Chapter Text
The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing James Potter that St. Tropez was just a certain kind of fake tan.
He'd had no idea that it was named for an actual town.
A town in France, no less!
James didn't consider himself to be an intolerant person, but he hated the nation of France and he had reasons for feeling that way. Plenty of reasons. Reasons that he did not feel the need to explain or justify to anyone who asked.
He'd also had no idea that the devil was his own mother.
"It was Sirius's choice," was how the woman chose to defend herself, hitting pause on the slideshow she was using to announce the two-week trip, having lured James to the projector with false promises of popcorn and Dr. No. "This is our first official holiday as a family and it's only fair that he gets first refusal."
She'd even created a professional looking title page for her presentation, with the words SAINT-TROPEZ 2021 emblazoned across an image of a dozen sailboats floating on a glimmering turquoise sea. It looked so idyllic that anyone might have been fooled into believing that it wasn't a secretly gruesome place. Which it must have been. Because it was a town in France.
Euphemia Potter was a great proficient in Photoshop and treachery.
James levelled a glare at his best mate, who was grinning unctuously at him from a leather recliner. The smarmy git had the massage function running and was sipping his coffee out of James's special Arsenal FC mug. "He only picked it because he knew that I wouldn't want to go!"
"It doesn't matter why he picked it—"
"I'm a committed Francophile, everyone knows this," Sirius finished.
"—what matters is, that's where we're going."
"Besides," James's father reasoned, "nobody would waste their choice of a holiday to make a member of their own family feel uncomfortable."
James loudly guffawed. "Have you met Sirius's parents?"
"Fleamont and I are his parents," Euphemia reminded him, her voice taking on a much colder edge. "Or were you asleep throughout the entirety of the ten stressful months it took to adopt him?"
"I know that, I only meant—"
"He doesn't want me around," Sirius lamented, pouting. "He doesn't wuv his big brudder."
Euphemia's lips—painted in her preferred shade of Estée Lauder's Pure Color Desire Rouge Excess, which James specifically knew because he bought it for her every birthday, Mother's Day and Christmas—twitched like she was going to laugh, but she kept her composure. "Don't stir the pot, Sirius, for goodness' sake."
"Let's order in tonight," said Fleamont, with his phone at the ready, adjusting his spectacles on the bridge of his nose. "What does everyone fancy?"
"I fancy not going to France," said James.
"Too late," his mum replied. "We've already booked the villa."
"Indian? Chinese?"
"I don't care. You can't make me go. I have human rights and I'll call the United Nations."
"How about Polish food?" Sirius suggested. "Those potato pancakes from last time—"
"I'm your mother, you're still under eighteen and while you're living under my roof—"
"Then I'll run away, it worked for Sirius."
"Or we could always just go with Thai Pei?"
"Sirius has had a very difficult childhood—"
"But I hate France!" he whined. "I wanted to go to New York at Christmas!"
"I'd watch my tongue if I were you, young man. You're veering dangerously close to self-obsession," warned his mother, who had lined the entrance hall of their townhouse with massive black-and-white photographs of herself from her modelling days in the seventies, but sure, James was the narcissist here. "I lived in abject poverty until I moved to this country, and there are children in the world who don't have the luxury of a proper meal, let alone a luxurious holiday. You should be grateful for what you've been given."
"Yeah," Sirius seconded. "Why don't you ruminate on that for a while?"
James stood there like an absolute goon with his hands clenched into fists, him standing on one side of the sofa and Euphemia matching his stance on the other while his father sat between them, scrolling placidly through Just Eat, and Sirius marvelled at his handiwork with his feet up. There was no argument he could raise to counter his mother's reminder that the world was full of people who tangibly suffered and he was not one of the unfortunate. That would officially push him into the role of spoiled brat, as opposed to the role of "lovable rogue with certain eccentric principles" that he felt most comfortable with.
James was very aware that his entire existence thus far had been setting him up quite neatly for the role of a spoiled brat.
He didn't want to be a spoiled brat.
He didn't want to be ungrateful.
But France! Of all places! Sworn enemy of his assailable mortal soul! James had once written an impassioned short story in which he engaged in mortal combat with the entire nation of France and came up victorious, and all he'd gotten for his efforts was a trip to the school guidance counsellor, who wanted to confirm with him that "everything was going well at home."
"Hmm," murmured Fleamont, seemingly to himself. "Lebanese Taverna?"
"And look, darling, there's a water park in Saint-Maxime!" cried his mum, in the faux-cheerful tone of a woman desperately battling to coax a spoonful of broccoli into her toddler's mouth. She raised her little clicker and resumed the slideshow, skipping ahead to a photograph of a man in a helmet and safety vest, swinging on a rope above a pool of water. "And some sort of ninja-training place, just an hour away from the house!"
