“Nice, huh?” Juniper asked. Ethan nodded, trailing her alongside the glittering water and toward a shingled gray boathouse at the edge of the trees. At the door, she handed him the picnic basket and rapped lightly against the wood.
“That you, June?” a gruff voice asked from within.
“Who else?” Juniper rocked onto her toes, and a moment later, the door swung open to reveal an aging but clearly athletic man. His teeth sliced through his salt and pepper beard as he stepped through the doorway and offered the energetic redhead a crooked smile.
“This the boy you were telling me about?” he asked. “The Harper boy?”
“That’s me.” Ethan stepped forward and shook the man’s outstretched hand.
“I’m Gus,” he said, nodding briskly. “Knew your dad growing up. Good guy.” He grunted. “Anyway, bet you kids want to go out on the lake. Come with me.”
They followed him into the dimly lit boathouse, where a line of rowboats were tied up along the dock.
“This one!” Juniper cried, stopping in front of a wooden boat that looked exactly like all the others. She all but leapt into it, sending the boat rocking. “Welcome aboard the SS Juniper,” she said, holding out a hand to help Ethan climb in after her. “It’s named after me.”
“That’s right,” Gus affirmed, unhooking the SS Juniper’s rope and tossing it into the boat. “And she’s a real star out on the lake.” He leaned off the dock and pushed aside the wooden doors, revealing the lake in all its cerulean glory, then handed Juniper a pair of oars.
As she positioned them above the water, Ethan reached out tentatively. “Do you want me to—?”
Juniper snorted. “Please. Leave the real work to the girls who can handle it.” And with a surreptitious wink, she cut the oars through the water and sent them gliding out into the glassy blue.
The air smelled different out here. Ethan took a breath and thought he must be inhaling the entire forest, that saplings must be sprouting between the bones of his rib cage. Juniper chatted up a storm as she rowed, and though he tried to listen, he found himself mesmerized by the rhythm of his lungs. Trees surrounded them, casting their long shadows across the water. It was a dance of the senses, touch and smell and taste, and another sense: the feeling of calm.
“And, we’ve arrived,” Juniper announced, snapping Ethan from his reverie. He looked around to find that they were in the middle of the lake, floating on the open water. Juniper laid the oars across the bow and reached for the picnic basket. “From here, we drift.”
Ethan craned his neck, taking in the sunlight, the tumbling leaves, and the mist of the water as it carried them along on timid waves. “Wow,” he said.
“Wow is right.” Juniper paused for a moment to glance around the lake and smile. “This is my second favorite place in the whole entire town.”
Ethan raised an eyebrow. “Second? What’s your first?”
“Oh, no, you don’t.” She wagged a finger in his face. “That’s for another day. For now, take one before they get cold.” She pushed the basket toward him and, looking in, he saw that it was filled to the brim with misshapen biscuits that all seemed a little bit burned. Juniper gave them a sheepish glance. “My baking skills could use some work,” she said. “But I also have jam, and jam fixes everything.”
Ethan stared at her, with her wild red hair and big blue eyes, hunching over a basket of botched biscuits, and maybe the absurdity of their makeshift friendship hit him all at once, or maybe there was something left over from the bike ride, but suddenly he found himself laughing relentlessly. He doubled over until his face was nearly pressed against the damp wooden hull, until he was coughing and nearly crying, until Juniper had joined in and their combined glee made the little rowboat quake.
When the guffaws had subsided into spurts of loud chuckles, Ethan clutched his aching stomach and took a shivering breath. “I don’t know,” he gasped, “what’s actually so funny.”
“Neither do I,” Juniper replied, brushing tears from her eyes. “But by gosh, isn’t that just the best way to laugh?”
It took another short eternity for them to catch their breath enough to handle Juniper’s breakfast. They sat on the lake and ate the smoky, but surprisingly soft, biscuits dipped straight into jars of strawberry jam, and even Juniper was silent. They ate until their happy-sore stomachs were filled to the brim, then sat there as the boat drifted in lazy spirals across the lake, watching the clouds go by.
