteen when I lost them.And for a while, I got to believe I hadn't.

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