"Ninja-training in French," James darkly retorted.
His mum sighed. "Will it help if I reveal the second part of the surprise?"
"What, that you plan on filling my pockets with rocks and tossing me off the side of a sailboat?"
"No." A little glint of victory seemed to twinkle in her expression. "That Remus and Peter are coming with us."
"They are?" said Sirius, his eyebrows lifting.
"Oh yes," said Euphemia smugly. "I confirmed with their parents this morning and they're both very excited to come."
This...changed things for James, but only slightly.
He chewed on the inside of his cheek, thinking it over.
James had many vivid memories of being bored out of his mind on trips with his parents and his father's scientist friends when he was a child, while other children his age had siblings to play with during the summer. A trip with his three best mates in a place that had sun, sand, water parks and ninja training courses would have sounded like the holiday of a lifetime under any other circumstances. If this had all been taking place in Spain, he would have been doing cartwheels around the family room—and James could do many cartwheels, because his two decidedly non-sporty parents had somehow produced a son with outstanding athletic abilities that science simply could not account for.
What he didn't want was for his holiday of a lifetime to take place in bloody France, or with his parents, for that matter, who for the most part were pretty cool and trusted James to do his own thing in his free time, but at the end of the day were parents nevertheless.
It didn't matter anyway.
He wasn't going to get the resolution he wanted. His mother was awaiting his compliance, not his consent.
"I want to order pizza for dinner," he eventually decided aloud, sensing that they would grant him this request to keep the peace.
"Pizza it is!" said Fleamont happily, while Euphemia cooed in delight and James flopped onto the sofa with a scowl.
"Don't you feel better now that you've seen the error of your ways and agreed to cooperate?" said Sirius.
James fixed him with the most withering stare he could muster. "Can you at least admit that you did pick France to piss me off?"
"I kind of did do that, yeah," Sirius admitted, snuggling into his recliner and fixing the projector screen with a lazy, wide-lipped smile, the coffee mug balanced on his chest, "but I've had a very difficult childhood, so it's really not my fault."
*
Lily Evans was folding a sarong when her best friend clattered up the stairs and kidnapped her.
"There are boys next door!" Beatrice screeched, skidding into the room with her hands squeezed into fists in front of her tummy. She looked like she was trying to hold in a wee, or preparing to fight a much shorter person. "Boys next door! Boys our age! One of them is really really cute!"
"Wha—" Lily started, but Bea leapt at her and seized her by the wrist.
Tripping rather ungracefully over her own two feet, she allowed herself to be pulled through the door that connected her room to Bea's. Miriam, Beatrice's little sister, was sitting on the floor reading Julián is a Mermaid, but Lily barely got to wave at her before she was dragged out to the balcony, which overlooked some of their garden and almost all of the house next door.
"There," said Beatrice excitedly, pointing at next door's garden. "There he is, my future husband—he's the one on the lounger. LookathimlookathimLOOKATHIM!"
Lily looked.
And squinted.
The villa next door was like a palace compared to the quaint yellow house that Beatrice's mum had inherited at the behest of her grandmother's will, with tall stone columns, a flat slate roof and window panes larger than most ordinary shop fronts. The eight sun loungers that ran the length of the pool were the size of double beds, there was an outdoor shower, a firepit, a barbecue, and an older man with a shock of greying hair was building a plastic football goal on the lush green lawn.
There were two boys outside, one floating in the pool and the other on a sun lounger. Both were too far away for Lily to properly see their faces, although Sun Lounger Boy was holding a book and wearing neutral colours, which served as a strong indication that Beatrice was going to devour him alive at the first available opportunity.
"Do you have zoom lenses in your eyeballs or something?" she asked Bea, tilting her head to one side as if that might have thrown Sun Lounger Boy's features into sharper relief.
"Nah," Beatrice sighed. "I was outside, watching him through the bushes."
"The bushes!" she laugh-squealed. "Stable of you!"
"It's not like I was flicking my bean while I did it."
"Jesus."
"But don't you think he's lovely?"
"I can't see him well enough to think anything."
"Well, he's gorgeous up close, believe me," she continued, eyeing the poor chap like a lioness stalking a zebra on the Savannah while she adjusted the straps of her bikini top. "How do I get his attention?"
