“Nice.” He stares right at Seren, holding her gaze, as though he’s sizing her up. So she does the same. They stay like that for ages, and Seren doesn’t want to look away first because it feels like losing. Eventually, Caleb speaks. “You could have come over and said hi instead of hiding in the trees.”
“I wasn’t hiding.”
“Whatever.”
“I’m not—” Seren stops. She can’t believe she almost saidI’m not allowed, as though she’s still ten and needs Mam’s permission to play outside. And anyway, Caleb would never understand why everyone in Cwm Coed hates The Shore so much.
“I wouldn’t trust them as far as I could spit,” Elen had said when they’d seen the first signs of life across the lake. “Arrogant, land-grabbing bunch of… You’re not to go anywhere near that place, you hear, Seren?”
Caleb gets a tobacco tin from his tracksuit bottoms and shakes it. “Do you wanna go somewhere for a smoke?”
Seren takes Caleb above the forest, and he complains about the hill, about his legs aching. Seren laughs, dizzy with the exhilaration of hanging out with someone new, with the steep climb, with the prospect of getting stoned. “Just wait!” On and on they climb until they get to where the forest meets the field and the waterfall crashes into the stream that winds through the trees back down to the lake.
“Here.” Seren turns him around and they stand next to each other, looking back down the way they came.
“Fucking hell.”
“It’s all right, isn’t it?”
Cwm Coed isn’t the sort of place Seren’s ever been proud of living in—not like if you lived in New York or one of those villages where people have thatched roofs and put their shopping in wicker baskets—but sometimes, like now, she sees it through someone else’s eyes, and it looks pretty fucking fantastic.
They collapse on the grass, and Caleb skins up. The first drag is like it always is, so hot and harsh, Seren wants to cough, but she swallows it down and closes her eyes, and then it’s blissfully sweet, like when the lake is so cold, it feels hot. They pass it back and forth, the cigarette paper sticking on Seren’s bottom lip and dragging it out as if it doesn’t want to leave her mouth.
“Have you always lived around here?”
“Yup.”
“It’s amazing.”
Seren sits up. “Are you taking the piss? It’s a shithole.”
Caleb laughs and sits up too. He has a gap between his front teeth, and when he smiles, you can see the tip of his tongue through it. “All this.” He waves an arm: the lake, the mountains, the forest. “You can go anywhere.”
“Where? There’s nowheretogo. The cinema’s an hour on the bus.”
“All this, though,” he says again. He gets the tin out of his pocket. “Can you roll?”
Seren doesn’t dignify that with an answer, pulling out two rolling papers and sticking them together to make a joint twice the size of the one they just had. Caleb lies back down, closes his eyes, and lets out a loud sigh. The shadows under his eyes look like bruises.
“Stop looking at me.”
“I’m not looking at you.”
Caleb grins, his eyes still shut. “Your loss, then.”
Seren lights the joint and takes a drag. She exhales slowly, watching the smoke plume in the still, hot air, then she touches the filter to Caleb’s lips and holds it there while he does the same—as intimate as a kiss. “What’s it like at The Shore?”
Caleb shrugs, but he opens his eyes and squints up at her. “S’all right, I guess.”
“Rhys Lloyd went to my school,” Seren says, claiming the bragging rights she usually scoffs at. “Like, years ago, obv.”
“He’s a dick.”
“Is he?” Seren lets go of her knees. “He seems really nice.”
“He accused me of perving over his daughters.”
“Were you?”