Dedicated to Alyssa for helping me with my new story idea, her ongoing support, and for being a lovely person.

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            “What is this? A burger or a piece of charcoal?”

            Collette stared briefly down at her plate before glancing over at Jay, a look of incredulity written upon her face. I suppose she did have a point – the circular, blackened mess that currently sat atop her burger bun could not in any universe have passed as meat. But, then again, that was what she got by appointing Jay – who clearly had no idea how to work Collette’s family’s fancy grill – Head of Barbequing Operations.

            I had to admit: the expensive contraption did have an unusual amount of complicated dials and levers for something whose job was, essentially, to heat food. That was the main reason behind his struggle; no matter how hard he tried, he just couldn’t seem to work out the correct orientation of each knob and button to make the barbecue function as just that. Yet I couldn’t imagine any of us would’ve done a better job.

            “That was my best one,” he pouted, looking hurt. “I thought it was at least an improvement on Scott’s.”

            The guy himself chipped in at this point, a mildly disgusted expression directed towards the head chef. “I think I’m chewing on a piece of coal.”

            The six of us were sprawled on a huge picnic blanket on Collette’s lawn, basking lazily in the late afternoon sun. Though we did our best not to dwell on the thought, the obvious continued to stare us right in the face: it was the last day of the summer, and school was due to start the next day. The prospect no longer scared me witless, but even knowing that I’d be enduring my last year of sixth form with those who’d become my new best friends didn’t compensate the fact that it was still school.

            And whether in London or Walden, it still put an abrupt stop to the placid summer days I’d grown increasingly used to over the past two months.

            “I’ll do you another one if you want to risk it. Just bear in mind that it might turn out even worse.”

            “On second thought,” Collette interjected quickly, finishing her burger with its top bun, “I’ll just slather it in ketchup.”

            “You know, it’s really your fault for having such a complicated barbecue,” Jay said, pointing his spatula in her direction. Slung from his neck was an apron – which would’ve looked okay, had it not been bright pink and embellished with the sequinned words Kiss the cook. Collette had claimed it had been the only one she could find, but I had a feeling she hadn’t exactly exhausted her options. “I’ve got no idea how to work this thing.”

            “Yeah, we guessed that one, mate,” Daniel cut in. He’d managed to stomach one of Jay’s offerings – a blackened, crunchy piece that had been a sausage in its previous life – but only by drowning his entire plate in half a bottle of ketchup and mustard.

            I was pulling up the rear with only half a burger stomached; I hadn’t quite got used to the feeling of clamping through a smoky charcoal layer with each bite. But Jay’s effort was valiant, and since none of us could make a better attempt ourselves, we kept quiet.

            “So,” he said, gesturing back towards the grill, “anyone up for seconds?”

            The subsequent disagreement was so sudden and vehement that it was almost funny; Jay seemed to take a step back on his bombardment with fervent declinations. We’d originally been hungry, but just one taste of his awful cooking had been enough to suppress our appetites.

            There was a banging sound as Collette began aggressively pounding the bottom of the ketchup bottle, but to no avail: the contents of her plate remained as dry and blackened as ever. She groaned. “Who used up the last of this?”

            “That’d be me.” Erin glanced down at her own plate. “I needed an ocean to cover up the taste of this.”

            “Yeah, I don’t blame you.” Straightening out her legs, she began to pull herself into a standing position. “There’s probably another bottle in the kit—”

            “I’m the chef, I’ve got it!” Jay chirped, unusually helpful. He scrambled to his feet before Collette even had the chance to move; within a matter of seconds he’d already bounded across the lawn, his pace carrying him towards the back of the house with peculiar speed.

            My voice was the one that broke the ensuing silence. “Well, that was weird.”

            “Jesus, he’s not usually that eager, is he?” Collette said, frowning as she plonked back down onto the ground. “I say we should be wary.”

            Expecting him to return with the same bizarre urgency, we were instead surprised to find that he still hadn’t emerged from the kitchen several minutes later. It was getting to the point that we were considering sending out a search party that he poked his head around the back door, his attention directed primarily in Erin’s direction.