"You could shout at him from over here," Lily suggested, thinking of the unpacking she still had to do. There were sure to be many delightful things in France that couldn't be found in England, but boys were everywhere. Literally everywhere. Their presence didn't merit so much excitement. She'd dropped her lovely blue sarong on the floor when Beatrice grabbed her. What if a wasp flew inside it and stung her when she tried to wear it? She'd never been stung by a wasp so for all she knew, she was allergic. What if the wasp then killed her?
That unlikely scenario was holding more of Lily's attention than one potentially cute boy and his floating friend.
"And say what?" said Bea.
"Say, 'Où est la bibliothèque?'"
"You're thinking of biblioteca, which is Spanish, you dunce."
"Yeah," Lily agreed, "and bibliothèque is French, you fool."
"What is it in Irish?" said Bea, turning a pair of narrowed brown eyes on Lily's face.
"It's—" Lily pursed her lips together and ran her tongue over her teeth, mentally scrambling through what little of her mother's native language she had learned. "It's something," she eventually concluded. "Something that I will look up and shame you with later."
To be fair, Lily's mother knew about as much Irish as she did.
"Oh come onnnnnnnnnn," Bea wheedled, tugging at Lily's tank top. "What do I do? I never have to chase anyone, I need help!"
"Oh, right, win me over with a humble brag. That'll work."
"Um, I'm not humble and you're prettier than me even, so, like, shut up you ginger princess?"
"What if he turns out to be gay or something?" Lily suggested. "What if that guy on the lilo is his boyfriend?"
"Then it doesn't fucking matter, does it?" Beatrice cupped her boobs in her hands and shook them like she was trying to rouse them from slumber. "Alright, small but mighty, small but mighty. Where are all the tennis things mum brought?"
"I think I saw them in the hall. Why?"
She smiled coyly. "I've had an idea, is all."
"What, to club him over the head with a racket and keep him trussed up in the toilet?"
Beatrice let out a girlish laugh and bounded away, blowing a kiss to her sister and gleefully kicking aside a pile of colourful knickers she'd left on the rug before she vanished down the stairs. They'd only been at the villa an hour, but Bea had done nothing but dig in her case for her bikini, leaving every other item she'd removed strewn sluttishly all over the floor.
As Lily watched her leave, Mimi lowered her book into her lap and signed a question. "What happened?"
"Your sister is really silly," Lily said, signing back.
Mimi lifted her finger to her cheek, signed, "Always," with a roll of her eyes, and returned her attention to her book.
*
Predictably, the big French adventure did not get off to a promising start.
At least, it didn't start off well for James, who had the bright idea to draw a thin, curling moustache—French style—on Sirius's face in marker while he was dozing in the Uber to the airport. After fifteen tense minutes spent in a toilet in Heathrow, Sirius learned to his dismay that no amount of soap could wash it off.
James found this very funny.
Sirius, who was openly down for all kinds of pranks that most decent people wouldn't have considered, apparently lost all sight of his sense of humour when anyone dared sabotage his laboriously maintained, tragic, phantasmal beauty. James got a dead arm for his trouble and ambled onto the plane to Nice with the threat of revenge hanging ominously over his head.
Given that his brand new brother now had the devious nation of France at his disposal, he rather regretted his actions.
The villa they were staying in was just to his mother's taste—posh, clean, gigantic and stylishly modern, with gleaming marble bathrooms, snow white furnishings and countless black and white photos of topless women with their breasts cleverly covered. The house even boasted a spa and sauna, which successfully distracted Sirius from rubbing at his inky top lip for all of five minutes, as well as a games room with a foosball table and a telly the size of the wall.
James might have liked the place, if it wasn't so...French.
Once their taxi was unloaded, their tour of the house finished and the owner had left them to their own devices, Euphemia gathered James and his friends in the kitchen. She then proceeded to present each of them with one of four identical, black nylon backpacks.
"I want you to take good care of these bags while we're here, and bring them with you on excursions," she instructed, handing the last one off to Remus. "They're your survival packs."
"What's a survival pack?" asked Peter.
"I've loaded them up with all of the essentials that you might need for the next two weeks," Euphemia explained. "Things like water bottles, sunblock, aftersun lotion, aloe vera, bug spray, a mini first aid kit, condoms—"
James let out a yelp of horror, his fingers biting into the straps of his own bag. "Mum!"
"What?" said Euphemia, blinking innocently at him. "What else am I supposed to do with four seventeen year old boys in the house? It's perfectly reasonable to assume that one of you might meet somebody you like while we're here, and if that should happen—"
"Mum, stop!" James pleaded. Remus and Sirius were already digging into their backpacks, the latter laughing under his breath.
"—if that should happen," his mum pressed on, hitting James with her "I'm the boss here" stare, "I'm not going to be the mother who returns disease-ridden boys to their parents. Luckily," she added brightly, "you're all such thoughtful, darling boys that I know you'd never dream of making me worry by practising unsafe sex."
