The Invincible Summer of Juniper Jones

by Daven McQueen

  From the chair next to Juniper, where he had moved after milk shake number two, Ethan mopped his forehead with his apron. “I didn’t know drinking milk shakes could be so tiring,” he said.

  With a hand on her stomach, Juniper nodded. “I know those were my first milk shakes and all, but I’m thinking that’s gonna be it for me. Like, forever.”

  “I don’t blame you,” Ethan said, laughing. He spun slowly in his chair and had just made one full rotation when the shop bell rang. Assuming it was his uncle since it was almost one o’clock, he called, “Hey, Uncle Robert.”

  “Sitting on the job, huh?” came the response, but not in his uncle’s voice. Cold horror creeping down his spine, Ethan spun back toward the front of the shop to see Noah O’Neil standing in the doorway with Alex slouching beside him.

  “Scram, Noah,” Juniper said, crossing her arms.

  “Who, me?” Noah laughed. “Y’all can’t make me leave. It’s a free country.” He dropped heavily into a chair at one of the tables and Alex sat beside him, grinning.

  “Sorry, can’t sit here unless you buy something.” Ethan wasn’t sure if that was true, but he was hoping Noah didn’t know either.

  “Oh, really?” Noah said. “Fine. Then make me a milk shake. Chocolate.”

  “Make me a milk shake too,” Alex piped up a beat later.

  Ethan gritted his teeth and remained in his seat. Noah snapped his fingers. “Well, what are you waiting for? Two chocolate milk shakes. Or should I tell your uncle you refused to serve me?”

  Ethan looked at Juniper, who stared back, wide eyed. Finally, hands clenched at his sides, he stood up from the stool and marched behind the counter, barely aware of his own movements. The malt shop was silent except for the sounds of Ethan scooping ice cream, pouring milk, running the blender. Juniper sat frozen at the counter, staring at the wall. Noah and Alex lounged in their chairs, totally at ease.

  It seemed to take ages for the shakes to be done. Once he had poured them into the glasses—sloppily, so some dripped down the sides—he gave each one an angry spurt of whipped cream and tossed a cherry unceremoniously on top. Then he walked as if floating through the swinging counter door and over to Noah and Alex’s table, where he all but dropped the drinks in front of them.

  “There,” he said roughly.

  Noah examined the milk shakes, leaning over so that his cheek nearly brushed the table, and everyone seemed to be holding their breath. Ethan watched, quietly fuming, wishing he could overturn the drinks onto Noah and Alex’s laps.

  Instead, after several quiet moments, it was Noah, with a quick swipe of his hand, who knocked both glasses onto their sides. There were two loud clanks as the glasses fell over, then the creamy liquid poured onto the table and then the floor. Juniper jumped out of her seat, Ethan stared with a mix of shock and fury, and Alex and Noah laughed so hard their entire bodies shook.

  “Noah, how dare you!” Juniper cried, rushing toward them. She stopped just short of stepping in the quickly growing puddle of milk shake.

  “It was an accident,” Noah said. He stared straight at Ethan, who returned the glare with his fists clenched tightly at his sides.

  “Yeah, it was an accident,” Alex echoed. “Cool off, psycho.”

  Ethan blinked, then followed Alex’s gaze to Juniper, whose lips were suddenly trembling. “I’m sorry,” he said slowly. “What did you call her?”

  “He called her psycho,” Noah said. “I don’t know if you know, Ethan, but your pal Juniper Jones is a bit—you know.” With his eyes crossed, he waved his finger in a circle around his ear.

  “Get out.”

  Noah looked up, a challenge sparking in his eyes. “You sure you want to talk to me like that?”

  “You heard what I said.” Ethan looked at Noah, and the anger pulsing through his body made him feel like he could pick up the older boy by the finger and hurl him through the wall.

  Alex eagerly watched as Noah held Ethan’s gaze and, with infuriating slowness, leaned back in his chair and lifted each of his feet onto the soaked table, fingers linked behind his head. He didn’t say a word, but the message was clear: Make me.