            “Hey,” he called, “could you come in here for a second? I need some… help.”

            She frowned, muttering something along the lines of, “What does he want me for?”, but her bemusement didn’t stop her from gathering herself to her feet. “Does he think I have ketchup-locating superpowers or something? It’s Collette’s kitchen.”

            “Somehow I don’t think ketchup’s what he’s looking for,” Collette commented with a smirk, but by this point Erin had already cleared the edge of earshot, disappearing past the threshold. “It’s pretty obvious what those two are going to be doing in there.”

            Daniel made a face. “I don’t want to think about that. You know that’s my sister, right?”

            “Oh, I know,” she answered amusedly, “but just because you don’t want to talk about it doesn’t mean it’s not happening as we speak.”

            I was sure Daniel was about to respond with a suitably witty remark, but he was robbed of the chance; the moment his lips parted, the words about to spill from them, he was cut off by a particular something.

            And that ‘something’ happened to be a cold stream of water, jetting right over the lawn like a shot, right into the faces of its unsuspecting victims. Which, of course, happened to be us.

            My head whipped around the moment the water collided with my skin, effectively drenching my entire face and seeping down into the upper layers of my clothing. Eyes searching the vicinity for the source of the surprise, they hit the jackpot once they landed upon the pair stood at the back door, brandishing bright plastic – and incredibly vicious-looking – water guns.

            “You have got to be joking,” Collette exclaimed, but I could’ve sworn I noticed the edges of her lips curling upwards at the sight.

            Jay, unmistakably the mastermind of the operation, raised his gun. At some point preceding the commotion he’d shed his pink apron, the end result being an overall more intimidating appearance. An effect, I found, that intensified when I found myself his gun’s locked target. “This is war!” came his loud declaration.

            And then, suddenly, they were running towards us, their pounding footsteps on the lawn so rapid it barely gave us a chance to scramble haphazardly to our feet. I heard the click of a plastic trigger and suddenly the water was flying through the air again, splattering my back with an uncomfortable cold dampness that seeped right through to my skin.

            Amongst the kerfuffle, a hand grabbed my own, and I looked over to see Daniel glancing expectantly at me. “What do you say – allies?”

            As if he needed to ask, I thought, as he ducked out of the way of Jay’s latest shot and yanked me forward in the process.

            “Come on!” he called over his shoulder. “I know a good place to hide.”

            I stumbled dazedly after him, my sense of awareness compromised amongst the disorder as we sprinted to avoid the incoming streams of water. Even underneath the warmth of the afternoon sun, Jay’s source was obviously the cold tap, the sensation too much of a shock to the senses to be anything near pleasant.

            The brief time slot in which Jay and Erin’s guns were pointed in directions other than ourselves allowed us an opportunity to leg it around the side of the house, ducking past the corner and stopping, breathless, to lean against the rear wall of Collette’s garage. The scratchy brick rubbed at my back as I pressed up against it, trying to remove myself from the radar of our attackers.

            “I think we’re safe,” Daniel whispered after a few seconds, and we both let out a breath of relief.

            “Trust Jay to declare a water fight,” I whispered back.

            “Yeah, well. That’s what you get when you combine his immaturity and the last day of the summer.”

            The last day of summer. His words, unpleasantly expectant, hung in the air between us. It was almost as if they themselves were visible, the string of letters suddenly much more than that: something tangible that I could reach out and grab hold of. If I wanted to.

            It had been hanging over us for days now, folding the final days in on themselves at an unnerving pace, the obvious prospect niggling at the back of everybody’s heads. Yet somehow, spoken from Daniel’s lips, it seemed much more real. The inexplicable sense of finality to his tone was felt through my every fibre of being.

            “It really is the last day, isn’t it?” I murmured quietly.

            “Uh huh.”

            I wasn’t leaving Walden, nor moving anywhere away from my new friends, but it was impossible to shake off the feeling that it was like the end of an era. At the start of the summer, I’d been a whole other person. Convinced that coping without Nora was impossible, that belief had been imprinted into every region of my brain. And yet here, months later, the knowledge that my sister resided over a hundred miles away no longer terrified me. Not when I only had to move a few inches to find Daniel.