"Fair enough, but what's the lube for?" said Sirius, holding up a little red bottle.
Every last millilitre of blood in James's body went rushing straight to his face.
"There's lube?" said Peter in awe.
"Lubricant can come in very useful in a pinch," said Euphemia.
"Sensual, intimate lube and massage gel," Remus read from the front of his own bottle, looking very amused, "with seductive Ylang Ylang—"
"NO!" James roared, and dropped his backpack on the ground. He could not handle a discussion on this topic with the woman who had given him life, especially when his three closest friends in the world were witnessing the entire bloody debacle. He turned on his heel and walked away. "I'm off. I'm not doing this. I need to go somewhere quiet and scrub my eardrums with a wire brush until they bleed."
"Take your survival pack with you!" his mother demanded.
While his mates cracked up at his expense, James doubled back and snatched it up into his arms, and took three steps at a time when he ran up the stairs to the bedroom he'd chosen earlier. He immediately threw the backpack down and kicked it under his bed.
"This is all France's fault," he murmured, and vowed to stay confined to his room for the entire duration of the trip.
Fifteen minutes later, when he'd grown bored of sulking, he ventured down into the garden to find that his dad had built a footy goal on the lawn. Peter was bobbing on a Ratatouille lilo in the pool, and Remus was perched on a sun lounger with a book in his hands.
He was also wearing sunglasses, which was jarring in a way that James couldn't have put into words, except to say that Remus was not a sunglasses guy by any stretch of the imagination.
"Where's Sirius?" he asked his mate, dropping down on the opposite lounger.
"In the sauna," Remus muttered, "hoping the steam will loosen the moustache."
"Why are you wearing sunnies?"
"I'm on holiday."
"What are you reading?"
"The Art of Deflecting your Mate's Incessant Questions."
"No you're not, you're reading Holes by Louis Sachar."
Remus let out a long-suffering sigh and dropped the book between his knees. "Why did you bother asking if you already knew what it was?"
James would have delivered a brilliant, cunning retort, but a hard, round object came flying out of nowhere and smacked him on the skull.
"OW!" he bellowed, clutching at his head and throwing himself sideways across the lounger because that felt appropriate for the moment. The object that had whacked him—a tennis ball—had bounced a couple of feet and landed in the nearby grass. Remus, meanwhile, had hidden his face behind his book to hide his laughter, while Peter was tittering with such enthusiasm that he was in real danger of tipping his lilo sideways and falling into the pool.
"Sorry!" he heard a cheerful, unfamiliar voice cry out.
James jumped up and staggered around in a half-circle to locate his attacker. There was a girl on the other side of the long, low hedge that separated their villa from the one next door, waving her long, bare arm in the air.
"Can I have my ball back, please?!" she shouted.
Peter wobbled precariously on his lilo. "It's a girl," he hissed, as if he'd never seen one before.
"I know it's a girl," James hissed back.
"Don't you see? She's the one. The one we have been waiting for—she has come to break the spell!" said Remus to his book, grinning slyly. It was such a top notch Beauty and the Beast reference that James couldn't even hate him for putting on a French accent to say it.
James went and caught the ball under his trainer, bounced it off his other ankle and kicked it to chest height, where he caught it easily in one hand. He could have thrown it back, but he wasn't feeling at his most magnanimous on account of the possible hairline fracture she'd left on the top of his head. He walked over to the hedge with the ball held close to his chest, wearing as stern an expression as he could muster, so that she would know that he had suffered a great injustice at her hand.
"Hiya!" said the girl brightly, when he drew near enough.
She was very, very pretty, and the tennis racket she was swinging back and forth incriminated her nicely. She also had the longest hair that James had ever seen in his life, a sleek, silky mane of toffee brown that she probably could have sat on if she wanted. It struck him as very impractical that she would neglect to tie her hair back to play tennis, or that she would opt to play tennis in a bright yellow bikini, but it probably would have been mansplaining if he pointed that out. He decided not to mention it.
"Your ball hit me in the head," he informed her.
"Did it? That's hilarious," was her reply. She extended her arm across the hedge, palm upturned, fingers splayed. "Can I have it back?"
"Aren't you going to apologise?"
"I mean, it's not like I was aiming for your head, but I'm sorry it hit you!" she offered, sounding annoyingly upbeat and insincere about it.
From where he was standing, James could clearly see the house and garden behind her. Her villa was smaller than the one his parents had rented, but far more charming and cosy with its primrose yellow walls, blue shutters and terracotta tiled roof. Their garden had palm trees in it, too. James's villa did not have palm trees. He really resented that.
