June 12th. The sun was shining through a tall window, seeping out on a light wooden floor in an apartment in central London. On the floor, on a rug, three people were sitting in a circle, staring at their hands. Their names are Jenny Mason, Hugo Phillips and Isaac Lloyd, and even though they did not utter a single word, they knew they were all thinking the exact same thought:

Who dies in a plane crash anyway? Does that kind of things even happen in real life?

None of them had thought that it did one year ago. Sure, people got killed by buses or murderers or overdoses or wild animals every day, but who actually dies in plane crashes?

Celebrities and characters in movies, that’s who. Someone who doesn’t die in a plane crash is Lucy Mitchell. Because Lucy wasn’t famous, she wasn’t in a movie. She was a regular, eighteen year old girl heading home from New York with her family. Lucy wasn’t the kind of girl that dies in plane crashes.

But nevertheless, she did. Lucy Mitchell died while heading home from a holiday in New York the day before summer holidays was about to start. The plane she was on had caught on fire and crashed onto a field before it had exploded. They’d barely been able to identify the remains of the passengers, that’s how badly burnt they were.

 

Lucy, Jenny, Hugo and Isaac had been friends since they all had joined the same guitar class three years ago. They’d been in the same class for ages, but had never really spoken with each other until they got the guitar class in common. When Lucy was still alive, they hung out almost exclusively with each other. Their group was tight-knit, warm and welcoming, and throughout the years they gathered their fair share of traditions and inside jokes. They cried together in times of sadness, and laughed when the skies got brighter again. They told each other everything.

But that all stopped when Lucy died.

 

The three friends that were currently sitting on the living room rug of Isaacs apartment (even though Isaac was the youngest of them with his seventeen years, he’s the only one with his own place since he went to their school in London on a scholarship while the rest of his family were living in Leeds), celebrating the end of the school year and the start of summer holidays, were an example of three best friends that had drifted apart very tragically.

They probably wouldn’t even have met up there at Isaac’s place if it hadn’t been for the fact that it was one year today since Lucy died and took their group dynamic with her. But Jenny, the constant leader of the group, had insisted on that this was the least they could do for her. Lucy couldn’t be forgotten or ignored just like that. They had to put flowers on her grave and hang out for a while. For Lucy, at least.

Jenny lifted her glance from her hands and let it sweep across the blank faces of her two friends, who did the same. She looked them in the eye, sent them a silent question of how it could have come to this. They used to be able to carry a conversation on nothing, and now, they couldn’t even talk about what they would do for the summer – the safest, easiest subject of conversation there was.

She really loved them both. Honestly. Even though the loss of Lucy was a gnawing hole in her chest, a constant reminder of how things could’ve been if she had been alive, where she would sit, what she would say, how she would laugh, she still loved her boys. Hugo, the brown-eyed, brown-haired, book loving, insanely adorable lone wolf that had absolutely no idea of how many girls’ hearts he had spun around his fingers, and Isaac, the socially awkward, scrawny theatre nerd that was so pale all over that it seemed someone had just drained all the color out of him, with his white blonde hair, piercing light blue eyes and skin the same color as that of a snowman. She truly, honestly loved them, and she was sure they loved her just the same, even though she could be self-absorbed and bossy at times. It had just been hard starting over without Lucy. Their psychology teacher had once said that a group changes permanently every time a member enters or leaves a group, and that was probably what had happened with them - the trio that got left behind.

 

Right after Lucy’s death, they had all just been at their respective homes, trying to piece themselves together, trying to come to terms with the fact that their spunky, sweet, Asian best friend with the spiky black hair and round brown eyes was never coming home again. They hadn’t really talked with each other, simply because none of them could collect the energy to talk to anyone at all. And then, when they had returned, they simply… didn’t start again. They talked, sure. They hung out, sure. They were still a group, with the exception that they were now a group that didn’t know how to talk to each other. Jenny hated it. Sure, she had Rudy, her boyfriend since three years, but she loved Hugo and Isaac in a different, deeper, more important way. The way you can only love your best friends. The thought of losing them made her panic, and she was willing to do anything to fix them, to put back their shattered, misshaped little pieces and make them perfectly broken together, like they used to be.

She had thought about her idea while they had been to Lucy’s grave, placing a dozen bright yellow roses, Lucy’s favorites, beneath her name, and she had realized while staring at her best friend’s name and wrestling the ever-present feeling of loss in her chest, that it was the best shot they had of repairing this. Not just their group, but themselves.

