F*** them all, it’s summer for me!

In the city, it was already, or maybe still, so cold it felt as if, after several attempts, someone up above had changed their mind about starting spring. The wind was blowing so hard it seemed the window would swell into a bubble and burst.

People were out on the street in jackets, trench coats, and hats. Standing out among them, a girl went by in a light blouse with bare shoulders, hugging herself across her breasts. It was obvious that only a proper coat could have warmed her nipples, swollen from the cold. Then again, maybe it was better she wasn’t wearing one. What a sight. Buses pulled up with a heavy sigh, tipped slightly to one side, opened their doors, and let new passengers spill onto the sidewalk, already annoyed by the weather. They hurriedly turned up their collars and went off. Max had been watching all of this through the window since early morning. And he’d figured it all out.

He went outside in a white T-shirt. Not a new one, unfortunately: there was a tiny hole on the shoulder, probably from the wash. But who would notice. He had only one T-shirt so white. And that was the main thing. Beside it, the gray morning looked petty and insignificant.

Max was fifteen. The age when a person is not yet prepared to treat as fact the things he doesn’t like. If an adult is cold, he puts on a coat. That’s just how it is. If a teenager is cold, he first has to figure out whether the cold is actually cold, or just an insulting form of someone else’s opinion that can be ignored.

His mother called after him:

“Are you out of your mind? It’s cold outside!”

“Oh, come on. And here I was thinking it was blazing-hot summer.”

He said it without anger, with that thin streak of mockery teenagers sometimes slip straight between an adult’s ribs, hoping right up to the last second they’ve hit the exact spot.

His mother, of course, would have said something about using his brain and all that, but Max had already slammed the door and run down the stairs.

Outside, the wind met him. Max hadn’t expected it to be this unbearably cold, like plunging into icy water, something that, fortunately, had never actually happened to him. The wind slid under his T-shirt and stung his back. Max shivered, but only straightened his shoulders more defiantly.

“F*** them all,” he said through his teeth. “It’s summer for me.”

And kept walking.

It wasn’t just a stubborn gesture. Max was living in some season of his own. Not exactly a happy one, happiness is rarely a stable condition in teenagers. It was more that he always lived with a feeling of something just ahead, something that made it worth going out without a jacket, coming home late, listening to the same song forty times in a row, laughing for no reason, and staring out the window as if, any second now, like on a foldout page in an astronomy textbook, the meaning of the universe might suddenly open.

Max was in love. Not love-love, of course, he understood that, he wasn’t an idiot. But that simple kind of happiness, when everything around you suddenly starts having something to do with her. Maya’s name lived inside him separately from Maya herself: it flashed through his head uninvited, clung to random associations, sounded inside him so often that he had almost stopped noticing he was thinking about her all the time.

Maya. That was why he had gone out without a jacket today, though he would never have admitted it even to himself. He didn’t want to add to the grayness, he wanted to stand out, to argue with the obvious, even if the obvious happened to be the weather. He wanted to belong to summer, to be on team happiness.