Read Online Invincible Summer by Alice Adams - Free Book Online Page B

Those were the sorts of things they wanted to know, not whether the candidate was passionate and creative and fun to work with.
    For the first time in her life, she was starting to feel like she was at the bottom of the pile. At school and university she’d always been in demand; she was good-looking and confident and naturally subversive, and that had always been enough to keep her high in the social hierarchy. The academic side of things wasn’t her forte, but Mr Nolan the art teacher at one of her secondary schools had said she had a rare talent, confirming her sense that her destiny lay in being an artist. But lot had changed since the days when her star had been so firmly in the ascendant, even within her immediate group of friends. These days Eva was glowing with a new confidence, and more, an overarching sense of purpose, which only compounded Sylvie’s growing sense of being adrift. Lucien, too, was raking it in on his club nights and Benedict at least had a direction in life, even if it wasn’t one that she much envied. But she wasn’t about to admit any of this out loud.
    ‘Never mind immortality, I’m going to top myself if I have to listen to Lucien moaning about his feet for much longer,’ she said.
    Her brother glared back at her. ‘Have I mentioned in the last five minutes that they’re agony? And that this whole trip was a shit idea? I was promised sunshine and naughty Catholic girls, not blisters and hostels full of stinking Germans. And that’s if we’re lucky. I’m telling you, if we don’t find somewhere with vacancies soon we’re going to have to sleep under a tree.’ He waved a hand at the darkening air around them; the last three hostels they’d passed had no free beds, forcing them to keep walking. ‘Look at these shoes, they’re completely ruined. And what about these trousers, eh? Three hundred quid, they cost me, and now they’re covered in mud.’
    ‘I did tell you that you wouldn’t be able to walk 100 miles in suede shoes,’ snapped Sylvie. ‘Why on earth didn’t you bring proper hiking boots?’
    ‘Because I’m not fucking forty?’
    Eva, who was walking a little way in front of the rest of the group, suddenly drew to an abrupt halt in the road ahead. ‘Halle-bloody-lujah!’ she called back to them. ‘A hostel with a sign saying they’ve got beds.’
    Sylvie, the only one who spoke any Spanish, went in to check while the others sat on a wall to relieve their aching feet. She came out smiling a few minutes later.
    ‘Good news?’
    ‘Good news and bad news. Which do you want first?’
    ‘The good news,’ yelled Eva, Benedict and Lucien in unison.
    ‘The good news is that we are not going to be sleeping in a ditch tonight. We have beds.’
    ‘As long as we’ve got beds, I don’t even care what the bad news is,’ said Eva.
    ‘That’s lucky,’ said Sylvie. ‘Because the kitchen’s closed and there are only two rooms left. I’m in the single and you three are sharing the double.’
    Even before she had finished the end of the sentence she had flung a room key at them and started to run towards the nearby converted stable block. By the time the others had picked up their rucksacks and chased after her she had already slammed and locked the door to her room, leaving them banging on the door and protesting feebly which only seemed to increase the volume of her laughter emanating from within. Eventually they gave up and trudged off to find the other room.
    ‘Just when I thought it couldn’t get any worse,’ groaned Eva as the three of them stood looking down at their bed for the night, a standard-size double. ‘I barely slept in that dorm last night. My bunk was above that Franz guy we keep running into. He snored like a tractor and smelled like something had crawled up his bum to die.’
    Exhausted and out of options, they silently munched their way through the sandwiches left over from lunchtime before stripping down to T-shirts and pants and collapsing