The Boiling Point | ✔️

32 | r e c k l e s s

NOTE BEFORE READING: The next 3 chapters are set in the months before Summer goes to culinary school, and they provide important backstory for her. Keep in mind that Summer is telling Ashton about this in the present, so please don't skip over these just because they happened in the past. It's all relevant to the story ♡

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SUMMER

Andrew Hollis was the boy I thought my sister was going to end up happily ever after with.

Inseparable since elementary school, Ella and Drew were best friends, as close and in-tune as any other couple who had known each other for that long would be. They spent so much time together that everyone assumed they harbored secret feelings for one another. And Ella did.

She was so hopelessly in love with him that she was in a constant state of self-torture. She'd hold back from any boy who pursued her, and her heart would break every time Drew pursued someone else, watching from the sidelines and giving relationship advice to the one she ached the most for. Masking her dejection every time she did.

So where did I fit into all of this? Simple: I was just the little sister who tagged along for the ride. They were only two years older, but I longed to be in their sophisticated world from the start. I idolized the ground they walked on, in awe of their maturity. But back in the beginning, I was eight years old, and the world looked a lot shinier than it did when I grew up. My parents were superheroes, my big sister knew it all, and Drew Hollis was otherworldly to my starry-eyed self.

As the years went by, the shine faded, but Drew's shine only brightened. I developed a childish crush that didn't mean anything. He was older, he was cool and kind and treated me like a friend.

I liked how his teasing was never mean. I liked the way his sandy blonde hair curled in tufts behind his ears, how his middle part made his bangs flop over either side of his forehead. I liked how the dark blue shade of his eyes resembled the ocean at dusk. I liked the freckle above his lip and how it would stand out against his flushed skin on hot days. I loved hearing his laugh echo through the halls at home, alerting me to his presence. But after another handful of years, my world expanded beyond Ella and Drew.

At fourteen, that was when I started to come into my own. And that was when Drew started looking at me differently. The first time is burned in my memory.

I was at a tennis lesson, and he stopped by the courts after football practice to offer to walk me home. I had just started high school, I didn't know the route yet, and Ella would be held up in her piano lesson for hours. 

Maybe it was the heat that day, maybe it was watching me fan out my sweaty shirt, watching me stretch in that tennis skirt, maybe it was the ferocity in which I smacked that ball. Whatever it was, the shift in him was subtle. But I noticed that entranced look in an instant, because I had never seen that look on Drew before. And I definitely hadn't seen it anywhere near my sister.

But it wasn't even the look that had struck me that day. It was his loss for words. The foggy state I found him in, like I'd just woken him from the deepest sleep of his life and he couldn't quite place me. His usual sharpness, his brainpower, it's why him and Ella made such a good team. And I had singlehandedly turned that brain to sludge.

Our dynamic slightly changed from that point, but how could it not? A lot of kids who grow up together go through the same things. I had a few entranced moments of my own. A prominent one being in the summer before my sophomore year.

At a public pool, I watched Ella and Drew in a chicken fight with their friends. I watched how effortlessly he lifted her on his newly broadened shoulders. How his latest growth spurt seemed to have stretched out his body overnight. How droplets of water clung to his lean muscles when he got out of the pool. The waft of sunscreen and chlorine I got when he flopped down next to me. His wet skin glistening in the sun.