“That one looks like a rabbit.”
“No way, it’s definitely a platypus.”
“Juniper, not every cloud can look like a platypus.”
“Says who, the cloud police?”
Ethan elbowed Juniper in the side, a gesture she returned with a smack to the chin. They were each lying on one of the two center benches, their shoes discarded and their toes grazing the water. The clouds took a stroll overhead, slow and gentle.
Sighing, Ethan lifted himself into a sitting position, twisting once in each direction to snap the cricks out of his back. Juniper remained where she was, her eyes closed and her hands folded across her stomach. A peaceful smile tugged at her lips.
In the past hour, in between cloud watching and biscuit eating, Juniper Jones had laid bare her invincible summer, piece by piece. She’d been thinking about it, she said, since that day at the malt shop. Ethan wasn’t sure how she remembered it all. She wanted to have a race through the entire town, but holding kites. She wanted to organize a sock hop night at the Malt. To plant sunflowers on every front lawn in Ellison. To paint a mural on the empty wall outside the general store. To climb to the top of Big Red, allegedly the tallest tree in all of Alabama. She wanted to go to the movies in Montgomery, learn how to use a record player, read twenty-one books in a week, put on a puppet show. And the list went on. She’d scatter her ideas through their conversation like she was coming up with them on the spot.
“And that’s why Mrs. Westbury has warts on her feet,” she’d say. “Also, I want to knit scarves for all five of Mr. Callahan’s new puppies. I don’t know how to knit, though. Oh, that too! I want to learn how to knit.”
Ethan wasn’t sure how, but something about the upside down and sideways way she spoke made sense to him. He mentally made a note of all her summer plans that were plausible—when she suggested holding her breath for two hours, he carefully dissuaded her—and did not once wonder if they would actually follow through on all of them. She made it all seem effortlessly possible.
At one point he had said, “You know what we should do? We should get a really long piece of paper, like a scroll out of an adventure flick, and we should write everything down. We can hang it up somewhere, and every time we finish something we can check it off.”
Juniper had grabbed his arm and shook it, squealing, “Yes! Ethan Charlie Harper, you are an absolute genius!”
Now, Ethan crossed his legs on the bench and glanced over at her, lying there with her eyes still feigning sleep. On a whim, he passed a hand over her face. No response. He poked her in the side. Only the slightest twitch. “Hey, Juniper,” he said loudly, “I think you’re dead. Hope you don’t mind, I’m gonna toss your body into the lake now.”
He reached toward her with both hands and was mere inches away when she leapt to her feet and then dropped heavily onto her butt, rocking the boat so hard that water splashed them both from over the side.
“No, I can’t swim!” she shrieked, then snapped her fingers. “That’s another thing! I want to learn how to swim.”
Ethan snorted, shaking his head incredulously. “You’re telling me,” he said slowly, “that you’ve lived in a lake town your entire life and you’ve never learned how to swim?”
“Well, no one ever taught me!” Juniper crossed her arms and huffed, then muttered, “Also, the lake water is really cold.”
“Ha! Maybe we should call you Chicken instead of Starfish.�
�
“How dare you!”
“Relax,” Ethan said playfully. “Look, I’ll teach you to swim, all right? That’ll be an easy one.”
She shoved his shoulder again, but this time with a hint of a smile. “Fine. Chameleon.” Ethan raised an eyebrow. “Chameleon,” she repeated. “I’m Starfish, and you’re Chameleon.”
Ethan frowned. “How come?”
“Because,” said Juniper Jones, “you’re the quiet type. Not too noticeable. Not in a bad way, of course—it’s just that I think back where you’re from, you don’t have a problem fitting in.” She paused, suddenly troubled. “But not here. Here in Ellison, things are different, and you stick out like a sore thumb.”
Juniper’s watch read noon when Ethan realized that his aunt and uncle didn’t know where he was.
