Kınalıada is the first of the Princes' Islands, a short ferry from Istanbul, and the one the Armenians go to. My family still opens the house there in July.
I spent every summer of my childhood on that island with the same friends I had at school. I did not know at the time that this was luck. You do not lose people you sit beside in October if you are also swimming with them in August. The friendship never has to survive a gap, because there is no gap. It took leaving to work out that this is not how it goes for most people, and that most friendships are kept alive on purpose, by someone, at some cost.
We fished. Off the rocks, or from a friend's boat, with his grandfather telling us what we were doing wrong and being right about it. We played football in the street until it was too dark to see the ball. Marbles. Tazos. Beyblade, when that arrived.
I was the one in the group who understood machines, so I burned PS2 games and sold them to the other children.
That last detail dates the whole thing. We were about the last year group for whom the computer was not yet the main event. It was in the house, and it was interesting, and then you went outside. So we got both versions of the world, and we watched the second one arrive, and I was the one selling it on a stack of discs.