Somewhere Only We Know - 6. The Quiet Summer Before Everything Breaks

Summer didn’t explode into brightness the way people romanticized it. It seeped in slowly—warm mornings that arrived earlier each day, long evenings that stretched soft and golden, the air thick with the smell of cut grass and heavy leaves. School ended in the usual blur of slamming lockers, crumpled worksheets, and yearbook signatures that promised keep in touch and never did, but for Matt and Kitt the transition felt quieter, steadier, like stepping from one room into another without shutting the door behind them.

They needed that quiet.

They never said it aloud, but they moved through June like boys trying to hold something fragile between them, careful not to grip it too tightly or let it slip. Whatever they were—whatever they were becoming—they wanted to keep it from cracking. For now, that started with routine. With work. With something that looked like normal from the outside.

Matt landed a part-time job at Miller’s Hardware. Most afternoons he came home with dirt on his forearms and dust on his shirt, hands rough from hauling bags of mulch, stacking fertilizer, wheeling carts of paint, and listening to old regulars call him “muscles” or “buckaroo” like it was still 1975. He grumbled about it, but Kitt could tell he liked it: simple, physical work that let him use his body without a scoreboard attached, that made him smell faintly of lumber and soil instead of sweat and turf.

Kitt’s job was gentler. His mother had signed him up for the town’s youth employment program, and they placed him at Suncrest Library three afternoons a week. He spent his hours shelving returns, straightening displays, helping little kids find the next book in their favorite adventure series. The library’s hush wrapped around him like a second skin; the low murmur of voices and soft thud of books being checked out was the first soundscape in a long time where he could move without constantly checking over his shoulder.

They didn’t walk home together on workdays—Matt usually clocked out later than Kitt—but most evenings they still managed to find each other. Sometimes they met on the curb between their houses, knees drawn up, trading pieces of their days. Sometimes they wandered into town for cheap ice cream and argued about flavors. Sometimes they ended up in the hammocks in Matt’s backyard, swinging gently in the warm air, saying almost nothing at all.

One evening, after a long shift at Miller’s, Matt dropped into the hammock with a theatrical groan, limbs splaying in every direction.

“My arms feel like noodles,” he announced.

Kitt lay beside him, a paperback resting on his chest, thumb holding his place.

“That’s because you lift mulch like you’re wrestling it,” he said.

“I am wrestling it,” Matt replied. “Mulch is alive.”

“No, it’s not.”

“It is. It fights back. You don’t know what I’ve seen.”

Kitt shook his head, laughing softly. The hammock swayed under their combined weight, their shoulders bumping, their knees knocking lightly. For the first time in a long time, the sound of his own laughter didn’t feel like it had a shadow attached to it. It was just warm. Just easy.

Summer made everything between them feel gentler.

But gentleness never stayed forever.

. . .

Kitt’s father grew sharper as the weeks passed, like the heat had burnt away whatever softness his words used to carry. At first it was small things—checking the clock when Kitt came home, asking where he’d been, reminding him that summer didn’t mean a break from “serious responsibilities.”

“Are you studying enough?”
“How long were you at Matthew’s?”
“You seem tired. Are you overextending yourself?”

Then the questions changed.

“Why do you spend so much time with Matthew?”
“You’re both growing up. You should have a wider circle.”
“Are you two always going to the lake alone?”
“You don’t seem as focused lately.”

There was an edge beneath those words, a watchfulness that made Kitt’s skin prickle. He answered carefully, keeping his tone neutral and his eyes slightly lowered in the way he’d learned calmed his father quickest.

“We’re just hanging out.”
“We’re friends.”
“I’m keeping up with my work.”

He didn’t tell Matt any of it directly. But Matt saw traces of it anyway.

He saw it when Kitt’s body went tense every time his phone buzzed and his father’s name appeared on the screen. He saw it in the small flinch whenever a car door closed out front and the front door opened a little too quickly. Once, during a movie night on Matt’s living room floor, Kitt startled so visibly when the Wellington car door slammed across the street that Matt’s gut twisted.

He didn’t pry.

But he watched.

And he worried.

On the days they didn’t work, they rode their bikes lazily around Lakehurst. They stopped at BrightMart for slushies that turned their tongues neon blue, bought snacks they didn’t need, raced each other down quiet side streets, or sprawled in the town park talking about the future in the big, careless way kids did when the future still felt like a story instead of a deadline.

Northbridge University became their favorite shared daydream without either of them planning it.

It started when Kitt brought home a brochure from the library—a glossy pamphlet with a blue crest on the cover and photos of brick buildings framed by maple trees. He’d flipped through it in quiet fascination, drawn to the biology program and the way the campus looked both big and contained.

