Summer and July

by Paul Mosier

  “No thank you.”

  On the screen, the guy in the cartoon who looks like he’s wearing a hospital robe is flying by means of his beard.

  I hear her plastic takeout utensils in the darkness. “What did you do today?” Mom asks between bites.

  “Not much,” I say. “Rode some sick waves on my sponge. Got splashed by some dolphins that were closer to me than you are right now.”

  “Really?”

  “One of them was smiling at me. He jumped out of the water and grinned at me and Summer. Then he splashed us with his tail as he dove back in the water. No big deal.”

  “Wow! Well, if you were looking in my direction right now, you’d see that I’m smiling at you, too.”

  I let it hang for a moment. “I can live without that.”

  Saying it doesn’t make me feel better. Instead it makes me feel worse, but I hope it also makes her feel worse. And so, without even turning in her direction, I leave Mom and her delicious-smelling aloo gobi and vegetable korma, and the cartoon guy who flies by means of his white beard, and I take my empty stomach and my empty self into my empty bedroom and shut the door harder than I should.

  Standing above the nightstand, I open the drawer and look down at Mom’s list, which looks back up at me.

  More exercise and fresh air.

  Confront your fears.

  Go outside your comfort zone!

  Below her words are my additions.

  MAKE A NEW FRIEND

  LEARN TO SURF?

  FIX FERN THING

  I start to close the drawer, but the list is noisy, hungry. I take it and flatten it on the desk, then pick up the little pencil and add words.

  GET CLOSER TO MOM

  The newest addition is a gigantic hole in my heart, and the Fern thing is still miles away from being resolved. But looking at the first five goals—assessing my progress—I am filled with what I’ve done with these days of July, and I stand up straight. Through the open window I see the shapes of the moonlit blossoms shining in the sky. I take in their smells on the breeze, and allow myself to imagine that tomorrow—the Summer part of tomorrow—will be as magical as today.

  15

  IT’S JULY 18, and Summer and I are sitting in Adirondack chairs where the sidewalk meets the sand in front of the snack bar on the beach. The marine layer is refusing to burn off, and so the sky is as gloomy as Summer is today.

  I didn’t see her at all yesterday. She told me she had family stuff again. I don’t know whether she goes out of her way to make me feel like I shouldn’t ask for details about her family, or whether I’m just afraid for reasons entirely my own.

  My phone buzzes. It’s a text from Fern.

  Softee’s is closing forever. First you abandon me and now Softee’s is closing. Hope you’re having an amazing summer too!

  I turn the phone screen-side down on the arm of my chair.

  “Your mom?” Summer asks without cheer.

  I sigh. “Fern.”

  A happy golden retriever comes to visit us, tail wagging. But his owner barks at him and he hurries away.

  “Tell me about Lakeshore.” Summer stares off toward the ocean. At least her face is pointed that way—I can’t see her eyes behind the dark shades she’s wearing.

  I lean toward the table and take the last onion ring from the tray, then dip it into the little plastic tub of ketchup and hot sauce. “There’s not much to tell.”

  “I remember how you described it on the first day we hung out.” She digs her bare feet into the sand. “‘Gross in summer, cold in winter. Jack-o’-lanterns in fall, bees in spring.’”

  “Is that what I said before?”

  She nods. “But I’m surprised you didn’t describe it with more danger.”

  I take a bite of the onion ring. “What do you mean?”

  She shrugs. “Something like, mosquitoes with West Nile virus in summer. Zombie hooligans on Halloween.”

  “Stop.”

  “Abominable snowman in winter. Killer bees in spring.”

  I take the last bite of onion ring. She’s kidded me before about stupid fears, but this doesn’t feel like kidding. She’s not smiling.

  “What happens in Lakeshore?” she asks.

  “Nothing.”

  “What do you do?”

  “Nothing. Go to the mall.”

  “Skating on frozen lakes?”

  “Nope. Just hang out indoors under fluorescent lights.”

  “Shenanigans in the woods?”