  In Ethan’s mind flashed an image of Samuel Hill, staring at him with the smugness of someone who knew they had the upper hand. The memory made Ethan see red. He hardly knew what he was doing as he grabbed the table with both hands and toppled it.

  Three things happened at that moment. First, the table fell into the puddle with a loud thump, sending milk shake splattering over all of them. Second, Noah’s legs were flung into the air, and despite a desperate attempt by Alex, Noah’s chair tilted backward and onto the floor, where he lay momentarily stunned. And third, with a shrill tinkle of the bell, Uncle Robert walked through the door.

  After the crash, the silence was complete. Nobody moved or spoke for a long moment—then Uncle Robert shouted, “What is going on here?” and suddenly everyone was talking at once.

  “Your nephew attacked me—”

  “—but Uncle Robert, I swear he started it—”

  “Noah was minding his own business when—”

  “—so Mr. Shay, you gotta believe that it wasn’t Ethan’s fault!”

  Eventually, Uncle Robert, his face red, held up a hand. “Juniper,” he said, turning to her. “What happened?”

  Juniper took a big, shaky breath as everyone turned to her, and all the words came out in a rush, “Noah and Alex came in being all mean and told Ethan to make them milk shakes and then Ethan did but Noah knocked the milk shakes over and they spilled everywhere and then he wouldn’t leave when Ethan told him to and so Ethan flipped the table over but Noah deserved it!”

  From the ground, Noah yelled, “She’s lying! I was being a perfectly civil customer, and your nephew just came after me. I don’t know what’s wrong with him, Mr. Shay, he’s so violent.” All the while, Alex nodded emphatically.

  Uncle Robert turned to Noah with a look of disdain that surprised Ethan. It seemed to shock Noah too, because the boy stared up in wide-eyed silence.

  “Noah, Alex, go home,” Uncle Robert said.

  “But—”

  “Get up. Go home.”

  “Fine,” Noah snapped. Alex reached out an arm to help him up, but Noah swatted it away and pushed himself to his feet. The back of his jeans was damp with spilled milk shake. He backed toward the door, but not before casting Ethan a baleful glare.

  “You don’t even know what I could do to you,” he said. “I could make you regret this for the rest of your life.”

  Ethan opened his mouth to respond, but Uncle Robert beat him to it. “I can handle my own nephew, Noah. Go home.”

  With one last scowl, Noah shoved his way out the door, Alex on his heels. When they were gone, Ethan immediately began to speak.

  “Uncle Robert, I know what it looks like, but I swear he came after me first. He knocked over the milk shakes and I just got so mad—”

  “He was sticking up for me,” Juniper interrupted, and both Ethan and Uncle Robert turned to her. “Noah and Alex were calling me names, and Ethan stuck up for me. That’s why he knocked over the table. Don’t blame him, Mr. Shay. Please.”

  Uncle Robert was quiet for a moment, his gaze trained on the fallen table and wide puddle. Finally, he sighed. “I believe you,” he said. “Noah O’Neil is a nasty kid. Always picking on the underdogs.” Ethan let out a breath he didn’t know he’d been holding. “But you shouldn’t have done that,” Uncle Robert continued, giving his nephew a hard look. “You have to be careful how you act around here.”

  Ethan glowered, staring at the ground. “Yes, sir.”

  Uncle Robert sighed again, then walked slowly to the counter. “I’ll handle the mess,” he said. “You kids go home.”

  “Are you sure, Mr. Shay? I can—” But Uncle Robert cut Juniper off with a shake of his head and waved them tow
ard the door. Ethan stepped over the puddle as Juniper circled around it and they left the store.

  Back in the glaring sunlight, they rushed out of the center of town. They didn’t even have to look at each other: they both just immediately began speed walking down the street, their heads down. If people stared as they passed, they didn’t notice.

  Once they’d made it beneath the cover of the trees, Juniper stopped. She looked down at her skirt, which was splattered with brown streaks.

  Ethan looked at his own stained pants and shook his head. “I’m real sorry, June,” he said. “I overreacted.”