So she cleared her throat, swept away her long, dark brown hair with the blue streak in that accentuated her eyes, and caught her friends’ eyes.

“I’ve got an idea.”

“Really?” Hugo looked almost relieved. He was. He was feeling the exact same thing, but unlike Jenny, he was incapable of finding a solution to their problems. He and Isaac had always been bad at initiating things. Lucy and Jenny had always been responsible for that part. And now that Lucy was gone, all that pressure fell on Jenny. Hugo felt a bit bad for her, but couldn’t help it. If you couldn’t get any bright ideas, you couldn’t – simple as that.

“I know we haven’t really talked about this, but it feels like we don’t talk about stuff as much as we did… before”, said Jenny, and Hugo and Isaac nodded, relieved that it wasn’t just them having that horrible feeling. “And… well, that sucks, to be honest, so my plan was that, to makes us all tell stuff about our lives again… I mean, it’s kind of hard to just start talking again just like that, right?”

“Apparently”, said Isaac with a small, sad smile. Jenny nodded, and continued:

“So, my plan was, since we’re all going away to different places for the summer, we could start to use these.” She opened the bag lying next to her, picked up what seemed to be three small, black notebooks, and threw two of them at Hugo and Isaac. None of them had the eye-hand-coordination required being able to catch the books mid-air, and they ended up getting smacked on the forehead with them. Jenny grinned at them, and said:

“This is our diaries for the summer. We’re writing down everything that happens to us in them – and I mean everything, don’t censor out anything, okay? – and when we get back here the week before school starts again, we’re all going to go through what we have written. If we read directly from our diaries, we should be able to have something to connect over again, right?”

“I’m not sure I’m completely comfortable with reading out loud from my diary, but desperate times calls for desperate measures, I guess”, said Isaac and flicked through the lined pages, wondering how he would be able to make five weeks of theatre camp in Paris interesting enough to write about.

“Agreed”, said Hugo. “I’ll do it, even though it’s somewhat reluctantly.”

“None of us really wants to do this – I don’t, either, but I think this could be the key to get us back to where we were.”

“Lucy would’ve liked this”, mumbled Hugo. Jenny nodded, and Isaac smiled a bit and said:

“She probably would’ve written like fifty pages about some random poet we knew nothing about that she had discovered over summer.”

“And when she read it she would sigh and stare at us with those condescending eyes she was the best at giving, you know, and say ‘God, you guys don’t know who he is? You’re so deprived’”, added Jenny, and the trio laughed. It felt good, it felt healthy, to be able to laugh with Lucy again, even though she weren’t physically here. But they all knew Lucy would be there, in some way. People like Lucy never truly leaves. Not when she was such an important piece of them.

“So, you’re going to Paris for theatre camp, right?” said Jenny and Isaac nodded.

“And you’re going to your parents’ summer cottage?” asked Jenny, and Hugo nodded and added:

“As usual.”

“And Rudy and I will be driving through the East Coast of America to see if we can find some fun places to visit.”

“And go to the All Time Low concert in New York, right?” said Hugo with a knowing grin, and Jenny smiled back.

“How did you know?”

“Your All Time Low-obsession isn’t what you would call ‘subtle’”, smiled Hugo. Jenny didn’t even protest anymore. She knew that anyone that spent more than ten minutes in her company became well aware that she adored the American punk-pop-band from Baltimore, Maryland. Hugo was the only one of her friends that had not only learnt to live with her fixation to the band, but also started to listen to them as well, just to see what it was that she loved so much. That was the kind of thing Hugo did regularly. He was honestly one of the sweetest things to ever walk this earth. No wonder so many girls threw themselves after him, though he was completely oblivious to it. Guys without a single bad bone in their bodies, deep brown puppy eyes and a love for punk-pop had always had a head start in the dating business. A shame Hugo didn’t know that.

“So, to sum it up: Jenny’s going to America, you’re going to France and I’m going to the wastelands outside London, we’re writing down every second of it, and meet up here again the 15^th of August, one week before school starts again?” said Hugo, and the other two nodded.

“Sounds great.” Hugo slapped his knees with his hands and got up. “I got to go – I have to pack.”

“Me too”, said Jenny, and after sharing a slightly awkward hug in the middle of the living room, they all left for their respective adventures, still completely oblivious to how much this summer apart would change them.

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