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‘Cool. I’ll make the sandwiches.’ He seemed relaxed, making it impossible to be sure one way or the other.
Bummer. He was much harder to read than Liam.
They worked together in silence, the sun streaming through the basement window and lightening Lizzie’s mood. After gathering all the ingredients she needed from her mum’s larder, she started melting the chocolate. She sensed Trey behind her, slicing the bread and raiding the larder for tins of sweetcorn and tuna to make the sandwich filling Aldo adored. Normally, she would have moaned on principle. Why did Aldo always get the filling he wanted? Just because he refused to eat anything else. The calories in her mum’s home-made mayo were catastrophic. But she was too busy catching glimpses of Trey as he worked. At one point, he leaned over her to grab a bowl from the cabinet above her head and she got another heady whiff of that woodsy shower gel. She caught sight of his biceps, round and sturdy beneath the short sleeve of his polo shirt. Did he do weights? Have a gym membership? Liam had always been super skinny. But what had seemed edgy and cool a year ago seemed weedy now next to Trey’s solid strength.
Awareness pulsed in places she didn’t want it to as his long fingers gripped the sweetcorn tin, his wide wrist flexing as he worked the can opener.
He caught her looking and she averted her eyes, suddenly absorbed in folding beaten eggs and flour in with the melted chocolate and butter mixture. She greased the baking tin and hoped he couldn’t see the blotchy blush working its way up the back of her neck like a Virginia creeper.
Slopping the gloopy mixture into the greased tin, she chopped up some salted peanuts and sprinkled them on top. She refused to look his way again while she listened to the sounds of him cling-filming the sandwiches.
‘You didn’t weigh anything?’
She glanced over her shoulder at the enquiry. ‘No need. It’s a simple recipe. I’ve made it with my mum a billion times.’ Back in the days when her mum had let her help out with all the baking chores on a Saturday morning.
‘You and your mu
m used to bake together?’ The question was tinged with astonishment. As if he couldn’t imagine her being helpful.
‘Yes, she always had tons to do at the weekend—party food mostly. Kids party catering was how she made her money in the early days, before the cake designing took off.’
‘Did you enjoy it?’ If he wasn’t so hard to read, she might almost have thought he sounded wistful.
She pushed the tray into the oven and slammed the door on the memories. ‘It was OK.’ She shook off the moment of melancholy. No point in getting cheesy about the good old days. Her mum certainly never did. And why would she? Her mum didn’t need her help any more because she had a whole army of helpers who could do the job better than Lizzie ever had.
It was a glorious day for a visit to Hyde Park, the weather having thrown London for a loop by deciding it was mid-August in the south of France instead of early July in the UK. The sun warmed the still verdant grass, which hadn’t had a chance to be beaten down by a thousand tourist loafers yet. The cool spots under the horse chestnut trees, as they walked across Kensington Gardens, smelled of wet earth and tree sap rather than dust and dog shit. After they’d paid the nine pounds for a family ticket to enter the Lido enclosure, Aldo raced ahead to find ‘the best spot’. Lizzie hung back with Trey, darting glances past the few other groups already there to make sure none of her friends had decided to come for a morning swim. The last thing she wanted was to get spotted on something as shudderingly uncool as a ‘family outing’. She relaxed, though, after scanning the crowd and seeing no one between the ages of sixteen and thirty, except her and Trey. She relaxed more when it occurred to her it was only ten o’clock. None of her friends would even be out of bed yet and she wasn’t sure any of them could swim. And, even if they could, they probably wouldn’t be caught dead swimming in the Serpentine with its dark water and squidgy lake bottom—which sunk through your bare toes and made you wonder how much of it was really just duck poo.
Trey strode ahead to join Aldo on the brow of the bank that faced the lake, where her brother stood staking out their ‘best spot’. Trey pulled a blanket out of the picnic backpack and lifted it up by two corners to spread it out. All thoughts of duck poo disappeared as Lizzie became momentarily transfixed by the play of muscles in his arms, and the fleeting glimpse of his trim belly and outie belly button again, before his polo shirt settled back to cover his midriff—and the blanket floated onto the grass in perfect symmetry. The shorts and camisole ensemble she’d chosen for the day became uncomfortably tight. And the blotchy blush from this morning crept back up her neck.
