My breath hitched in my chest. If that was what I was for her, then what was she for me? Like the last thing you see before falling into a black hole. This was the first moment – the first beautiful, unrestrained moment – where I thought about June and myself as ‘us’ without any trepidation. June and Sydney. Now it wasn’t trying to cover up something else. Now it just was. I wanted to touch her, hold her, put my forehead against hers and leave it there. ‘So what do we do?’ I asked.

‘I don’t really know.’

‘You’re going to college.’

June nodded. ‘Even if I wasn’t, I still wouldn’t know. I think this is … I think we just need to be careful.’ She craned her head to look at me. ‘Are we damaged goods?’ she asked. Even with the mischievous grin, and the way she was squinting at me, I was pretty sure there was a part of her that was genuinely asking.

‘No,’ I said, confident. ‘I think … I don’t know. I think we’ve just felt a pain that most people don’t have to feel until later.’

‘Yeah. So, actually, it’s kind of like a club.’

‘Right. Very exclusive.’

June squirmed upwards and sat, cross-legged, facing me. ‘I don’t know if this is OK,’ she said, ‘but I care about you a lot, and even if we’re not sure what that means right now … I’m happy to spend the summer learning.’

I didn’t know what to say to any of this. It was a lifetime’s worth of thoughts and feelings and fantasies and they were all here, all now, and I didn’t know what to do with any of them, didn’t know what to say to this beautiful girl, this beautiful girl who found me while I was busy burying myself alive and dug me out.

I thought I should touch her.

I hoisted myself up to meet her and mirrored her position, my legs criss-crossed. And then we just looked at each other, and I took in all the things that I couldn’t before, for fear of being caught staring. ‘That sounds nice,’ I said. Then, maybe because the weight of the situation was starting to become uncomfortable, or to take the attention off me, ‘Let me feel your head.’

June scoffed, but leaned forward.

‘It does look good,’ I said. I dragged my fingertip along the patch, careful not to touch the stitches.

‘I don’t know. I’m not sure it goes with my aesthetic.’

‘There’s this joke: what do you call a straight girl with an undercut?’

June blinked.

‘A liar.’

She snorted. ‘Well, maybe it goes fine, then.’

That was when we kissed, hard.