  “Not really.” I take a sip of coconut smoothie. “I mean, there are woods and all. But I don’t really go into them anymore.”

  She turns my way. She seems to study me for a moment while I pretend not to notice. Then she looks back to the ocean.

  “There’s something you’re not telling me.” She kicks the sand off her buried feet. “What’s the worst thing that ever happened there?”

  I fall back into my chair. “Nothing.” I drop my shades from my hair to my eyes. I know she’s trying to figure out why I have fears, but you don’t get fears. You just have them.

  “Scary video games at the arcade?”

  “Stop it.” I put my fingertips to my face and trace my features to make sure I’m scowling properly.

  We don’t talk for a minute. While we don’t talk, people on bikes and skates and skateboards roll by on the sidewalk behind us. As we sit in silence, families play in the surf ahead in the distance. The smell of french fries and burgers and veggie tacos washes over us.

  “Can I see your phone?”

  I look to her. “Why?”

  “Experiment.” She holds her hand out, grinning like, Please? I lean over and pass it to her.

  She taps the screen. She taps it some more. She laughs, covers her mouth.

  “What?” I ask.

  “I typed the letters a and p and it suggested apocalypse.”

  “No it didn’t.”

  “Yes it did!” She puts her fingertip back to the screen. “Okay. I’m gonna put in d and i. Whoops! Disaster!”

  “It doesn’t say that.”

  “Yes it does!” She turns the screen to me but it’s too far anyway. It’s too far and I don’t care. “It could have suggested any word, but it knows your personality. It knows your thinking. Disaster and disease. And diphtheria. Which is also some sort of disease or infection.”

  “I know what it is.”

  “For anyone else it might have suggested did. Or didn’t. Or dig.”

  “I have no idea what your point is.”

  She puts my phone on the arm of my Adirondack chair. “My point is, either you’re poisoning the mind of your phone, or it’s poisoning yours.”

  I sit deep in my chair, and she falls back into hers.

  A seagull lands at my feet and eats an old french fry covered in sand. Then it cocks its head, gives me a sassy look, and flies away.

  “Sorry,” Summer says. “I shouldn’t poke fun at you.”

  A homeless man in dirty clothes passes us, dragging a tent toward the water. It’s already assembled into its angular shape.

  I take a deep breath, then let it out. “The worst thing that ever happened in Lakeshore was when my dad put his suitcases in the trunk of his car and drove to an apartment across town that he’d already rented for himself and Genevieve.” I take another gulp of air. “Then the two of them moved to Switzerland, and me and my mom moved to a different part of town and a new school where I didn’t know anyone because my mom was too sad to stay in the same house. There you are, since apparently you can’t stand not knowing.”

  A lifeguard helicopter passes from north to south, a short distance out from the water’s edge. The noise of the rotors wipes everything away. I close my eyes and take a deep breath. I am new.

  “In Lakeshore the summer nights are the best,” I say. “The sun goes down so late. Way later than dinner. Then it gets dark, and the fireflies come out.” I think about when I last saw them. I can’t remember if I saw them at all in June.
I was probably stuck inside all month.

  “I’ve never seen fireflies,” Summer says.

  “They’re magical. They come on and go off. Appear and disappear. Some of the kids like to catch them and put ’em in jars. Or smear them on their skin like war paint so they can glow. But I just like to watch them appear and disappear.”

  “It sounds beautiful.”

  “I love the Little League baseball games at my school on summer nights. There’s a snack bar that smells like popcorn and cotton candy. And snow cones, where you can smile and say ‘Please go heavy on the syrup’ when you order, at least if the boy working behind the counter has pimples and a big Adam’s apple and a face that turns red when you place your order. And then when the ice is all gone and it’s all melty snow-cone juice at the bottom, and the paper cone is getting soggy and almost ready to collapse, you tip it back and drink it.”

  “Yum,” Summer says.