He also noticed that she was the only person in her garden.
"Who were you playing with?" he asked her, frowning.
"Nobody," she said. "I'm taking practice shots."
He dropped the tennis ball into her outstretched hand. "Into our garden?"
"They go where the muses move them," said the girl in a dreamy lilt, and with a strange, affected little laugh, then she turned away and flounced off in the direction of her pool.
"Lunatic," James muttered under his breath.
He went back to his friends then. Peter had wrestled himself off his lilo and was resting on the pool's edge with his face upturned towards the sun. Remus was still reading, and James shot a wary glance at his sunglasses as he sat back down on his lounger.
"That girl next door is a weirdo," he informed them both. "I told her she'd hit me in the head and she said, 'that's hilarious!'"
Remus immediately snorted into his book without an iota of shame and, apparently, not a modicum of concern for James's feelings.
"It's not funny," he chided, scowling.
"It is funny," Remus replied.
"What kind of person would say that?" he pressed on, ignoring his heartless friend.
"A weirdo," Peter agreed. Peter always agreed with James. "He's right."
"Yeah, well, I gave her a right telling off," James grandly lied, drawing himself up where he sat, chest out and proud, "so I doubt she'll be doing that again in a hur—"
A tennis ball sailed past his head and splashed down into the pool.
*
Once Bea had run off to seduce and possibly abduct the boy next door, Lily unpacked all of her things and put them neatly away in her room.
Then, because she was soft, and because her friend had obviously planned for things to happen that way, she unpacked all of Bea's belongings and tidied away the trail of destruction she'd left on the floor. By the time she was finished and the bedroom was clean, Mimi had ventured out to the balcony and fallen asleep on the tiles, so Lily scooped her up and put her on Beatrice's bed to save her from sunburn. She was awarded with a sticky little kiss on her cheek for her trouble.
Kids were great—and permanently sticky, but undeniably great—especially Mimi, who had been born a white-blonde, roly poly little potato, but was rapidly morphing into a carbon copy of her sister, boundless reserves of confidence and all.
With Mimi safely dozing and Bea's parents grocery shopping in town, Lily went downstairs and got herself a glass of water before strolling outside to see what Beatrice was up to. She found her friend on the flagstone patio by the pool in full peacock mode—bikini out, hair loose, but glistening wet from the neck down—and watched as Bea tossed her tennis ball into the air, reared up and sent it flying in the direction of Sun Lounger Boy's garden. It sailed over the hedge with ease and disappeared out of sight as Beatrice balanced herself on her heels.
"Think that might be the one, you know," she exhaled, as Lily drew next to her, fiddling with the side-tie on her bikini bottoms.
"The one what?"
"The one to get him to come over."
Lily stifled a smile and pressed her glass to her chest. It felt deliciously cool against her skin in the early evening heat. "How many times have you knocked a ball over there?"
"Like, ten?"
"Ten?"
"Yeah, but he still hasn't come over." Bea sounded rather affronted, as it was somebody else being rude instead of her. "Some angry guy who accused me of hitting him in the head keeps tossing it back."
"So unreasonable," said Lily slyly.
"It is unreasonable!" Bea protested.
"You hit his head with a ball and it confuses you that he's angry?"
"His head hit my ball and I'm not angry."
"I think there's a difference between that and—aaaagh!" she screamed, in shock and in pain, dropping her glass of water directly on her bare foot, because Bea's tennis ball had just been launched across the hedge with the speed of an X-wing Starfighter and crashed into Lily's left boob.
"Fuck!" spat Bea, hopping away from the blast radius of Lily's glass, which had smashed completely to pieces.
On her foot.
Which was now bleeding.
"Oh my god!" another voice cried from the adjoining garden.
Lily staggered away from the glass shards with her hands pressed to her breast, just as a tall, thin bloke with glasses and obscenely untidy black hair leapt into their garden, clearing the hedge in one bound with the ease of a ninja who dabbled in competitive parkour on weekends.
"SORRY SORRY SORRY SORRY SORRY!" he practically bellowed, skidding to a halt just short of the broken glass. It had taken him all of three seconds to reach her. "I didn't mean to hit you there and I'm—" His eyes, which were fixed on her injured boob, suddenly widened like saucers. "And now I'm looking at your—oh, god, I'm looking at it, I'm so sorry!"
He screwed up his face as hard as he could, in what seemed like a concentrated effort to keep his eyes as tightly shut as possible.