Matt didn’t care much about course catalogs, but he’d gone straight to the athletics page.

“Look at this field,” he said one evening as they sat on the local track bleachers, the sky fading to lavender. He pointed at the picture. “You could swim here.”

“You could play here,” Kitt said.

“You could go here,” Matt shot back.

Kitt shrugged, fingers playing with the corner of the brochure. “It’s expensive.”

“You’ll get scholarships,” Matt said without hesitation. “Easy.”

“I don’t know.”

“I do,” Matt insisted. “You’re smart. You’re disciplined. You’d get in no problem.”

Kitt hesitated, then asked quietly, “And you? Would you?”

Matt opened his mouth. For the first time in a long time, doubt flickered across his face.

“I’ll make it happen,” he said finally. “Somehow.”

Kitt’s chest tightened with something warm and painful at once.

They walked home with the idea drifting between them—not a promise, not a plan, but something that hovered just close enough to feel real. Something that felt dangerously like hope.

. . .

By mid-July, the space between Matt and Lindsay had turned from a crack into a small canyon.

It didn’t happen because of a dramatic fight. It happened in the way most things did at their age—quietly, almost invisibly. One unanswered text. One forgotten plan. One “sorry, I’m tired” that turned into three. Matt hadn’t intended to pull away. He just kept thinking about other things—about Kitt’s races, about the library and the hardware store, about the lake, about the look on Kitt’s face when he thought no one was watching.

Lindsay noticed before he did.

“You’re different,” she said one afternoon when they managed to carve time out to sit together.

“How?” Matt asked, genuinely confused.

“You’re… somewhere else in your head,” she said.

He didn’t deny it. He didn’t know how to fix it. A week later, they broke up—softly, mutually, without shouting or slammed doors. Just a shared recognition that whatever they’d been trying to build wasn’t fitting right anymore.

Matt told Kitt two days later, sitting on the low wall outside BrightMart with condensation dripping down the sides of their drink cups.

“Lindsay and I broke up,” he said, staring at the pavement.

Kitt’s fingers tightened around his straw.

“Are you okay?” he asked, careful.

“Yeah,” Matt said after a moment, meaning it and not meaning it at the same time. “I think so.”

Kitt nodded, trying to keep his expression steady even as something inside him fluttered in a panicked, hopeful way he didn’t trust.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

“It’s not a bad thing,” Matt replied quietly. “It just… is.”

Kitt wanted to bump their shoulders like he used to, to say something like You don’t have to figure it all out right away. But they had learned, in their own cautious way, to be careful with touch. Careful with closeness. Careful with the lake.

Some lines, once crossed, couldn’t be uncrossed.

. . .

The lake changed before anything else did.

It had once been pure refuge—a place where homework, parents, and expectations dissolved into the soft slap of water against wood. Then it became a place of “almost,” a place that remembered every nearly-spoken truth and every aborted movement.

Now it felt like a question.

They still went sometimes, but always with a little more distance between them. Always with the awareness that the dock knew their secrets a little too well.

One late July evening, they sat side by side, legs dangling above the dark water, watching the last of the light drain from the sky. Crickets had already started their nightly chorus. The air felt thick and still.

“Do you ever feel like something’s… shifting?” Matt asked quietly, eyes on the far shore.

Kitt’s heart stumbled.

“Yeah,” he whispered.

Matt turned, really looking at him, and for a terrifying second the space between them felt charged again, dense with unsaid things. The kind of charged that made Kitt feel like one wrong breath might tip them into something they weren’t ready to face.

He swallowed.

“We should go home before it gets too dark,” he said.

“Yeah,” Matt answered, standing slowly. “Probably.”

They walked the familiar path back toward Willow Creek Drive, every step feeling more deliberate than usual, like they were both pretending the air around them wasn’t humming.

At the curb between their houses, Matt hesitated. His hands stayed shoved deep in his pockets, shoulders slightly hunched, eyes moving everywhere except directly at Kitt.

“Hey,” he said finally, voice low. “You’re still… here, right? Like, you’re not pulling away?”

Kitt stared at him, startled by the vulnerability in the question.

“I’m not going anywhere,” he said.

Matt’s shoulders eased a little; relief softened his face.

“Good,” he said. “Just… checking.”

A warm breeze threaded through the trees above them. They split then, crossing to their separate driveways, each boy carrying the same uneasy truth: something was changing.

Not fast.
Not loud.
But undeniably.

And the closer junior year inched toward them, the more fragile everything between them began to feel.

. . .

August settled over Lakehurst like syrup—slow, heavy, and warm enough that even the cicadas sounded tired. Daylight stretched thin and hazy, and nights were gentle, windows left cracked open so the sounds of summer could wander in and out.