  “And when school starts the trees are still deep green, but it’s like they’ve been brushed with sadness. And in fall, the first cold mornings, the leaves change to bright red and yellow. And finally a dull rusty color, so you aren’t so sad when they finally drop. Then the trees are completely bare and you can see everything that the woods hid all summer. Because the woods are so thick. And then they aren’t. And then everything looks desolate until the snow falls, and it’s a wonderland.”

  “Tell me about winter.”

  I listen to the distant ocean, the seagulls. A family speaking German walks by.

  “When the snow falls, and it’s covering everything, it’s so quiet. Like every sound in the universe is absorbed by the blanket of snow. All you can hear is your own feet crunching in it. It’s so quiet and bright, with white light coming from every direction.”

  Summer sighs. “You’re lucky.”

  “And then in spring, when you’re totally sick of cold and snow and freezing rain, the first signs of green come. It begins on things close to the ground, like hedgerows. Little bits of green. Tiny flowers. Then everything’s budding. People start wearing short sleeves. You hear birds singing. Once I saw a newly budding tree filled with yellow finches, like a crop of lemons. Which don’t grow there. But finches do. In spring, when it’s like the whole world comes back to life.”

  I imagine it. It feels like forever ago. Like another lifetime.

  “Will you show me someday?”

  I turn to Summer. “What part?”

  “Everything. All of what you said.”

  I look away, to the shore, then farther, to the Santa Monica Mountains jutting into the sea to the north.

  “I’d love that,” I say.

  “Now you remember what’s nice about Lakeshore.” Summer turns to me. “Like you’ve done for me with Ocean Park. And the waves. Letting me show you what I’ve loved about my life in this place.”

  I lean forward to grab an onion ring from the table, but they’re all gone. So I sit back and watch the lifeguard helicopter go back the other way. The light is turning a darker gray.

  “The psychologists are right,” I say out of nowhere. “My mom is right. My fears aren’t real.” I dig my feet into the sand, burying them. “I’m not afraid of zombies. Or the number three. Or tsunamis, or any of that.”

  Summer’s hand reaches mine on the arm of my chair. I turn my palm up.

  My other hand removes my shades. I wipe my eyes with the back of my arm. “Just things that ruin your life. Things that make you forget about fireflies and snow cones.”

  I put the shades back on my eyes. I feel pathetic.

  “You didn’t forget fireflies or snow cones,” Summer says. “You just forgot you remembered them.”

  It feels good to remember the good things, and it feels good to dump the truth at Summer’s feet. But I feel like there’s some truth she isn’t telling me, and that it’s her turn to lay it down.

  16

  JULY 19, AND it’s another day of Summer being mysteriously unavailable. I didn’t ask her why she couldn’t hang out when we said good-bye yesterday, but it’s weird that she doesn’t just tell me. I don’t want to walk past her house and spy on her.

  I’m also weirded out that I feel this way. That less than three weeks after meeting someone I can feel so attached and needy. It’s different from the way it has been with Fern or any other friend. I used Fern to protect me from things I didn’t want to do, or feel, but it feels like Summer is the key to everything I want to become.

  I take a bag with my library books and grab a water at the little market on Fourth Street, then head toward the park on top of the hill. Sitting cross-legged on the cool grass in the shade of a tree that smells like a can of air freshener, I reach inside the bag and take the book my hand touches first.

  Zombies Slurped My Eye Sockets at Dawn.

  I look around the park. No zombies. Not even any homeless people at the moment.

  I turn to the first page.

  Violet was having a dream. A nice dream. She and Sully were hanging out at the convenience store like they used to, back in the old days. Back before the zombies came. They were drinking those slushy drinks with the bright colors. Violet’s was red. Sully’s was blue.

  “Cheers,” Violet said, lifting her cup.

  “Cheers.” Sully hoisted his own.

  They put their lips to the straws.

  Then, the awful slurping noise. Slurping, and screaming. Violet looked around the parking lot, but she couldn’t see anyone in any kind of trouble. She looked back at Sully, who smiled and winked.

  The slurping got louder. And the screaming, rising.

