This week, I had an out-of-body experience watching The Summer I Turned Pretty. One minute, I’m watching Belly fuck off to Paris, and the next, a memory of my own Cousins-esque experience crashed into my smooth little brain. It was a recollection of my own childhood, growing up and going on holidays to the central coast with my mum’s best friend and her three boys.
Did I unwittingly live my own TSITP experience without living it? Let’s discuss.
Ever since I was little, my family spent time with my mum’s best friend’s family. We lived a couple of suburbs away, and my two older brothers were the same age as her eldest two boys. I was a year or so younger than her youngest and at the time — he was my Conrad.
Most years, we’d rent a house on the NSW central coast during the school holidays, spending hours at the beach, fishing and cooking up BBQs.
As you might have been able to predict, I had a deep, yearnful crush on the youngest son that was painfully obvious to everyone.
Like most tweens with overactive imaginations, I’d daydream about our trips to the beach and hope with every fibre of my being that one day, we’d be together. My romantic musings were so strong that I genuinely can’t remember if we actually kissed one time or if it was all in my head.
That’s how powerful my pre-pubescent brain was. Despite my first-ever crush feeling all-encompassing at the time, I must have blacked it out to not have made the connection to Belly’s longing for Conrad until now.
Admittedly, I’m new to TSITP universe. I only started watching the show a couple of months ago to prepare for interviews with the cast, and then I just couldn’t stop. By the end of the month, I’d seen the entire show and could finally throw myself into the online discourse wholeheartedly.
Somehow, throughout the hours of catch-up watching, I hadn’t connected the dots between Belly’s experience and my own, despite the similarities. Most likely because my caterpillar-to-butterfly moment didn’t really happen until I was well out of high school.
Honestly, I think I dodged a fucking bullet. I cannot imagine how insufferable I would have been if I had been in that position and clocked the similarities between my life and Belly’s if I had read TSITP before my frontal lobe developed. I can only imagine the hours I would have spent staring out into the ocean, pining and waiting for the day that he would decide that I had suddenly become pretty.
Now, as an adult, I love watching Belly and her bad decisions from the comfort of my own home, without any risk of getting my reality confused with my daydreams.
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