Free The Last Kings of Sark by Rosa Rankin-Gee

Esmé. He pressed his pen hard into his notebook.
    He mentioned his grandfather, and said a name that neither of us recognized.
    â€˜Painter,’ he said. ‘Quite a famous one. But yeah, the whole lot go to the Sorbonne. Grandfather, great-grandfather. Uncles too.’
    â€˜Just the men, then,’ I said.
    â€˜And her. She went.’
    â€˜Sorbonne sounds like sorbet,’ Sofi said.
    â€˜Why do you need to go?’ This was me, practically at the same time. ‘Don’t you already speak French?’
    â€˜Oui,’ he said, ‘but my accent’s terrible.’
    I nodded, though it didn’t need confirmation.
    â€˜She says I get it from my dad.’
    â€˜Well,’ Sofi looked back at him on his high rock. ‘I think that would be great, Pip. More the merrier. Us three. Pa-ree.’
    â€˜It’s not like I just suddenly thought of it,’ he said to me. ‘She grew up there, in the sixteenth. I’ve thought of it before.’
    â€˜Sixteenth what?’ asked Sofi.
    â€˜Arrondissement,’ I said. I knew that.
    â€˜I didn’t think it was century. Arrrr-ond-eess-mont!’ said Sofi, affecting Frenchness by stretching her top lip downwards. ‘I love it. I can’t wait to go. Baguettes, man. Reunion. Shitloads of wine.’
    Sofi bared her chocolate-orange teeth. She’d shifted and was lying on her back now, T-shirt shuffled up to her bra. She scrunched a bit of the orange tinfoil into a ball and balanced it on her stomach. She was using her hips to try to roll it into her belly button, like one of those pinball toys you get in a Christmas cracker.
    The little ball rolled in a wobbly path off her waist and she threw it into the sea. We both watched it go. There was more sea – golden-blue, but choppy, hard-looking – than when we first lay down. A lot more.
    â€˜Pip,’ she said. His eyes were shut now, lashes flickering in the heat. ‘Oi, white boy. How do we get back up that cliff?’ She worry-burped, and blew it up towards the sky. He said we had to climb.
    â€˜Fuck that for a bag of chips,’ she said. ‘I’m flying.’
    â€˜No,’ Pip replied, as if it had been a genuine suggestion. ‘You can’t. The only way’s to climb. Or swim, maybe.’
    Neither of us liked his answer so we decided not to hear. The sun was coming in thick beams in the breeze and I asked it to blow me to sleep. I’d got to that stirry half-awake, when Sofi called my name. She’d wiped the chocolate off her mouth with my bag and was using both arms to do enormous waves. It was like breast-stroke, but standing up, and she jumped up in the air every time she brought her arms down. ‘It’s them, ’ she kept on saying, ‘them’. It was the Czech boys: Vaclav and Armin, in a little red dinghy.
    They shouted ‘Sofya!’, and then ‘Judy!’. Pip started laughing when they said it a second time.
    â€˜Judy’s – brilliant,’ he said. ‘Can I call you Judy from now on?’
    I said, sure, fine, and that I’d call him Pippa. ‘Your shoulders look like crayfish, by the way.’
    When the Czech boys got close enough, Sofi stuck out her thumb like a hitchhiker, then stuck out her chocolate tongue. Vaclav jumped in the water to pull the boat close enough to us. He and Sofi kissed each other on the cheeks, three times, maybe even four. We got in, Pip last, carrying my bag and his leather notebook between his teeth.
    The boat wasn’t meant for five people. It sat low, very low in the water.
    â€˜Why do you have a boat?’ Sofi asked, drawing finger tattoos on Vaclav’s forearm. ‘Are you pirates?’
    It was when Vaclav said they worked for Farquart & Fathers that Sofi’s hand dropped off his arm.
    â€˜But Sofya, it’s not choice thing. It’s job – money thing. What you can do?’ He put his hands up in the air like he