"Are you okay?" he continued, addressing his words to the air. "I'm so sorry, so so so sorry—I was just angry about the balls and I wanted to make it stop and I'm such an idiot, I shouldn't have—"
"Oh Lily, your foot!" Beatrice cried.
The boy's eyes snapped back open to drop to Lily's feet and he visibly shuddered at the sight of her bloody cut, his Adam's apple twitching in his neck like he was going to throw up.
"You're bleeding," he said, in a strained sort of way, as if he was pushing the words out of the end of a toothpaste tube. "Fuck, you're bleeding, you're bleeding and it's all my fault I've murdered you, I'm so—"
"Forget the apologies you psychopath, are you okay, chicken?" Beatrice jumped to Lily's side, pulling her even further away from the glass and into her arms. "Are you dizzy at all? Do you need to sit down?"
"Yeah, I'm fine, my foot feels fine, I'm just—ow," Lily replied, cradling her breast, which was throbbing painfully.
"Boob?"
"Yeah."
"Caught you on the nipple, didn't he?"
Lily laughed weakly. "I guess that's my breastfeeding dream out the window."
Ninja Boy, on the other hand, was swaying faintly from side to side and looked just about ready to drop. He was somehow the most concerning part of this whole debacle and he didn't have so much as a scratch on him.
"Are you alright?" she asked him. "Blood doesn't make you sick, does it?"
He shook his head with vigor. "No, I'm just...dying of shame?"
"Some revenge you cooked up there, mate," said Beatrice cheerfully. "I hit you on the head completely by accident, you retaliate by trying to take my best friend's tit off—"
"I wasn't trying to—to hit her!" he yelped. His face was turning puce. "I wasn't trying to hit anyone!"
"Bea," said Lily warningly.
"I was just—you wouldn't stop whacking tennis balls into the garden!" he protested. "I thought if I whacked it back in here, you'd stop—but that doesn't excuse what I did and I shouldn't have sunk to that level and I'm so sorry," he carried on, his gaze now fixed very earnestly on Lily's face, "so if you want to—to hit me back or tell my mum, which would actually be worse than hitting me back—"
"Wait." Lily lifted the hand that wasn't protecting her boob. "How exactly did you 'whack it back in here' that fast? Fired it out of a cannon?"
"No, I, er…" He scuffed at the ground with the toe of his trainer. "Kicked it."
"You kicked it?" she flatly repeated.
"Yeah."
"You kicked a tennis ball?"
"It's really not as hard as you'd think."
"Daddy, how did you meet Mummy?" Bea trilled in a high falsetto. She dropped her voice and attempted a low baritone. "Well, son, it all started when I kicked a tennis ball at Mummy's tit—"
"Your boyfriend's here," said Lily coldly, shrugging her off. Sure enough, two other boys had appeared at the hedge, including Bea's beige-wearing, book-reading victim of choice. "Go talk to him."
"But you're—"
"It's a little nip on my foot and a mildly bruised boob—go talk to him."
"Eeee! Thank you!" Bea squealed. "Thank you thank you I love you!" She kissed the side of Lily's face and pushed her gently in the direction of Ninja Boy. "Take care of this one for a mo, mate, all is forgiven."
"No, but—" the boy began.
But Beatrice skipped away, her long hair swaying in the breeze behind her.
"She left you," said the boy, gazing at Lily in complete and utter dismay, as if he were watching her succumb to her injuries and die right there in the garden.
Lily shrugged. "Yeah, I know."
"But...but you're injured."
He looked and sounded so plaintively sincere in his protestation that Lily couldn't help but laugh. "I can fix it with a plaster," she told him. "And anyway, she fancies your friend."
"Wait, what?" His head whipped around momentarily to take another look at the hedge. Beatrice had reached it and was posing as only she could while she chatted animatedly with the boys. "Which one of them, Remus or Peter?"
"How exactly am I supposed to differentiate between—"
"Oh yeah, of course! Sorry, I'm not really—sorry." He blew out an exasperated breath. The poor thing looked so pained. "Remus is the one with all of his clothes on."
"In that case, she likes Remus," said Lily. "Hence, she was whacking all of those tennis balls into your garden."
He jerked his thumb over his shoulder. "To get his attention?"
"What did you think she was doing it for, the French Open?"
He laughed, but it was a brief, ashamed little thing, revealing the barest hint of a dimple in his left cheek. "Is there anything I can do for you, like pick the glass up while you patch up your foot, or?"
"Oh no, it's really fine," she assured him. "And probably best that you don't pick up glass with your bare hands?"
"Right," he agreed, sighing. His hand jumped into his hair, elbow pointing skywards. "Don't want to cock things up worse than I already have."
"It's honestly fine, she was being really rude, I'd have retaliated too."