“Relax,” Juniper assured him, “Mr. and Mrs. Shay love me. They won’t care. But if you really wanna, we can head back to shore.”
Ethan nodded, distracted now because the thought of his aunt and uncle had reminded him of the broadcast the night before. The black schoolgirl had been gone from his mind for these few hours—now, she suddenly reappeared. He glanced sideways at Juniper as she drew two more biscuits from the basket.
“Think fast,” she said, and tossed one at Ethan. Hardly paying attention, he made a weak grab for the flying object, but it flew through his fingers and splashed into the lake. Juniper glared at him as she leaned over the edge of the boat to retrieve it. “Way to go, klutz.”
Ethan said nothing for long enough that Juniper became preoccupied with the biscuit in her hands. When he finally decided to speak, her mouth was full.
“June?” he asked as she swallowed. “You know things about, you know . . . things.”
“Yes, Ethan,” Juniper replied solemnly. “I know many things. About things.”
“Oh, cut it out. Look, I don’t know if you watch the news—maybe not—but anyway, on NBC last night, there was this one report.” He explained the situation, and she listened quietly. “And I just—is that really the way things are here?”
Ethan paused when he saw the way Juniper was staring at him, her eyes wide and her mouth slightly agape. She’d finished the biscuit, but she swallowed again.
“Yeah, Ethan,” she murmured. “In Ellison it’s a little different ’cause the town’s so small, but in the big cities like Montgomery and Birmingham? It’s the law. A place for colored folks and a place for white folks. Even on the bus. Everything is separate.”
Ethan blinked slowly. He looked down at his hands, several shades darker than Juniper’s, and thought about that bus. “Why?”
Juniper looked at him strangely. “Say, Ethan, where did you say you’re from, again?”
“Arcadia,” he said. “City up in Washington state.”
Juniper tilted her head, her eyes troubled. “And when your dad got mad and decided to send you here, he never talked about, you know—what it would be like?”
Ethan thought about Arcadia—its roads dense with shops and houses, its sidewalks scattered with pedestrians. When he rode the school bus every day, he sat wherever he pleased. Growing up he’d had friends who looked like him and friends who didn’t, and until Samuel Hill came along, he’d hardly noticed the differences at all.
“No.” He laughed slightly. “Then again, he doesn’t talk to me much about anything. But he definitely didn’t mention any of this.”
“Well,” Juniper said with a long sigh, “I guess I don’t know what to say. This is how things are around here, Ethan. All the time. For people like you.”
It all played back in his mind: the stares, the women in the general store, the fight with Noah. All because he was colored. Here, he was a deviation from the norm—and that was a threat.
“I can’t tell you why they’re like that,” Juniper went on. “I’ve been trying to figure it out too. The way I see it, you know, people are like the different paint circles on a palette. You’ve got your reds and blues and greens and yellows, and you need all of them to make a painting. But around here, they don’t see it that way.” She shrugged. “They never have. And last year, when that black boy came to town and there was the whole—”
Ethan frowned as she froze. “What?” he asked quickly, leaning forward. Juniper shook her head, settling back onto the bench.
“Nothing,” she assured him, picking up the oars and slipping them into position. “We should go.”
“Juniper. What boy? What happened?”
“It’s not important,” she said. “None of it is.” She forced a dim and tired smile. “Listen, I’m real sorry your dad decided to send you here. Not because I don’t want you here, but because they don’t. And they won’t let you forget it.” She cut the oars expertly through the water, sending the boat forward. “But while you’re here, I’m gonna do my best to make this a good summer for you. I pinky swear.”
Seven
The forest paths were the greatest gift that Juniper Jones could have ever given Ethan Charlie Harper. That Sunday afternoon, he needed the time to think. The sun was high above the trees, and the air was thick and damp when he strapped on his sneakers and took off down the lane that wound away from Aunt Cara’s house and into the trees.
