Free The Last Summer of Us by Maggie Harcourt

woods?”
    â€œWho knows why anyone does anything round here?” Taking advantage of the fact that Jared’s distracted, Steffan snatches the instruction sheet out of his hand and scowls at it. “You dipstick. You’re telling me I’ve got the bloody pole upside down – you’ve got the whole sheet upside down, haven’t you?” He waves it in front of Jared’s face.
    â€œWas it?”
    â€œYes. Did those funny shapes that looked a bit like upside-down capital letters not give it away?”
    â€œIs that what those are? Huh.” Jared doesn’t look impressed. He looks even less impressed by my attempt to hide my laugh as Steffan continues to call him a long list of exciting names.
    â€œYou realize it’ll be dark soon, right?” I’m exaggerating slightly. It’s not going to be dark for a while yet – not even at the rate they’re going – but if I say I’m bored again, I’ll sound like a four year old. Instead, I stand up and dust my jeans down. “I’m going to go over to St Jude’s to take a look at the changing rooms.”
    â€œLet us know if the water’s on, yeah?” Steffan barely looks up from the tent. He’s now picked up a handful of the fabric and is stabbing at it with one of the tent poles. Either he’s finally worked out how it’s supposed to fit together or he’s attempting to sabotage Jared’s chances of staying dry if it rains. It could go either way.
    I leave them to it and start picking my way through the trees and back towards the St Jude’s playing field.
    There’s a hole in the front of the door where the lock used to be, and it takes little more than a nudge to open it. So that’s all fine – but it’s pretty dark inside. Changing rooms being what they are, you don’t exactly get big picture windows down the side of them, do you? There is, however, a light switch just inside the door, which I find by fumbling around like an idiot.
    Naturally, it doesn’t do anything. I flip it up and down several times, because obviously faith healing is going to work on a broken light switch.
    Still nothing happens. I have failed in my attempt to miraculously fix the lights. I’m going to have to look for some kind of fuse box, aren’t I?
    Armed with my one “practical science” lesson from Year Eight (when Mrs Dalston handed everyone in the room a plug and a screwdriver and a handful of clipped wires and told us to put them together, before sitting back down at her desk to glare at us) I’m going to try and turn on the electrics in the St Jude’s changing rooms. This can only end well, right?
    Right.
    The changing room block sits right on the edge of the school’s fixtures field. They’ve got another field too, next to school, that they use for their PE lessons. But this is the posh one – the one for playing other schools. Which is nuts because it means that everyone hates St Jude’s matches. Even the St Jude’s teams. Especially the St Jude’s teams. Think about it: it’s the middle of January, you’ve missed your whole lunchtime to run around a freezing cold pitch for an hour, getting the full benefit of the horizontal rain…and when you’re done, you get changed and cleaned up in what’s basically a concrete shed. After all that, you have to trudge back out into the cold and the mud and the sideways rain and get soaked again on the ten-minute walk back to school…where you spend the rest of the day dripping gently into your shoes. As an exercise in building team spirit, it’s really something. Shame St Jude’s still suck at rugby anyway – and the less said about their hockey squad the better. Even we usually beat them at hockey.
    The grass is longer around the side of the block; left uncut since the start of the summer, it reaches to my knees and the seeds stick to my jeans as I