            And then there was the fact that things had finally been patched up with Gram. When she’d returned from the conference, I hadn’t been able to stop myself from running at her, enclosing her in a hug and apologising for the cold shoulder of the past few days. Her own apologies had come in full force, too, and some hours later we came to a mutual reconciliation that stitched the last piece of my life in Walden back into place.

            “So, tell me the verdict,” he cut in, his voice considerably cheerier. “Summer in London or Walden? Which one comes out top?”

            The resulting urge tugged my lips into a smile that spread across my face. “Come on,” I teased gently, “you know there’s no competition there.”

            He was grinning too. “No?”

            “Oh, no. London, without a doubt,” I told him. “The guys are cuter. More eye candy.”

            I resisted the impulse to laugh out loud as his eyebrows raised, looking down at me with a mildly amused expression. “You’re sure about that one?”

            “Positive.”

            It looked like he’d been intending to make a sarcastic remark, maybe even duck down to kiss me in an attempt to sway my answer, but I wasn’t given the opportunity to find out. The interruption came quickly, and initially I froze against the garage wall, preparing for an ambush by Erin and Jay. Seconds passed, but I didn’t find myself staring down the barrel of a water gun. The pair had made an appearance, but not in the way I’d expected.

            Their voices, carried from somewhere around the corner of the wall we were pressed up against, were easily heard. I dared to sneak a peek, peering around the edge of the building to see them having completely abandoned their weapons in favour of holding the other’s hand.

            “Well, that got rid of them,” Jay said breezily.

            “You were right,” Erin answered with a laugh. “Your methods might be childish, but I have to admit they’re effective.”

            “Didn’t I tell you? You should listen to me more often.”

            “Yeah, alright. Don’t push your luck.”

            He laughed too, but the carefree sound ebbed away when he leant in to kiss her, weaving his hands onto the small of her back. Her response was nothing short of enthusiastically, and I noticed how she threw her arms up to link them behind his neck, the ends of her vibrant hair brushing his hands with the upward tilt of her head.

            I recoiled back against the wall, shooting a glance at a bemused Daniel. “Don’t look now unless you want to catch your sister in one intense snogging session.”

            Unfortunately, the consequential surprise was served with a shot of impulsiveness, and, completely disregarding my warning, he poked his head around the corner too. Needless to say, Jay chose the wrong moment to back Erin up against the wall, letting her fingers tangle themselves in his hair, as demonstrated by Daniel’s startled and slightly grimacing expression when he looked back to me.

            “I shouldn’t have looked, should I?”

            “I did warn you,” I told him simply.

            He groaned. “Brilliant. That one’s going to be burned in my head for a while.” Slumping back against the wall, his attention seemed to catch on an object beside him. Had the arrival of  inspiration been any more noticeable, I could’ve sworn I’d have been able to see a bulb blink to life above his head. “Hey, I’ve got an idea.”

            “What?” I craned my neck to see exactly what he was peering at, but as soon as my gaze latched onto it, I realised his proposal immediately. “Would that not be completely and utterly evil?”

            He shrugged. “They started it. We’re the ones already dripping wet.”

            His argument, brief as it was, served as sufficient conviction. I didn’t even need instruction to grab the other side of the bucket as we held it under the garden tap, watching the water level creep slowly up the plastic sides. It wasn’t until it reached a few inches below the rim that Daniel shut off the tap, silencing the quiet splashing.

            “We need to be quick about this,” he told me. Though his tone was serious, the mischievous smirk could not be kept from either one of our faces. “Leg it out there, and then right over their heads.”

            “Got it,” I affirmed. “Though I imagine they’ll both be too absorbed in each other to even notice what’s going on.”

            He grimaced. “Let’s get this over with quickly, then. Ready?”

            I nodded.

            “Three, two, one… go!”