It was Father’s Day. Ethan had known it was coming, but was planning to feign forgetfulness and hope his aunt and uncle wouldn’t notice. And they hadn’t—after breakfast, they put on their church clothes and headed off to Mass with only a simple good-bye thrown over their shoulders. Ethan had relaxed then, and was just settling down with a comic when the phone on the side table rang.
Ethan hesitated, glancing a few times between the comic and the phone. The ringing continued. Finally, Ethan leaned over the love seat and lifted the blue phone receiver from its cradle. Wrapping the cord around his wrist, he said in his most inoffensive voice, “Shay residence, Ethan speaking.”
“Hi, Ethan,” came a familiar voice.
Oh. In the corner of the seat, Ethan pulled his knees up to his chest. “Hi, Dad,” he said. After a long pause, he added, “Happy Father’s Day.”
“Thanks.” Another pause. “I just wanted to see how you were doing. We haven’t spoken in a while.”
Not since you left me here, Ethan had thought, but held his tongue, instead saying, “Yeah.”
The sun beat down on the back of his neck as he wound through the trees. Sweat coated his arms and dripped down his cheeks, but Ethan forced himself to run harder. He thought that if his entire body was focused on this movement, he would be able to distract himself. But with every slap of his sneakers against the dusty trail, his conversation with his father did another lap through his mind.
It had taken a moment for Ethan’s dad to speak again. The two had never been particularly communicative with each other, but this awkwardness was new. It had started just after the incident with Samuel Hill and, Ethan could see now, had only gotten worse.
“So . . . how are things going?” his dad had asked at last.
Ethan had opened his mouth, then closed it again. Should he tell the truth? For some reason, the thought of admitting the torment he’d endured made Ethan’s face hot with shame. It felt like losing to admit to his father that this scheme had worked—that he regretted what he did, that he wished when stupid Samuel Hill had said what he said, Ethan had just turned and walked away.
“Good,” Ethan said at last. “Things are good. I, um—I made a friend.”
“Oh!” His dad sounded genuinely surprised, but caught himself in time to add, “That’s great, Son. I’m glad. What’s his name?”
“Her name. Juniper Jones.”
“Jones,” his dad said slowly, his voice growing distant for a moment. “Yes, that’s right. I knew her parents, back in the day. Cara was friends with her mom in grade school.”
Ethan frowned, realizing he’d never heard Juniper talk about her parents, on
ly her aunt. He didn’t know anything about her family. But this thought lasted only a moment, because then his father was saying, “If she’s as cute as her mom was, you’re a pretty lucky guy, Ethan.”
Ethan bristled. His dad would do this sometimes, comment on the girls he befriended, and it made him self-conscious and uneasy in a way he couldn’t quite place. “It’s not like that, Dad,” he said tightly, even as Juniper’s smiling face flashed through his mind.
“All right, all right, sorry.” Ethan could practically hear him holding up his hands in defense. “Hold on, Anthony and Sadie want to talk to you.”
“Okay, well, I—” Ethan started, but his dad had already passed the phone.
“Hi, Ethan,” the twins said in unison, their voices loud through the receiver. Ethan held the phone slightly away from his ear, as if their spit could travel through the telephone line.
“Hey, guys,” he said. “How’s summer school?”
“Summer camp,” Anthony corrected him.
“Yeah, summer school is for losers,” Sadie added.
“Right, sorry, summer camp—”
“It’s great.” Sadie interrupted him. “We go swimming and make crafts and take the kayaks out on the lake. Have you ever been in a kayak, Ethan?”
“Well, actually, my friend Juniper and I—”
But his siblings had already begun to talk over him and each other as they told him about the bugs they’d collected during lunchtime. Ethan smiled to himself. He had never been close to the twins, and often found them annoying, but he still had a soft spot for them. When their mom had left, he’d been the one to pick up many of the duties—changing diapers, giving baths, remembering which foods they wouldn’t spit out all over the table. He’d been only ten then, and Anthony and Sadie certainly didn’t remember it, but those memories made him feel closer to them anyway.
The Invincible Summer of Juniper Jones Page 6