L’été

Summer in Cœur de slush is Billie’s first great season of longing: a hot, slow stretch in which she wishes for an upheaval, measures herself against other girls, and hopes to become a woman without quite knowing what that should mean. Its defining tension is between the magical rescue she imagines and the ordinary, sometimes humiliating facts of adolescence. By the time August ends, the season has not delivered the transformation she wanted, but its disappointments and desires have made change impossible to ignore.

Heat, Work, and the Wish for Change

At the water park, summer is not merely a backdrop but a punishing routine. Billie spends eight hours blowing her whistle, applying sunscreen to herself and other people, watching children swim and pee in the wave pool, and disinfecting scraped knees. The work leaves her sunburned despite two layers of expensive cream; she describes her skin as red as a crab or lobster. She is saving her minimum-wage earnings for jeans and lime-flavoured Bud Light, while baking in the lifeguard chair and wishing that something—anything—would interrupt the sameness of her days and nights.

Her appeal to “Madame la Vie,” whom she imagines as a woman, gives that wish a private, almost ritual form: she crosses her fingers and asks for the world to turn the other way, or for anything at all to happen to her. But August is already old and nearly at the end of its life, and nothing has changed. The personification gives Billie a listener for her impatience, while the sunburn and repetitive work keep the wish anchored in the body and in the small economics of a teenager’s summer.

The desire is not simply for excitement. At seventeen, Billie wants to fall into the air and be caught by a boy’s hands before she hits the grass. She has been carrying this image from May onward, since the warm weather first made sundresses possible. The fantasy makes romance feel like rescue from loneliness: she imagines someone arriving at precisely the moment she cannot save herself. Her wish for an extraordinary evening and her wish to become a “girl-woman” belong to the same hope that life might suddenly carry her into a different version of herself.

Learning Womanhood Through Comparison

Billie imagines maturity through deliberate changes to her appearance and manner. She thinks she may be ready to cut her hair, paint her nails dark colours, speak more slowly, choose her words, laugh less loudly, and make her eyes shine. She wants to leave behind the private-school skirts shortened with craft scissors, but not to become fully adult at once. At seventeen, she feels both entitled to outgrow her skin and uncertain about the form that growing up should take.

That uncertainty sharpens in comparison with Annette. Billie sees her sister as effortlessly radiant and as a “real” woman, while she herself alternates between feeling like a child when sad and almost womanly when happy. The difference is not simply a matter of age or looks: it mixes admiration, love, and gentle jealousy. As Billie tends her sunburn with aloe, paints her nails in colours she considers too pale and young, and writes poems about Simon and Étienne inside crayon hearts, Annette appears to shine without trying. Billie hopes that their complicated mixture of affection and envy may become love without the envy as they grow older.

Her summer disappointment with Étienne gives that comparison a sharper edge. At the water park, the tall slide repairman splashes girls, and some accept the attention because he is confident, sun-tanned, and tattooed with a skull, or because he sometimes chooses one of them for an after-hours ride on his four-wheeler. Billie believes he might choose her after he compliments her freckles and narrow hips in her red swimsuit. On a rainy afternoon, however, he takes Shannon instead. The rain conceals Billie’s tears, but it does not lessen the rejection; she carries the hurt as an imagined mechanical-pencil-sized thorn lodged in the left side of her heart. The episode ties summer romance to the public business of being noticed and selected, and leaves Billie’s longing intact rather than rewarded.

Romance, Self-Consciousness, and the Body

The season’s emotional promise does not resolve neatly when Billie encounters Pierre. After an evening that feels like a failure, she worries that she has been awkward and arrogant, and imagines that Pierre expected a softer, more magical line, the kind of cinematic phrase that might have made him melt. Her heart begins beating hard after she has failed to give the moment the storybook answer she thinks it required. Walking with Annette for about half an hour, then falling asleep in their clothes without brushing their teeth, makes the night’s ending stubbornly ordinary. Summer supplies the romantic script; Billie is left judging herself against it.

The pattern continues as the school year begins. Billie cannot sleep because the image of a blond, blue-eyed boy fills her thoughts. She tells Annette what happened, and her sister’s mixed reaction confirms that Pierre leaves them both confused. Billie grieves that summer has ended without giving her anything sufficiently wild or special—without even a little magic—and faces a depressing routine alone with her summer dresses and hair that never dries straight. Yet Pierre’s hold on her is physical as well as imagined: when she sees him talking to a tall brunette who glances at her, Billie’s palms become damp, her lower belly seems full of bees, and she alternates between feeling hot and cold. She wonders whether the other girl is more beautiful and worries that she is nearly a woman in a way Billie is not.

Later, when Annette bluntly identifies Billie’s feelings for Pierre and asks whether she wants more than kissing, Billie turns red and denies it. The exchange reveals a gap between the desire that her body and attention betray and the words she can bring herself to use. When the possibility of sex becomes immediate, her anxiety is more specific than a general fear of romance: she worries about being sticky, being unattractive naked, making sounds she does not like, and lying motionless in a strange bed. The imagined alternative is to remain outside Pierre’s room, talk, and let the autumn mosquitoes bite them instead. The contrast clarifies how far the summer’s fantasy of being caught is from the real vulnerability of choosing whether to proceed with intimacy.

August Ends, but the Longing Does Not

At the water park near summer’s close, Billie tries to glimpse Pierre while crossing the crowded grounds on her lunch break. She sits on a large red bench by the wave-pool fence and eats a warm sandwich during her thirty minutes off, reproaching herself for having been needlessly cold with him. She describes her feelings as swinging back and forth between temperatures. The uncertainty is uncomfortable, but she wonders whether it might be better than remaining forever lukewarm and steady. That small reversal complicates her earlier wish for a clean, magical change: intensity brings distress, yet emotional evenness would be another kind of loss.

The calendar makes the transition unavoidable. Classes start the next day; Billie has one final half-day and exactly three hours left in her minimum-wage summer job. August is ending even though the weather is still too hot and beautiful to make September feel real. The coming cégep life appears grey beside the season she has spent hoping for magic. The first morning of school brings little relief: she has barely slept, feels depleted at 6:35, and finds herself beginning a routine she already expects to dislike.

Summer therefore ends not with the transformation Billie requested but with desire still active and unsettled. The season has exposed the limits of her romantic script: Étienne’s attention goes elsewhere, her hoped-for magical evening disappoints her, Pierre continues to provoke bodily excitement and uncertainty, and the prospect of intimacy brings fears her fantasies had not accounted for. At the same time, her changing vocabulary of self—child, almost-woman, woman—shows that the hoped-for passage is already under way, though not on command. The sunburn fades from the season; the questions it raised about beauty, being chosen, and what Billie herself wants continue into the school year.