"I feel terrible for hurting you, though."
"It was an accident, really. I'll go patch up my foot, I'm sure there's a dustpan and brush inside—"
"Oi!" Another voice, that of a fourth boy, loudly piped up from the hedge. Unlike his friend, he didn't vault athletically into the garden, but squeezed through a gap between two bushes further down and jogged leisurely towards them. "I want to go and take a look around town, what are you doing?"
Ninja Boy dropped his arm by his side with a groan. "Please go away."
His mate drew up to them both with his hands in the pockets of his skinny black jeans, which seemed like a terrible choice of clothing when the temperature was 29°C at five in the afternoon. His hair was just as black as Ninja Boy's, but shoulder-length and sleek where the other's was shorter and incredibly scruffy, he was paler even than Lily, and his face was the exact kind of perfect, polished, Hollywood-level beautiful that made her want to poke him squarely on the nose and exclaim, "Hah, you're not even real!"
If she'd been like Beatrice, who rarely thought of consequences, she might have actually done it, but for the permanent marker moustache on Mr. Hollywood's upper lip which definitively proved he was human.
Judging by the redness of his skin, he'd been trying and failing to scrub it off for quite some time.
"What happened?" he asked them both.
"Is your house some sort of clown car of testosterone?" said Lily, ignoring the question. "How many other boys are going to come tumbling out of there?"
Ninja Boy let out another woefully shamefaced laugh. "It's just the four of us. Well—us and my dad. And Mum, who will kill me if she finds out what I did to you, so please feel free to tell her."
"I'm not going to run off and tell tales—"
"Don't think she can run off in that state," added Mr. Hollywood, pointing at her foot. A thin trickle of blood was dripping on the flagstone.
"Yeeeeah," she agreed, lifting her foot a little off the ground and tilting it this way and that. She couldn't feel any pain there at all, though her boob was still stinging like a bitch. "While we're on that subject. I'm going to go and take care of all of this, so...see you both around, I guess." She backed away a couple of steps, lifting a finger to point at Mr. Hollywood's unwanted moustache. "Olive oil will get that off your face, by the way."
"Thanks," said Mr. Hollywood, his brows raised in mild surprise, while Ninja Boy stood there in silence, staring at her with his mouth slightly open.
Lily sent them an awkward wave and left them to it, treading gingerly across the warm, flat patio stones.
She hoped there was a dustpan and brush in the villa.
*
As the sun began to sink below the horizon, Beatrice's dad lit candles on the patio and the family had dinner outside.
The broken glass had been carefully swept up and discarded, while Lily's baby cut was cleaned, disinfected and covered with a plaster. It was then heavily, heavily bandaged by Mimi, who at the tender age of six had decided that she was going to be a doctor when she grew up, and therefore needed the practice. Mimi further displayed her commitment to the field of medicine by taking Lily's temperature, testing her reflexes and giving her an X-ray with her doctor's playset. She was immediately pronounced dead and ordered to lie in bed for ten minutes with Mimi's Moana doll until she came back to life, while Beatrice, who returned from her flirting expedition just in time to witness her best friend's death, kept a solemn and diligent vigil by her side.
"We met some of the people staying next door," she told her mother later over honey garlic salmon, signing as she spoke. The Booths were very particular about making everyone feel included at dinner, so Beatrice and her parents made an effort to talk and sign as much as they could when guests were present, even when Mimi became too engrossed in artistically rearranging her food to pay attention to what was being said. It was also very helpful for Lily, who had only been learning to sign for eight months and had an awful lot more left to learn.
"Hmm?" said Maite, with a forkful of salad hovering over her plate. At Beatrice's request, her parents had not been told anything about Lily's cut besides the irrefutable fact that she had dropped a glass on it in the garden.
"There's four of them," Bea continued, "two brothers and two of their friends, they're all really nice and they're our age."
"Four boys?" her father interjected, predictably suspicious.
"Men and women can be friends, Dad," said Bea dryly. She took a mouthful of lemonade and set her glass down with a clink. "And anyway, what I was going to say is that the mum is the only woman in a house full of men, so she might want some female company."
Maite smirked at her daughter. "I see."
"Plus," she added, "their father's into all of the boring stuff Dad likes."
"Speak for yourself, love," Colin responded.
"Oh, right," Bea drawled, "because spreading manure on your cabbages is such a thrill."
"So you want us to occupy their parents while you decide between their children?" said Maite.
"Of course not, don't be silly," said Bea, completing her performance with a fondly exasperated sigh. "I want you to occupy their parents while I make innocent, platonic friendships with their children."
