Page 67 of The Wishing Tree Beside the Shor
‘Go on, Seaside Sycamore Champions, you can do it!’ Tonya yells down from the clifftop.
‘Well, we’re not giving up. We have half an hour left to save this thing. We can still win.’
I look around at the truly magnificent pieces of sand art surrounding us. ‘If there’s one thing I always admired about you, it was your eternal optimism.’
A few squares over, there are three toddlers being encouraged by their parents to make a starfish. It looks like it’s recently been run over by a bus, and one of them is sitting in it, and it’s still better than ours. ‘Your eternal, utterly misplaced optimism.’
When the end klaxon goes, we stand back and look at our masterpiece.
The other teams all cheer and high-five and congratulate each other, taking a moment to look at all the other awe-inspiring pieces of work around them.
A child comes to look at ours and starts laughing.
Ryan drops his arm around my shoulder. ‘It is a disaster.’
I look up and narrow my eyes at him. ‘So, not winning then?’
‘I am truly impressed that we managed to create something so spectacularly awful.’
‘Still, at least we were brave enough to enter. It’s the taking part that counts, right?’
Dad and Cheryl have joined the gang standing beneath the sycamore tree now. They’re all still cheering us on, despite this disaster.
‘We’ll be brave enough to enter again next year.’ Ry drops his head to lean against mine. ‘And we’ll need to practise alotbeforehand.’
‘Next year,’ I agree with a determined nod. The thought of not being here next year makes my skin go cold despite the blazing sun. It’s the stupidest thing, but I suddenly can’t imagine not being here next year, not getting to do this again.
If I was brave, I’d tell him the truth about my job, I’d trust that he’d understand that no matter what it started off as, it changed the moment I saw him. If I was brave, I’d tell Harrison exactly where to stick his job. I wish I was brave enough to stay.
Although I’m not sure 365 days until next year will be enough time to practise our truly diabolical skills when they announce the winners.
‘We didn’t come last!’ Ryan cheers.
‘We came second to last! After a guy who seems to have based his design on a decomposing pigeon!’
‘Hurrah!’ Ryan cheers. He’s so excited that I can’t stop myself hugging him, except he goes to hug me at the exact same moment, and he ends up half-picking me up with one of my legs hooked across his arm and sort of shaking me a bit, and the awkward position makes us laugh even harder.
‘Oh my God, Ry,’ I say into his shoulder, where I’m clinging on for dear life.
He goes to spin us around, but his foot slips into the moat with a splosh and he stumbles, and we both crash down right on top of the sand version of Seaview Heights.
His whole body is shaking with laughter as the sand disperses underneath him, spraying us both and seeping into what’s left of the moat with a few sorrowful glugs, and I’m laughing so hard that I can barely hold my head up and my forehead drops onto his shoulder. I can’t remember the last time I laughed so much or had fun like this.
‘To be fair, I think we did it a favour,’ he says as earnestly as he can muster when he’s laughing too much to fully catch his breath.
‘Not quite champions, eh?’
‘I don’t know, I would consider any day that ends with you lying on top of me to be a “win”.’
If I wasn’t melting from the sun and the exertion anyway, I would definitely have melted at that.
I lift my head. ‘Ry …’
The atmosphere snaps the moment I meet his eyes, and before I realise what’s happening, his lips are on mine.
It’s nothing more than a peck, but my eyes close for a brief few seconds, and everything drifts away apart from the press of his lips against mine. There’s no crowded beach, no sand making things unnecessarily gritty, and no wolf-whistles and cat-calls from elderly residents on the clifftop above. There’s just me and Ryan, our foreheads pressing together, breathing against each other’s mouths.
And then he groans and drops his head back, splattering more sand in every direction. ‘I’ve got a sand-strawberry the size of a turtle in my back and no idea how I’m going to get up again, and I may well have broken at least one coccyx.’
