Summer and July

by Paul Mosier

  As the light grows in the eastern sky, giving an eerie shimmer to the fog sliding off the waves, Summer pops up and shreds the waves again and again. It’s absolutely sick. After each wave caught, she grins and shakas at Hank and me from the shallows, then turns and heads back to the break zone for another ride. I watch her and learn until I can almost picture myself doing it.

  Finally she drags her board onto the beach and unleashes herself. She bends down at the water’s edge and picks up a length of seaweed, fresh from the salt water. She works at it as she approaches, fashioning it into a wreath. As the sun peeks over the horizon, she kneels beside Hank and ties it around his head.

  “My surf prince.” She kisses his cheek.

  Summer sits beside Hank, holding his limp hand, facing the waves. Then she leans her head on his bony shoulder, and for a while I’m just a silent prop, there to keep Hank from falling back. And I’m totally okay with it, I’m so much more than okay with it, with watching this, being present to witness this.

  The ocean sends its breezes, the waves crash, the seagulls cry.

  The wisps of fog dissipate.

  An old woman with rolled-up jeans searches for shells at the water’s edge.

  Then the first shift of lifeguards arrives, six of them in red shorts and white T-shirts, who will spread to the lifeguard shacks up and down the beach. They come to us. They know Summer, and they know Hank, and they talk to him like he can hear them. They’re surfers with jobs, but mainly they’re surfers, kidding him, even though Hank can’t hear their jokes. He couldn’t laugh anyway, and neither can they, not really.

  Finally they slide Hank onto a surfboard and lift him at the count of three, ’cause that’s how lifeguards do it. They look like pallbearers as they carry him to his wheelchair, away from the ocean, away from the surf.

  24

  IT’S JULY 28, and I still haven’t caught a wave. Summer and I have been at it for three hours today, and I’m wiped out from wiping out. I’m noodle-armed from soaking in the miso, popping up and falling off. Finally I feel defeated.

  “Let’s pig out at the snack shack,” Summer says as we walk from the water. “It’s an important part of the training program.”

  I smile half-heartedly. We stuff our towels in our beach bags and head away from the shore, boards under our arms.

  As our feet leave the sand and hit the sidewalk, we see that there’s a line at the snack shack. We claim a table with our boards, and head toward the counter.

  “Uh-oh,” Summer says, stopping short.

  “What?” I follow her gaze to the two boys standing at the back of the line. It’s the two jerks we saw on the Fourth of July, and again at the party at the Big Kahuna’s. The two jerks we can’t seem to get rid of. “Oh.”

  Summer stands straight. “Come on. I’m sick of avoiding them. Let’s get this fight over with.” She leads me to the end of the queue, directly behind the boys.

  I’m nervous, worried about what might happen, what mean things they might say. But as we stand behind them, as I observe them, the boys look smaller than they did on the Fourth, or at the party. They both have the same skater haircut, which suddenly seems like a sign of their insecurity. Both sets of skinny legs poke from baggy shorts and end at their checkered Vans. Each holds a skateboard.

  We stand there for a moment before Summer pokes the taller one in the back. He turns to face us, as does his friend.

  “Oh, you,” he says to Summer with a sneer. Then he looks me up and down. “Nice job breathing life into the corpse.” He says it nastily. He must be referring to my punk-Goth look melting away in the sun and surf.

  “Hey, appropriately named Wade,” Summer says. “I just wanted you to know that I forgive you for being one of a zillion guys who suddenly started showing interest in me when Hank went into a coma.” She turns to the side and spits on the pavement to show her disgust. The quieter boy looks down at the spit like he’s afraid it’ll come to life. “It was super classy of you to only have the courage to get in my hair after my big brother could no longer watch over me.”

  Wade looks stricken. “I—”

  “And I don’t really care that you’re goofy-footed. It’s more that you suck and you’re a kook.”

  Wade’s mouth hangs open, eyes glassy. He turns away awkwardly.

  The friend looks from Summer to me. He furrows his brow, then turns and stares up at the menu board.