Lily said nothing, but pulled a face at a giggling Mimi while she sucked up her Coke through a straw.
Once dinner was done, Bea's parents cleaned up while the girls stayed outside by the pool. Their wicker sun loungers weren't a patch on the giant, cushioned monstrosities that the boys next door were enjoying, but they were supremely comfortable nonetheless. It was lovely to laze beneath a clear, starry sky in the darkness, surrounded by flickering candlelight and enjoying the dim strains of the classical music that was coming from another house nearby.
"It all feels very French, doesn't it?" remarked Beatrice, stifling a yawn. She was stretched across her lounger with her head balanced on her hand and her other arm tucked securely around Mimi, who was lying beside her, thoroughly engrossed in a colourful game on her iPad.
"Yeah," Lily agreed. "Nothing like this at home."
Bea jerked her head in the direction of the villa next door. "D'you know where that lot over there are from?"
"Where?"
"Cambridge."
"And?"
She smiled wickedly. "It's only two hours away."
"Oh my god, you don't even know the guy, you met him ten minutes ago," Lily pointed out, half tickled, half justifiably concerned.
"And? I've got two whole weeks to get to know him."
"Oh good, I'm glad you're giving yourself a fortnight to decide if you like this person enough to spend your weekends driving to Cambridge to show him a good time."
"I'll bring you with me when I go."
"And what'll I do?"
She shrugged. "Look at cathedrals and shit?"
"You've really thought this through, haven't you?"
"Then pick one of his other friends, if you don't fancy sightseeing," Beatrice suggested. "Two of them are alright-looking."
This was all very typical of Bea, who never thought things through before she did them and approached the topic of her future with vague, disinterested answers like "I dunno, maybe something with dancing," or "I'll marry someone rich and then it won't matter." She hadn't even decided if she wanted to go to uni or not, and was putting off doing the research required to help her arrive at a decision.
For Lily, who'd been preparing for uni for years and generally took months to decide if she fancied someone or not, it often felt like Beatrice was playing dangerously fast and loose with her own life.
But it was Beatrice's life, and Lily loved her, so she tried her best to bat her worries away and be supportive.
"Then fine, I can't wait to meet him properly," she graciously ceded, "and find out what in the hell his parents do to afford that house."
"Oh, they're not Remus's parents, they're his mate's, the one who hit you," said Bea. There was a pause as she adjusted the arm that was propping her head up. Lily could hear crickets chirping somewhere. "They took an Uber to Heathrow, you know."
Lily lifted her head from her lounger to stare at her friend. "From Cambridge?"
"I know, right! Rich bastards."
"Beatrice, your mother owns this house."
"Yeah, but she doesn't own that house," Bea retorted. "And anyway, this was inherited. It's totally different."
The main door to the house swung open, casting a shaft of yellow light across the patio, and Beatrice's father appeared on the threshold.
"It's Mimi's bedtime!" he called out, waving at the girls.
"I'll bring her in. Come on, baby girl." Bea nudged her sister and lifted her hand to her cheek. "Time for bed."
It took a bit of coaxing, but eventually Mimi was shuffled away to the house by her big sister, leaving Lily by herself to scroll through Instagram and check the responses to the pictures of the house she'd posted earlier that day. She'd never been abroad before Colin and Maite had offered to bring her along, and the experience of posting vacation snaps was still quite novel and new.
Predictably, her older sister hadn't "liked" any of her photos, but directly beneath the first picture Lily had posted that day—a shot of the swimming pool glistening in the sun that she'd taken from the patio—was one of her patented, passive-aggressive comments.
@petuniaspetalsxo Have fun in MY dream honeymoon spot :)
Lily locked her phone and dropped it on the lounger beside her with an irritable huff...just as an almighty wail of terror rang through the air, followed by peals of laughter from the garden next door.
Curious, she stood up, picked up her phone and padded over to the hedge that Ninja Boy had vaulted over earlier. It seemed that he'd gotten himself into a second spot of trouble—his friends had hoisted him up on their shoulders and were carrying him to the swimming pool while he fruitlessly tried to escape them and shouted incomprehensible nonsense. The word "betrayal" was bellowed several times.
She watched as they collectively, unceremoniously dumped him into the water and waved at his long-haired friend when he turned around and caught sight of her standing by the hedge.
"Drowning him, are you?" she called out.
"Nah," Mr. Hollywood replied, his voice carrying over the grass. In the moonlight he looked like a vampire. "Just sobering him up, is all!"
He brought his knees up to his chest and took a leap, cannonballing into the pool just as his friend broke the surface of the water with an outraged cry.
Lily turned away and walked towards the house.