Kitt liked those sounds: crickets tuning themselves in the tall grass, the faint hum of the highway far beyond the houses, the occasional creak of a porch swing when the breeze caught it just right. Those sounds reminded him there was a world outside the narrow expectations of his household—a world that didn’t care whether his grades were perfect or whether he’d spent too many afternoons with the same boy.

But even summer nights had edges.

One afternoon after work, Matt appeared on Kitt’s front steps holding two sweating cups of lemonade from BrightMart.

“Kitt,” he announced, louder than the quiet street really called for. “I require assistance.”

Kitt opened the door, one eyebrow lifting.

“With what?”

“Life,” Matt said gravely. “And also I can’t fix my bike brakes.”

Kitt fought a smile and lost.

“The first part you’re on your own with,” he said. “The second part I can help.”

They walked their bikes to the strip of driveway between their houses. Matt crouched beside his front tire, confusion written clearly across his face.

“Are you sure this is safe?” he asked as Kitt adjusted the cable and tightened a bolt.

“No,” Kitt replied calmly. “But if you die, I get your football posters.”

Matt gasped.

“Take that back.”

Kitt didn’t. He just smiled—small, crooked, playful. The kind of smile that made something inside Matt light up.

They worked like that for nearly an hour: Matt asking questions, handing over the wrong tools, “helping” in ways that mostly got in the way; Kitt actually fixing the brakes. The sun slid slowly across the sky, warming the backs of their necks. Their arms brushed occasionally when they both reached for the same thing.

When they finally straightened up, Matt stretched dramatically and flexed his biceps.

“Wow,” he said. “Look at us. Future engineers.”

“I did all the work,” Kitt pointed out.

“Team effort,” Matt corrected, placing a hand over his heart. “My moral support was crucial.”

Kitt looked up at him properly then, taking in the way his hair fell into his eyes, the grease smudge on his forearm, the easy, ridiculous grin. For a second, his chest pinched in a way he’d learned to swallow quickly.

Matt held his gaze a fraction too long.

Then he looked away, cheeks pink in a way he could blame on the heat if he tried hard enough.

Later that week, they rode farther than usual, pedaling out to the edge of town where old train tracks cut across a hill overlooking fields of tall grass. It was the kind of place middle-school kids used to come to dare each other to jump or lie on the rails and feel the vibration of trains that never came anymore.

Matt dropped onto the hill with a sigh, folding his hands behind his head.

“I like this place,” he said. “You can see everything.”

Kitt sat beside him, watching the breeze run invisible fingers through the grass, turning it into waves.

“It’s quiet,” he said.

“Yeah,” Matt agreed. “Almost too quiet.”

Kitt glanced at him.

“What does ‘too quiet’ even mean?”

Matt shrugged, gaze on the sky.

“My brain’s never quiet,” he said. “Not really. And sometimes places like this… make me think too much.”

Kitt’s lips parted.

“About what?”

Matt hesitated. For a moment something flickered across his face—confusion, nerves, longing, something he still didn’t have a word for.

“Random stuff,” he said finally, looking away. “Football. College. My dad yelling at me for using too much shampoo.”

Kitt exhaled a small laugh.

“That last part is valid,” he said. “Considering the amount of hair you have.”

Matt elbowed him gently.

“Shut up,” he muttered.

Their laughter drifted out over the field, swallowed up by the wide, open air. When the sound faded, the quiet that followed didn’t feel peaceful anymore.

It felt heavy. Anticipatory. Like the pause before a storm breaks.

. . .

By mid-August, the wall between Matt and Lindsay had become solid but not hostile. They still talked sometimes. Still sent the occasional text. Still smiled if they passed each other. But whatever had bound them together before had loosened into something that looked more like a memory than a possibility.

Kitt noticed the space between them widening; he was good at noticing space.

One evening at sunset, he and Matt walked through the neighborhood park, the sky fading pink and orange above them. Fireflies were just beginning to wink to life along the edges of the path.

“Do you miss her?” Kitt asked quietly.

Matt’s step hitched for half a second.

“I… don’t know,” he said.

Kitt waited.

“It’s not that I don’t care about her,” Matt went on. “I do. She’s great. Funny. Nice. But when we were dating, I kept feeling like something was off. Like I was trying to be the guy she thought she wanted instead of just… being me.”

“Maybe you were trying too hard,” Kitt said gently.

Matt gave a small, humorless laugh.

“Maybe,” he said. “Or maybe I don’t know who I’m supposed to be yet.”

“That’s normal,” Kitt replied.

“Is it?” Matt asked, voice dropping. “Because sometimes it feels like everyone else already figured themselves out, and I’m still waiting for… something.”