  Violet bolted upright, sleep torn away. On the bunk to her right, one zombie held Sully down while another’s mouth was glued to his face. Slurping.

  “My eyes!” Sully screamed. “My eyes!”

  I close the book. I’ve seen better eye-slurping-zombie novels.

  I put it back in the bag and reach for the next title.

  Eat or Be Eaten.

  This time I open the book to a random page near the middle.

  For months I’d wanted Brandonne to give me exactly the hungry look he was giving me now. But I never dreamed he’d give me this look with a spear in one hand and ketchup packets in the other. Or that I’d be gazing back at him, salivating, holding a small hatchet and a squeeze bottle of horseradish sauce. But we were the last Morsels, and this was what our lives had come to.

  My stomach growled—roared! I flipped the top of the horseradish bottle, and gripped the hatchet tightly. Then I slowly advanced upon the boy I once loved.

  I sigh, and shut the book. Then I drop it in the bag and lie back on the grass.

  The breeze asks me to close my eyes. The birds sing me a song. It seems like a good day for a daydream, if I can remember how.

  But with my eyes closed, I can’t daydream. Instead I find myself wondering why Summer has been acting more mysterious every day, and sadder. It’s like while she’s been rubbing off on me, I’ve been rubbing off on her. Then I wonder if maybe there’s been something dark underneath her sunny exterior all along.

  17

  THE NEXT AFTERNOON, we ignore alien orders at two. I arrive first and wait for Summer. I watch as she walks up the sidewalk, her face pointed down. She looks like she’s frowning, until she raises her eyes and sees me. She puts on a smile, the first smile that’s ever felt unconvincing on her. As she gets closer, she gives me a weird look.

  “What?”

  “Hello,” she says.

  “Hello back. Why are you looking at me that way?”

  “Because.” She reaches to me and pokes my shoulder. “I was thinking about how you were made up on the day we first met.”

  “Oh.”

  “And even more on the second day. Like a punk-rock corpse doll.”

  I’m not sure what to think of this, so I shift from one foot to the other.

  “It was a fun look,” she says, like she’s just decided.

  “Fun?”

  “Kind of Halloween
y.”

  I maybe frown a little.

  “But so cute.”

  I look down at my bare feet. “Thanks.”

  “Did you run out of makeup?”

  “No. I guess I just haven’t been using it lately.”

  She gasps. “You know what would be fun?”

  “What?”

  “You be me and I’ll be you!”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Make me up like a corpse doll! And you can be whatever I am. Just for today.”

  I’m suddenly not so excited. “I don’t think I can be you.” By which I mean a gorgeous surfer girl.

  Summer pushes me away with both hands, but playfully. “You totally can! Come on, let’s get your makeup!”

  I follow her to the cottage Mom and I are staying in. She walks around the hedge and to the door, like it’s her cottage, like she’s been friends with every kid who’s ever stayed here. I wonder if she has been.

  Summer waits for me to open the door, then follows me back to the bathroom. I open the medicine cabinet, then look at her.

  “You sure about this?”

  She nods fervently. “I wanna look just like you did when I first saw you at Pinkie Promise.”

  I sigh. “Okay. It’ll be ruining a good thing, but okay.”

  I take her and my makeup bag into my bedroom and sit her on the bed, where the light from the window reveals the perfection of her glowing skin.

  Perched on a stool in front of her, I begin with pale foundation, which in Summer’s case needs several applications to cover her glow. Then ivory powder, black eye shadow, black eyeliner above and below, and three passes of mascara. Just like me, back on the second day of July. Summer gradually disappears behind the makeup until she’s someone else entirely, someone I don’t recognize. Then I put her long golden hair into several ponies, doubled over to shorten them. They stick out of her head like demon horns.

  I lean back to take in the sight of her, grinning back at me, and the drama of her appearance makes my heart hammer. She looks like the beautiful warrior princess of the walking dead.

  “How do I look?”

  “Amazing.”

  She jumps up and runs to the bathroom. She screams with happiness.