  She tilted her head to look at him. Instead of responding, she said, “Wanna go to the lake?”

  Ethan paused for a moment, then nodded, and silently she led the way. They emerged from the trees several minutes later, this time on the opposite side of the lake from Gus’s boathouse. Here, a few large rocks stuck out of the water, and Juniper dropped down cross-legged onto one of them. Ethan lowered himself down carefully beside her, his legs dangling over the edge.

  For a while, neither spoke, just watched the lake glitter in the sunlight, its gentle waves lapping against the bottoms of the rocks. Ethan still felt on edge, his heart racing, as though Noah and Alex were going to burst through the trees at any moment. He felt angry, still, but mostly afraid. He hadn’t expected to lose control that way—he’d barely realized it was happening. He thought about his uncle’s warning, then of Samuel Hill’s smirking face. He was scared to think of what might have happened if Uncle Robert hadn’t walked in when he had.

  Ethan was deep in worry when Juniper shouted his name. He figured it hadn’t been the first time she tried to get his attention. When he looked up, she was watching him with concern.

  “Hey,” she said, face serious. “I don’t know if you feel like talking, but I do. I wanted to say thanks. For standing up for me back there. Noah and Alex and other kids make fun of me a lot, and usually I just kind of take it because what else can I do, you know? But it was really nice to have someone on my side.”

  Looking back at the water, Ethan shook his head. “It wasn’t good,” he said. “It was stupid. I shouldn’t have done that.”

  “It was brave,” Juniper insisted.

  “Then being ‘brave’ is exactly what got me stuck here in the first place. And what Noah said, about what he could do to me—I don’t want to end up somewhere even worse.”

  He fell silent but felt Juniper’s questioning gaze on his face. As cicadas chirped somewhere across the lake, she softly said, “You said you got sent here because you got in a fight with a kid. But there’s more to the story, huh?”

  Ethan squeezed his eyes shut. Behind his eyelids the memory played, as it did almost every time he closed his eyes. Samuel Hill, getting close up in his face, saying those words, and Ethan, drawing back his arm—

  He took a deep breath.

  “There’s this kid at my school,” he began. “Samuel Hill.”

  Samuel had never liked Ethan—it’d been tense between them ever since they were kids. Sam, with his light-brown hair and blue eyes, would throw sand at Ethan in the playground and dump pencil shavings onto his desk. But they were young, and some kids were bullies. Besides, Ethan had had plenty of friends. He had hardly minded Samuel Hill at all.

  Then, when Ethan was ten, his mom had left. The word had spread quickly through their elementary school, and for some reason, Samuel couldn’t let it go. He began to tease Ethan incessantly, escalating through middle school, so that by high school it was nearly unbearable. But Samuel’s insults were always shallow, nonspecific. He’d call Ethan a loser, or a moron, and that was all.

  “We’d get in each other’s faces sometimes,” Ethan recounted to Juniper, kicking at the water. “Nothing major, you know—I never even touched him. It was all talk.”

  Until May of his freshman year. It had been three weeks until summer, and kids were getting restless. They’d been in line for lunch at the cafeteria, Samuel with his friends just in front of Ethan with his. In math class that morning, Samuel had spent an hour sending spitballs into Ethan’s curls, so Ethan kept his distance now.

  Ethan’s friend John, a klutzy kid who’d gone through his growth spurt earlier than the rest of them, had leaned over Ethan to grab an apple from the lunch lady. It had happened quickly—John lost his balance, knocking into Ethan, who stumbled, his empty tray shooting forward out of his hands. A few people quickly dodged, but Samuel, talking to his friends, hadn’t seen it coming. The tray had struck him right in the behind.

  “Shit,” Ethan had said, trying to melt back into the crowd of his friends. But Samuel, who had whirled around, had already seen him. His eyes were bright with anger.

  “You threw that tray at me, Harper?” Samuel had demanded, pointing at the plastic culprit on the ground. Students scattered, forming a loose ring around the two boys. “Fight!” someone had cried from the outskirts.