There was absolutely no denying it, Trey Carson, lame clothes and all, was supremely, undeniably, super hot. Not just his model-ific features and buff body, but the quiet competence with which he did everything. So hot, in fact, she almost didn’t care if Carly and Liam and every one of her friends caught them having a picnic together.
In his own uncool way, Trey was cooler than any of them. Because he didn’t seem to care what people thought. Or maybe he just didn’t know what was cool and what was uncool, which made him even cooler really. What would it be like to be above all that bullshit? Not to care about saying the wrong thing, liking the wrong band, secretly being into Hannah Montana reruns when everyone was raving about Game of Thrones or Orange is the New Black … Or getting a rep for being a beg-friend or a frigid bitch.
Just imagining having that freedom made her feel lighter and bigger and more important.
She flicked off her sandals and carried them up the hill while Trey took out the assortment of sandwiches and brownies and crisps and dip they’d packed together for the trip. Funny how domesticity didn’t seem totally boring when you were doing it with someone who exuded enough raw energy to fire a nuclear power station.
Aldo whipped off his T-shirt, revealing his sturdy boy’s chest already tanned in July because of the olive skin Lizzie suspected he had inherited from that smarmy Italian dip-shit her mum had dated for about a nanosecond. As Aldo dropped onto the blanket to kick off his trainers and tug off his socks, Lizzie noticed the roll of puppy fat spilling over the waistband of his shorts, which hadn’t been there last summer. She felt a momentary dart of satisfaction at the thought that he would be hitting puberty in the next year or two.
Welcome to purgatory, kiddo.
But the satisfaction was swiftly followed by guilt. Poor bugger, he has all that crap still to come. And then a jolt of realisation. She had no idea when it had happened, probably sometime in the past year, but she wasn’t crippled by jealousy any more. Why had it never occurred to her until now that his body was a ticking time bomb, just like hers had been at ten or eleven? And, just like her, he didn’t even know it. Because no amount of dopey cartoons of naked people with pubic hair or tampon demonstrations in those furtive, giggly Year Six sex-ed classes could prepare you for how horrendous adolescence was going to be.
It seemed astonishing to her now that when she’d started her periods at thirteen she’d been hopelessly envious of Aldo’s simple, sturdy five-year-old boy’s body. In the three or four years that followed, she’d been so angry with all the mean tricks her body had started playing on her—bleeding and cramping and gaining hair and pus-y spots where there had once been only smooth, clear skin—that she’d taken it out on Aldo and her mother. Because they didn’t have any of this shit to deal with.
Sitting down cross-legged on the blanket, she tilted her head back to absorb the sun’s warmth on her cheeks. Her mostly zit-free cheeks, which had required only a minimal dose of concealer this morning.
‘Trey, can we go swimming now?’ Aldo’s urgent shout, pitched to piercing right next to her ear, jolted Lizzie out of her state of grace.
She opened her eyes, ready to launch into a rant, but cut it off, noticing the tiny love handles above the waistband of Aldo’s swimming trunks still visible even as he stood up. Energy pulsed through his body as he shifted his weight from foot to foot, waiting not at all patiently for Trey’s answer.
How glad was she that she wasn’t a ten-year-old boy? It must be a nightmare being on the brink of explosion all the time.
‘Sure, probably better to swim before we eat.’ Trey hadn’t even finished the sentence before Aldo gave a wild whoop and sped off. He charged straight into the lake, the whoop turning to a shriek as he hit the shallows, skidded over and bellyflopped into the water.
‘Eww!’ Lizzie shuddered. ‘What’s the betting he got a mouthful of duck poo and feathers with that manoeuvre?’
Trey laughed, warming her cheeks even more. ‘I better head in before he drowns himself. You OK to stay by the stuff?’