  Summer glances from side to side, then lifts her chin to face the menu. She doesn’t look like she’s deciding what to eat. Nor does she look triumphant, like she just slayed a bully or whatever.

  I look at the menu board, since everyone else is, then at the back of the taller boy. Wade. He moves his skateboard from his right arm to his left, then back to his right. He has a woven-thread friendship bracelet on his left wrist. Maybe he made it for himself. Or someone across the ocean in China made it and he bought it at a tourist shop, the kind Mom would find charming.

  “Wanna split some onion rings?” Summer asks dejectedly.

  I nod. “Sure.”

  I look behind me. There’s nobody there. We’re still the last in the queue.

  I look up in the sky as though I expect something to be there. But it’s just the sky.

  Finally Wade and his friend have ordered and left the counter, and it’s our turn.

  Summer steps up. “Yo. Onion rings, please. And a mango smoothie for me.”

  “Coconut for me,” I say.

  “Hey, Summer.” The girl at the counter rings us up. “Ten bucks.”

  Summer frowns. “Did you get both our smoothie orders?”

  The girl nods. “Yep.”

  “And the onion rings?”

  “He paid for the onion rings.” She nods toward the tables. “The taller kid. I guess he knows your jam.”

  “Oh.” Summer fumbles with some dollars. I give her mine.

  We pay, and tip the plastic jar, which says cool people tip. Summer is quiet as we wait for our food, and as we stop by the condiment station for ketchup and hot sauce and napkins. She’s lost in her thoughts as she fills up five, six little cups of ketchup, putting a bit of hot sauce on top of each. She reaches for a seventh.

  “Maybe that’s enough?” I ask.

  Summer doesn’t answer, but puts the empty cup back on the stack. She stares at the tray in front of her, then grabs a few napkins from the dispenser. She closes her eyes, holds them shut for a moment. Tightly. Then she turns suddenly toward the tables. I hurry by her side, a smoothie in each hand.

  There’s one open table where we stowed our boards, but Summer veers with determination toward the one the boys are sitting at, beneath a big umbrella, just off the sidewalk in the sand. I stay by her side.

  The boys look up. Summer stands stiffly with the tray held in front of her.

  “Two,” she says, addressing Wade, “it was nice of you to buy the O-rings. And one, I’m sorry for what I said about you being a sucky kook and appropriately named. And all the other trash talk I’ve been slinging the past several months.”

  The friend, the shorter one, clears his throat. “Appropriately named was actually pretty solid.”

  Wade throws half a french fry at him.

  “And,” Summer says, “you’re absolutely sick on the sidewalks. Maybe sometime you could pass along some tips.”

  “Likewise with you and the waves,” Wade says. “You are most definitely Hank’s sister.”

  Wade’s words cause the tray in Summer’s hand to tilt, almost spilling the basket of onion rings and all the little ketchup cups, which slide toward the front of it. Fortunately I’m holding both smoothies, one in each hand.

  “That’s, like, the most righteous thing anyone’s ever said to me.” Summer looks down, levels the tray. “Well. Thanks for the grub. Hang loose.”

  Wade gives the shaka. His friend does too. I raise a smoothie to them both, which seems silly somehow. Like it’s less cool than the shaka. But I guess someone needs to be holding the smooth
ies.

  We turn to leave, but Summer stops and looks back at the boys. “Also, it was solid of you to try to be a friend to me after Hank got hurt. I guess I just wasn’t ready.”

  Wade furrows his brow and nods like it’s cool and it’s no problem. But he looks overcome with emotion. Like he’s gonna cry any second.

  As I sit with Summer at our table, the onion rings taste so real they bring tears to my eyes. I also finally understand fully why Summer puts hot sauce in the ketchup. It’s just like everything else about her—wanting the most excitement, the most adventure from everything. Wanting whatever is the opposite of being in a vegetative state. As I think of this, our fingers bump, reaching for the same onion ring at the same moment.

  “Yours,” she says, and waits.

  “No, yours.”

  Summer smiles, but her eyes are glossy. She takes the onion ring, dips, eats. I stop watching her and take one for myself.

  “What just happened?” I ask. “With Wade?”