            The snapshot effect came into action from that moment on, and every one that followed: the first footstep out of our hiding spot; the weight of the slippery bucket in our hands; the raw muscle exertion of lifting it above our heads. It all came as individual bursts, each conscious moment seeming oddly clean-cut from the last. It was Daniel’s expression, shaking under the pressure of holding back laughter, that was the last thing I noticed before we hitched the bucket up all the way, angling it forwards so the water came sloshing out in one giant burst, all over our victims’ heads.

            They jolted apart immediately, the immediate drench freezing them right out of the motions of their kiss. Erin’s arms snapped back to her sides immediately, while Jay leaped away from her, widening the gap between them until it stretched at least two feet. It was at this moment that the dam broke, and mine and Daniel’s laughter erupted into the air, rapidly evolving from suppressed giggles to uncontrollable hysteria.

            “You two!” Erin said, her finger drifting between the both of us.

            “Come on, man, you completely ruined my hair!” Jay complained, running a hand through his now sopping mane and examining it with revulsion.

            “That’s what you get for starting a water fight,” I told them.

            “And also for bringing my sister around the side of the house to snog her,” Daniel chipped in.

            To this, Jay could only muster a sheepish smile. “Well, I mean…”

            He didn’t get to finish. The third and final unexpected event of the afternoon was about to commence, and that came in the form of the shocking sensation of a huge sheet of water crashing down on us from above. Not only effectively silencing the entire group, I was soaked in seconds, the squelching feeling of dampness felt everywhere from the strands of my hair down to the gaps between my toes. The effect was felt across the other three in the vicinity – though Jay and Erin had already been more than sufficiently drenched a minute ago, this time Daniel’s hair was also plastered to the sides of his head, eyes closed as water continued to stream down his face.

            “What the…?” My thoughts were voiced by Erin’s exclamation as we all looked upwards, attempting to investigate the source of the water. In hindsight, we should’ve known.

            Standing directly above us, leaning over the railing of the master bedroom’s balcony, were the missing two members of our party. Each held either end of a huge plastic tub – the one that obviously, a few moments ago, had contained the same water that was now seeping through the fabric of my T-shirt. Scott perhaps wore the widest grin of the pair; even from my position on the ground, I could see that it almost stretched ear-to-ear. Even so, Collette came in a close second, the hair scraped away from her face in a neat ponytail meaning her own grin was that much more visible.

            “You guys are novices!” she shouted down, her voice carried easily by the afternoon breeze. Which, thanks to the bucket of water stored between the fibres of my clothing, now felt considerably cooler on my skin. “That’s how you win a water fight!”

            “Bow down to your superiors!” Scott called, winking at Collette.

            There was a heartbeat’s pause: a moment in which I watched as she gazed back at him, the smile yet to slip from her features. It happened suddenly – had I blinked, I was sure I would’ve missed it. The empty plastic container clattered, discarded, to the floor beside them, and in the space of a few seconds Collette had took a leap at the guy opposite her, throwing her arms around his neck and pressing their lips into contact.

            At first he seemed stunned, his surprise evident in the way he stumbled slightly backward with the unexpected momentum. Still, it didn’t take long for him to recover, eventually lending himself into the kiss he’d been waiting for.

            And there, beneath the sunshine on that warm afternoon, as the last piece of the puzzle seemed to finally click into place, I couldn’t stop myself from smiling.

            “So,” Scott yelled down several moments later, “who’s up for ice cream?”

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Okay, so there we go. That's it. Twenty-five chapters later, and I'm finished. The story is completed, and I don't really know what to do with myself. It's been one hell of a ride, writing this, but it's been my favourite, hands down. I can't thank you enough for every lovely comment that I received every week, for those who made beautiful fan art and banners, for those who fell in love with the characters, as did I. Thank you so, so much.

As I said in the last chapter, I will be doing a one-shot competition for this story. Details of that will be posted in a new chapter this weekend, and I hope as many of you as possible will enter!

So, for the last time, thank you so much. I've had unbelievable fun writing this story, and I hope you'll stick with me into my next one. I love you all.