me. “All happy and silly together, having picnics on the grass and staying up all night talking. Toby tells me stories about it, sometimes.”
This time Leon’s snort was harder to miss. “Don’t believe a word he says.”
It was clearly meant to sound jokey, but enough edge slipped through that Melissa turned her head to look at him, puzzled. “But I love those stories. Was it not like that? Was Toby not happy?”
“Oh, he was happy all right,” Leon said. “Not the angst-ridden type, our Toby.”
“What was he like? Was he nice?”
“I was a saint,” I said. “I studied twenty-four hours a day and spent my spare time reading bedtime stories to orphans and saving baby seals.”
“Shh, silly. You’re never serious about this. I’m asking them.”
“Toby was basically Toby,” Susanna said. “Eighteen, so he was a bit louder and more obnoxious, but he’s always been very much himself.”
“Thanks,” I said. “I think.”
“Was he loud and obnoxious?” Melissa asked Leon.
“We’re probably the worst people to ask,” Susanna said, rolling over onto her stomach to find her glass. “We know each other too well; we don’t really look at each other properly.”
“I’d have loved to have cousins like that.” Melissa had her head snuggled into the hollow of my shoulder, listening with the same milky, wondering gaze she used to have when I told her those childhood stories. “Mine are nice, but we never saw each other much. It must have been lovely to be so close.”
“Well,” Leon said. “It’s not like we were close close. When we were little, yeah, but by the time we were eighteen . . . not so much.”
What? “Of course we were,” I said. “We were spending the whole holidays together here—”
“Right, and during term time we barely hung out at all. And it’s not like we spent the holidays snuggled up together pouring out our hearts to each other.”
I wasn’t sure what to think about this. As far as I was concerned, the old bond had hung on right through secondary school, until college hit and we all went our separate ways—I had felt exactly the same as always about the two of them, I’d assumed they felt the same about me, why wouldn’t they? I couldn’t tell whether Leon was rewriting history to make himself feel better about whatever he was trying to pull on me, or whether I had genuinely missed some subtle but crucial shift along the way.
“Well, we still loved each other and all that stuff,” Susanna said, seeing my face. “We just weren’t bestest buddies. That’s natural enough.”
“What about you two?” Melissa asked. “Were you basically the same back then?”
“I was a total nerd,” Susanna said cheerfully. “And a space cadet. Someone could be mocking me right to my face, or hitting on me, and the whole thing would go straight over my head. I like to think I’m a bit more copped on these days, but then I would, wouldn’t I?”
“And I was a loser,” Leon said crisply, flicking ash.
“You weren’t,” Susanna said, instantly and firmly. “You were great. Smart and kind and funny and brave and all the good stuff.”
She was smiling at him. Her face had a warmth, an unconcealed glow of something like admiration, that startled me: Leon? what had been so great about Leon? He smiled back, but wryly. “Course I was,” he said. “Unfortunately, no one noticed except you.” To Melissa: “I was the kid who got his head flushed down the jacks and found shites in his lunchbox.”
“Poor Leon.” Melissa reached out a hand to squeeze his. I couldn’t tell whether she was actually a bit tipsy or whether she was putting it on. If she was, she was surprisingly good at it. “That’s horrible.”
He squeezed her hand back. “I survived.”
“Did Toby take good care of you?”
“He wasn’t bad, actually,” Susanna said. “He brought us along to the good parties. Warned me when some guy chatting me up was a wanker. Basically, he kept me clued in enough that I didn’t make a complete tit of myself, at least not too often. He was even fairly tactful about it. Mostly.”
“That’s funny,” Melissa said dreamily. “I wouldn’t have expected him to be like that.”
I curled a strand of her hair round my finger. “What did you expect?”
“I imagined you a little bit thoughtless. So busy with your own things, you wouldn’t really notice anyone else’s problems.”
“Hey!” I said, mock-wounded.
“I don’t mean in a bad way. Just bouncing along, with your head full of so much