  Summer shakes her head. “Hank was always cool to everybody. He is always cool to everybody.” The half-eaten onion ring dangles from her fingers as she stares across the sand, across the ocean. “But boys my age have always been intimidated by him because he’s a legend on the waves. Best junior surfer in SoCal. Then when he got hurt, a bunch of them started coming around, acting all friendly to me. I couldn’t tell if they were just being nice or whether they were trying to . . .” Summer sighs. “I don’t know. Make me their girlfriend or whatever. And I hated both possibilities, because they only started talking to me because Hank was . . .”

  Gone. Summer doesn’t finish the sentence, but that’s what I hear in my head. She dips the rest of the onion ring in the ketchup and hot sauce, puts it in her mouth.

  “It wasn’t their fault, what happened to Hank,” she says. “But I hated them anyway.” She reaches for her smoothie, and looks to me with hopeless eyes. “Who’s gonna watch over me now?”

  All I can do is reach my hand to hers. I wish I could say I will watch over you, but in three days, I’ll be gone.

  25

  EXHAUSTED FROM A morning picking up garbage on the sand with the Beachcombers and an afternoon chasing waves, Summer and I walk from the shore to Main Street, surfboards under our arms. I may look more like a legit surfer with darker skin, stronger limbs, and natural highlights in my hair, but I still haven’t caught a wave. I’ve gotten as far as popping up properly and seeing the shoreline in front of me lots of times, but when it comes to the drop, I always wipe out. Sometimes the wave slips away from me and sometimes I fall in front of it and get crushed, but I never get it right. I’m trying not to let Summer see how discouraged I feel, but I’m running out of time.

  The list of goals in the drawer is noisy in my head. I’ve made progress on almost all of them, but this goal has no shades of gray. When I’m home in Michigan and looking back at my month in Ocean Park, either I caught a wave or I didn’t.

  It’s the twenty-ninth of July, and everything is about to end.

  I flash a smile at Otis as we walk inside Pinkie Promise, ’cause that’s the new me. He doesn’t ask me if I caught a wave. Not just because he’s helping a family of obvious tourists in front of us, but also ’cause he’s asked a few times already, and he knows he’ll hear it from me if I do. He’ll be able to see it on my face.

  When it’s our turn to order, Summer looks into the case at the featured flavors while I look at her. The light from inside the refrigerated display shines off her eyes. Though we’re indoors, her golden hair flashes as she pushes it behind the ear facing me. Her skin glows as though the sun were trapped beneath it.

  There are only eight flavors every day, which is one of the things I like about this place. I don’t have to go completely crazy making up my mind.

  Summer looks into the case and tilts her head. “The pistachio looks sad.”

  She’s right—only a little pistachio remains, chased to the corners of the container.

  Behind the counter, Otis clears his throat. I look at him, and he’s looking back at me.

  “The pistachio is bummed out because summer’s almost gone,” he says.

  I feel like he’s talking about me, that I’m the pistachio and Summer is the summer. It’s weird to compare my feelings to pistachio ice cream, but that’s what it feels like.

  Summer nods like she’s come to a decision after extensive deliberation. “Then I’ll have the pistachio. To cheer it up.”

  Otis smiles and begins scooping.

  “With whipped cream,” she adds.

  “You got it, Chiefette.”

  Then Summer turns to me. She looks happy.

  “Pistachio is the flavor you ordered when I first saw you,” she says. “Way back on the first of July.”

  “You remember,” I say.

  “Of course. Do you remember what I had?”

  I think for a moment. “You were behind me. So I was already outside eating mine when you got yours.”

  Summer smiles, kind of a disappointed smile. But I feel like she knows I’m not really telling the truth. Because I do remember. I remember her coming outside holding her cup, and I remember that it was cherries jubilee, with whipped cream and a maraschino cherry on top, and that she tilted her head to bite at the whipped cream, then saw me watching her, and smiled.

  Otis gives Summer her pistachio. The lights of her eyes shine brighter.

  “How about you?” Otis asks.

  “The same, please.”

  Otis goes to work scooping mine. I turn to Summer and watch her take the cherry off the top.

