First Summer

In the heat and the green haze that seemed to surround us both like a physical presence, I felt intensely awake.

One afternoon at the start of summer, a teenage girl watches a new girl move in across the street. In Clara, the narrator recognises the same loneliness that she feels herself, but finds tenderness and laughter too. Over hot, languid days spent talking and reading side by side in the garden, the narrator is awakened to the possibility of a true connection with another human…