Maisie had been to France.
She came back with a tan and a small striped bag and approximately four hundred things to tell Scarlett about - the swimming pool, the food, the boat trip, the ice cream that came in flavours Scarlett had never heard of.
Scarlett listened to all of it and smiled and said “that sounds amazing” in the right places.
And it did sound amazing.
Somewhere underneath the listening, something small and quiet was sitting in her chest.
Because Scarlett’s summer had looked different.
There had been no aeroplane. No swimming pool with a view of mountains. No ice cream in unusual flavours.
There had been the paddling pool in the garden, which Pudding had immediately stepped in. There had been a day trip to the coast on the train, with sandwiches in a bag and sand in everything by the end of it. There had been long, slow afternoons doing not very much, and an indoor picnic when it rained, and a den made of sofa cushions and a bedsheet that had taken most of one morning to build and about forty minutes to destroy.
It hadn’t looked like Maisie’s holiday.
That night, Scarlett told Lenny about it.
“Maisie’s holiday sounds incredible,” she said. “Ours was just... ordinary.”
Lenny tilted his head. “Tell me about your ordinary.”
Scarlett shrugged. “The paddling pool. The train to the coast. The den.”
“The den sounds good.”
“It was quite good,” Scarlett admitted. “Pudding kept trying to come in and it kept falling down.”
“What else?”
“We had fish and chips on the seafront and a seagull took one of mine right out of my hand and Mum screamed.”
Lenny smiled. “That sounds like something you’ll remember for a very long time.”
Scarlett thought about it. “We were laughing about it for the whole train home.”
“Tell me more ordinary things.”
“We watched films in our pyjamas. We baked something that didn’t really work. We stayed up later than normal and watched the stars from the garden.”
She stopped.
Lenny waited.
“That was actually really nice,” Scarlett said quietly. “The stars.”
“It sounds like a summer full of things,” said Lenny. “Just not the kind that come in photos.”
Scarlett sat with that for a moment.
“I don’t think I’d swap the seagull,” she said finally.
Lenny smiled. “I didn’t think you would.”
🫶 Dream big dreams.