  “These bear little resemblance to actual cherries,” she says, and bites it from the stem. “Like they’ve been sent away to fake camp and returned as candy.”

  I smile. At her voice, at her words. At her.

  “Do you wanna eat it on the bench outside?” she asks.

  “Sure.”

  I look from her to Otis, who holds my pistachio at arm’s length. I take it from him.

  “On the house today,” he says. “Since you brought happiness to some sad pistachio.”

  Summer puts her hands on the counter and leans forward. “I love you, Otis.” Then she turns and beckons me to follow her.

  “Thanks, Otis,” I say.

  We pass through the door of the little shop and onto the sidewalk of Main Street. We sit on the bench against the window.

  “Cheers,” Summer says, holding her cup to mine.

  “Cheers,” I say. We tap cups.

  We eat and watch everything move past in the cool breeze—a letter carrier with a canvas bag over his shoulder, who waves at Otis but has nothing for him, and cars, and a family holding boogie boards under their arms, and a tiny dog on a leash walking beside a woman who looks unhappy behind her designer sunglasses.

  I eat my way through the whipped cream to the pistachio. It’s so good. It’s so good it makes me sad. And I hate that something can be so good it makes me feel sad.

  “I’m gonna ask Otis for more whipped cream,” Summer says. “Are you in?”

  I frown. “It’s kinda mean to use your charm to get something free from him.”

  Summer gives me a smile like I’m kooky. “Charm? Otis is, like, practically a man. And all he cares about is surfing anyway. But I really do love him. He’s a peach.”

  “Whatever.” I poke my ice cream with the spoon. “No thanks.”

  She stands. “Be right back.”

  I don’t watch her as she turns to go inside, ’cause it’s weird to be constantly staring at her. Instead I watch a Big Blue Bus pass on its way down to Venice. Then I see a homeless man stoop over a garbage can and take a paper bag out, look inside it, then drop it back in the can.

  I notice that the light of day is weaker than it was when I arrived. The days are growing fewer. They are almost gone.

  Summer breaks the spell of melancholy as she comes through the door. “Score!” She sits beside me on the bench, her depleted ice cream renewed with
a ridiculously high tower of whipped cream. I watch her take a bite. Again she doesn’t use a spoon, and it’s left all over her mouth. She licks some of it away.

  “Is there a place like this where you live?” she asks. She turns to me, and I glance across to the sunny side of Main Street.

  “Not as cool as this.” I look back at her. I watch as she uses her spoon now to dig at the pistachio, taking a little whipped cream with it.

  “You know what makes this place so great?” She taps her cup with the spoon. “Besides Otis and extra whipped cream, and the deliciousness, and how it’s a perfect way to reinvigorate yourself after an afternoon getting crushed by waves?”

  I feed myself another bite, and shake my head. I look at my suntanned bare feet, resting on either side of a cigarette butt on the sidewalk. I’m listening, waiting, but Summer doesn’t say anything, so finally I look at her. She’s smiling at me.

  “Wait.” She reaches into her canvas bag and takes out her phone. She taps the cracked screen a few times, then turns it around to face me.

  “What am I looking at?”

  “Her. She’s the reason this place is so great.”

  I take the phone from her and zoom in to the picture. It’s some girl on the beach. Her hair is wet and laced with a strand of seaweed, draped across her face. She’s laughing. I’m guessing she just rode a sick wave and got crushed. Good for her. I hope she choked on a Neptune cocktail.

  I shrug and hand the phone to Summer. “Who is she?”

  Summer puts her fanned-out hand on her chest, her eyes and mouth gaping. “Are you kidding me?”

  I shake my head.

  “Look again.” She passes the phone back.

  I stare at the girl in the picture. She looks supremely happy, wild and careless. Her eyes are as green as the seaweed that hangs across her open mouth. Her teeth shine brilliantly.

  It’s totally annoying.

  Then my eye catches a mole over the girl’s lip. I zoom in.

  I turn her around in my mind: It’s above her lip on the left, slightly raised.

  My free hand rises to my own lips, the left side. My fingertip finds the small, raised black mark.