When he came up, Maya was sitting on the steps outside the school. She wasn’t wearing anything warm either, a green turtleneck, a skirt, bare knees. She was probably freezing too. The girl looked at Max and smirked.

“What an idiot.”

“Why?”

“Because it’s freezing!”

“Not at all.”

“Your lips are blue.”

He shrugged.

“It’s in style now.”

She laughed. Of course she understood that the whole pose was for her. And with that smile she let him know she was pleased, though she would never admit that either. Max thought he’d survive even winter for that laugh, barefoot, in his underwear and a T-shirt.

The bell rang. For a few seconds they looked challengingly into each other’s eyes, as if testing one another: “So? Are you going in?” Nobody won that staring game, and the two of them walked out of the schoolyard.

They walked along the shore. The waves were gray, small, and mean. There was no question of dipping bare feet into them. So was talking. They kept going in silence. Along the way Maya picked up the occasional white pebble and dropped it into the outer pocket of her school backpack.

The wind twisted her long blond hair into spirals and flung it into Max’s face. Sometimes it brushed his cheek, and that simple touch set off something inside him that no adult knows how to understand or explain anymore. It seemed to him that as long as he was walking beside her, death did not exist. Not in a philosophical sense, not in a heroic one, not even in a religious one. It simply didn’t. There was summer. And Maya.

An old man passing by smirked. Said something mean. Not clever, not cruel, but primitively petty, which somehow made it sting all the more. Max didn’t even catch what it was right away. First he tripped over a shriveled apple core lying in the sand, and only then pieced what he had heard into an actual sentence:

“Well, well, coo all you want while it still seems like forever. You’re not like everyone else, are you?”

The old man didn’t even slow down. But Max stopped. There was something disgustingly adult in those words: not even mockery exactly, but the disappointment of a man who had once had everything and had nothing left. As if the wind, the ocean, his own summer had all already been known to the old man and were of no use to him anymore. And Maya meant nothing to him either.

“F*** them all,” said Max. “You too.”

Maya snorted with laughter, and the old man was so startled that he laughed too, quietly, but unexpectedly for real. And in that second his face changed. It did not grow younger, that would have been impossible, but something earlier showed through: the memory of a time when the world had still seemed lavish and warm in any weather.

The stooped old man kept walking and soon was almost indistinguishable from the shore. Max thought that he and Maya, without even realizing it, had for a moment given that wretched thing back the memory of a long-ago loss he had already made his peace with. And Max was no longer angry.

Maya was silent. The wind was still just as cold. Max suddenly felt that none of it was at odds with anything else. Old age and youth, his anger, her laughter, his hunched back, her thin collarbones, the wind, and the longing for summer pulsing on the left side beneath his T-shirt. It was all the same: the irrepressibility of the moment and the continuation of their steps.

Without hurrying, he pulled a crumpled jacket out of his backpack and draped it over Maya’s shoulders.

“Don’t freeze, okay, whatever.”

Adjusting the jacket, Maya slowed for a moment, then quickened again, came very close to Max, and kissed him on the shoulder… They walked along the water, and summer no longer needed to argue with the weather, and the day went on…

April, 2026