When the two of them had been young, the little cabin had been their refuge from the rest
of the world. The summers together in the middle of the woods had been all that mattered to
either of them. Their families joked that they were superglued together—joined at the hip. Those
days had always been Celina’s favourite. With the sun shining on her skin, dirt always under her
fingernails and flower crowns on her head, she’d been carefree and unafraid. With Elle’s hand in
hers, she’d been free and braver than ever. Now, at seventeen, she looked back on those days
when she was younger with a kind of bittersweet nostalgia. She wished she could go back to that
time, before it all went down the drain; before Elle stopped hanging out with her and traded her
in for ‘the popular girls’.
            She remembered one particular day, during their first summer at the cabin, when they
were five. The two of them had been out the whole day, down at the river with only a little bag of
snacks. Their shoes were neatly stored under a tree, their socks tucked carefully inside them.
They were knee-deep in the river, playing some game that Celine couldn’t remember anymore
and the hems of their dresses were wet and dirty from falling into the water. When Celine’s dress
fell from her hand again as she tried to hold it up and out of the water, Elle noticed and ran back
to the bank where their shoes were.
            “Let’s just take them off! They can dry in the sun,” she said with the kind of expertise
only a five-year-old could possess.
            “Okay!” Celine drew her dress off over her head. It had once, long ago, been white; now
the hem was soaked and dirty from the mud on the riverbank and the rest of it was stained green
from grass stains. It was her favourite dress.
            “Can you help me?” Elle whined, trying and failing to get her dress off.
            “It has buttons, stupid,” Celine laughed. “Let me open them.”
            When both had gotten their dresses off and laid them down in a sunny patch of grass to
dry, they ran straight back to the water to continue playing.
            Another time they’d gone to the creek where Elle’s mom and dad had made them a swing
that dangled from one of the tree’s branches right over the water, so their feet would graze the
surface as the swing fell back or flew up into the air. They both wanted to be on it and since they
were young and impatient and didn’t care about risks, they did just that. Elle went on first. When
the swing stopped shaking, she stood up and held on tightly to the ropes on either side. She gave
a thumbs up and then Celine hopped on, sitting between her legs.
            “Let’s go!” Elle yelled as the two of them started swinging back and forth.
            Celine felt the water graze her feet, the wind in her hair and the warmth of the sun on her
tanned skin. She laughed with Elle as they went higher and higher until they had to stop in fear
of going around the branch that held them.
            “I love the summer,” Celine breathed. “I wish I could live here forever.”
            “Me too,” Elle replied. She loosened one hand from the string to poke Celine. “One day,
when we’re big, we’ll live here. Buy the cabin for ourselves and never leave.”
            Celine laughed in the way that children often did when dreaming about the time when
they would be adults, because it felt so far away—she wished it still felt that far away—and
leaned her head against Elle’s tummy to look up at her. “We’ll get a cat,” and before Elle could
interrupt her, she added, “and a dog. And they’ll be best friends, like us.”
            “Exactly!” Elle smiled at her as if their plans were written in the fabric of the universe,
like they would come true one way or another. “And we’ll be best friends too. Only the two of us
with Cat and Dog and all the chocolate we could want!”
            Celine wanted to go back to that kind of love—pure and unaware of all the hardships of
life. Some days, she wished she could still love as purely as that; that her love hadn’t been
tainted. Sometimes she wondered if Elle had ever loved her the same way that Celina had loved
her. At seventeen, she felt so much more lost than she had at seven.
            The soft music that she had on in the background as she tried to concentrate on her stupid
homework wasn’t helping her either. Summer was coming back as May turned into June and she
couldn’t shake the memories whenever she saw that red hair or those green eyes. Did Elle still
think about those mid-July days they’d spent climbing trees or swimming in the shallow water of
their river? Or had she forgotten it all? They lived in a small town and though they could almost
be considered neighbours, Elle had not even looked at her in years. The patter of the rain on the
roof and her windows that usually calmed her only pulled her mind to the August rainfalls when
she and Elle had loved to run around in the wet grass and dance until their dresses clung to their
bodies and their parents brought them in to warm them up with towels and a good hot chocolate.
            Maybe that’ll help, she thought. Though the weather was getting warmer, hot chocolate
was a drink for every time of the year, in her opinion. And so she changed the music to
something more upbeat, connected her headphones and walked down into the empty kitchen.
They had the powder that made hot chocolate if you put it into hot milk (or water, but Celine had
never understood why someone would put water anywhere near their hot chocolate voluntarily)
but her grandmother had taught her how to make it the old school way and since she was
dreading going back up she decided to do that.
            She got a saucepan from the cupboard in the corner, the milk out of the fridge and the
chocolate from the pantry. Her grandmother had used dark chocolate, but she liked hers sweeter,
so she used milk chocolate when they had it. First, she heated up the milk and then she broke the
chocolate into pieces and put them in with the milk. For a while, she stirred, until all the clumps
had melted down and when they had, she took two mugs from the cupboard next to the fridge.
Might as well offer her sister some. They had bought whipped cream for the pancakes they’d had
last weekend, so she topped both the mugs off with a little whipped cream and some mini
marshmallows she’d found in the pantry with the chocolate.
            As she was about to surrender and go back up to give the second hot chocolate to her
sister and then go do the rest of her homework, the doorbell rang. Mom, she thought. Since she
wasn’t in the mood to talk about her day, she took the two mugs with her to escape quickly with
the excuse of having to go give her sister the other mug.
            When she opened the door, she didn’t see her mother. She stood there, rooted to the spot
with the two mugs in her hands, trying to process what was happening.
            “Hi,” Elle said, looking like a wet dog, clothes soaking and stuck to her body.
            And because Celine had no idea what to do, she did the one thing she remembered.
“Change of clothes and hot chocolate?”
            Elle nodded, tears forming in her eyes. “Please,” she choked out.
            And though Celine still didn’t know what had brought Elle to her doorstep and years had
passed since they’d last talked, it felt like summer had come knocking at her door again.