“For what?”

Matt looked at him, eyes dark and searching in the fading light.

“I don’t know,” he whispered. “But it feels like it’s close.”

Kitt’s heartbeat stumbled. He looked away before Matt could see the way the words had landed.

They kept walking, shoulders almost brushing. Their hands swung at their sides, and for a brief moment their fingers touched—just a soft, accidental brush of skin. Both boys froze for the barest heartbeat before continuing on, pretending nothing had happened, every nerve suddenly louder.

That night, Kitt’s father knocked on his bedroom door.

“Come in,” Kitt said, straightening without thinking.

His father stepped inside, arms folded loosely, expression calm but too controlled, like he’d practiced it in the bathroom mirror.

“You’ve been out a lot this summer,” he said.

“I have a job,” Kitt replied.

“And on your off days,” his father continued, “you’re always with Matthew.”

Kitt’s throat tightened.

“We’re friends,” he said.

“You’re getting older,” his father said. “Boys your age should be meeting more people, not spending every hour with the same… individual.”

Kitt’s fingers curled in his bedsheet.

“You’re not keeping anything from us, are you?” his father asked, voice soft but edged.

“No,” Kitt said quickly. Too quickly.

His father’s eyes narrowed, moving over his face like he was searching for something written there.

“You know how important it is to stay on the right path,” he said. “There are influences that can lead you astray.”

Kitt nodded, jaw tight.

“Matthew seems like a good boy,” his father added. “But too much attachment at this age…” He paused, choosing the word with care. “It’s unhealthy.”

Kitt kept his gaze on the floor until his father finally left, the door closing with a soft click that felt more like a warning than a goodnight.

He didn’t cry. He didn’t panic. He just sat there on his bed, fingers pressed so hard into the fabric that his knuckles went white, heart heavy with a feeling he was starting to recognize all too well: the fear that something inside him was wrong, and that someone else was going to find it before he did.

. . .

School approached faster than either of them wanted. The days on the calendar disappeared more quickly, mornings growing a little cooler, sunsets a little earlier. They pretended they weren’t counting down, but every store display screaming Back to School made it harder to ignore.

They filled the last weeks with small, simple moments: fixing Matt’s bike again—this time with Matt actually doing half the work; lying on the trampoline in Matt’s yard, watching the stars blink on one by one; reading under the shade of the oak tree in Kitt’s backyard until the pages grew too dark to see; racing each other at the town pool; walking into town for sodas; sitting on curbs and watching thunderstorms roll in from the west.

One night, when the sky had turned the color of steel and distant thunder rolled like a warning, they sat in Matt’s open garage with their legs dangling over the concrete step. Rain streaked the driveway in bright diagonal lines. The wind smelled like wet asphalt and cut grass.

“Kitt,” Matt said, his voice almost lost in the sound of the storm, “promise me something?”

Kitt turned his head.

“What?”

“When school starts,” Matt said, eyes fixed on the rain, “don’t drift. Don’t disappear into your own head. Don’t… stop being you.”

Kitt blinked, caught off guard by the seriousness in his tone.

“I won’t,” he said.

“I mean it,” Matt insisted, finally looking at him. “Stay with me. Even if things get hard.”

For a second, it was hard to breathe.

“Okay,” Kitt whispered. “You too.”

Matt smiled then—small, bright, unexpectedly tender in the dim light of the garage. Kitt tucked the moment away carefully, deep inside, where even his father’s questions couldn’t reach.

A promise. Fragile. Real.

On the last night before school started, they sat in Kitt’s backyard on the slightly scratchy grass, watching the summer heat finally relax into a cooler breeze. The sky was a dark blue bowl overhead, the stars dim behind a haze.

“Tomorrow we’re juniors,” Matt said.

“Weird,” Kitt replied.

“Yeah,” Matt said. “Everything’s gonna change.”

Kitt didn’t argue.

He already felt it—beneath the lawn, beneath the street, beneath the lake. Something shifting. The houses. Their routines. Their conversations. The space between them. It all felt like it was holding its breath.

They stayed outside until the porch light flicked on behind Kitt, a silent signal from his parents that it was time to come in.

Kitt stood. Matt stood with him.

A moment stretched in the warm air between them—uncertain, heavy, humming with everything they hadn’t said and everything they didn’t know how to want yet.

“Night, Kitt,” Matt said quietly.

“Night, Matt,” Kitt answered.

They crossed the yard in opposite directions, each stepping into a different doorway, entering two homes that felt more different than ever.

As the lights shut off one by one along Willow Creek Drive and the town settled into its restless pre-school sleep, neither boy had any idea how quickly junior year would push them toward the edge of whatever they were trying so hard not to name.