  “I didn’t throw anything,” Ethan had said. “Calm down.”

  But Samuel had persisted, stepping forward to nudge Ethan in the stomach with his own tray. “Calm down? When you hit me with that shit?” He nudged Ethan again.

  It was a reflex: as Samuel moved to push his tray into Ethan once again, Ethan had swept out an arm and sent the tray flying. It grazed Samuel’s shoulder and clattered to the ground a few feet away.

  The cafeteria was silent. Ethan had looked at Samuel, thinking it was over—instead, Samuel’s sneer grew deeper. “You think you can disrespect me like that?” he had demanded, pushing his chest into Ethan’s. “Huh, half breed? You think you can disrespect me?”

  Ethan had been trying to dodge the boy’s advances, but he remembered thinking that “half breed” was a new one. “Samuel,” he had said, annoyance growing. “Can you cut it out? I said I didn’t throw it.”

  Samuel had ignored him. “Well, guess what?” he said, raising his voice for the benefit of the growing crowd. “You can’t, Harper. You can’t disrespect me. Not when you’re a half breed and your mom’s a goddamn nigger.”

  Someone had gasped—maybe several people had. Remembering the moment now, Ethan couldn’t be sure. He had been seeing red. Because that word, he knew. He’d seen it written in books, heard it whispered by adults, and when he had been young, his dad had told him never to say it. And here it was, being spat in his face.

  The rest Ethan knew only from what his friends had told him later. Samuel Hill had stepped back, grinning smugly. Ethan, furious, wound up and swung. He punched Samuel three times, right in the face, until his nose gushed blood. Later, in the nurse’s station, he had washed that blood from his bruised knuckles as he’d tried to explain to the principal what had happened. It hadn’t mattered. Not to the principal, and not to his father.

  “I got suspended for the rest of the school year,” Ethan said. “My dad was pissed. I’ve never seen him so mad about anything my whole life. He didn’t talk to me for a week. Then he came into my room and told me I was spending the summer in Alabama. To ‘build character,’ he said. Learn some ‘real southern values.’ That was it. Now I’m here.”

  Ethan didn’t look at Juniper, just up at the top of the trees, where the sun was bright and high. Talking about it now made his stomach clench the way it had when his dad had come to pick him up from the principal’s office that afternoon, his face bright red and furious. Ethan had opened his mouth, about to tell him what Samuel Hill had said, but his dad had cut him off. He said, “I don’t care. That is not how you handle a problem.”

  There was a part of him that had been satisfied by the shock on Samuel Hill’s face when he sat there on the cafeteria floor, clutching his bleeding nose. But there was also a part of him that was afraid of what he’d done. Ashamed. Because he knew, had always been told, that anger was the wrong thing to feel—and that when it made an appearance, it should never be acted on. His dad had always told him to be
the bigger person, to walk away, to hold his tongue.

  Juniper, who had been silent for a while, finally cleared her throat and scooted closer to Ethan on the rock. “You shouldn’t feel bad about that,” she said slowly. “About punching Samuel Hill or knocking the table over onto Noah. They deserved it.”

  Ethan shrugged.

  “I think—” she went on, “I think it takes a real strong person to stick up for themselves. Maybe even more than it does to stick up for someone else.” She put a hand on his arm. “You don’t have to be nice all the time, Ethan. Not when people aren’t nice to you.”

  “Thanks, Juniper.” Ethan kicked at the water with his heel, just barely skimming the surface. “But I guess it’s not that simple.”

  Juniper said nothing for a long time. They both stared out over the lake. Then, eventually, Juniper said, “I’m sorry.”

  Ethan nodded. “Thanks,” he said. “Me too.” He closed his eyes, thinking about Samuel Hill and Noah O’Neil, until their faces blurred together into one fair-skinned monster rising up in his mind. He clenched his fists, imagined himself bracing against their attack. He wished that was enough.

  Nine

  Juniper showed up at Ethan’s window the next afternoon, just as she had that first morning they’d spent on the lake. Ethan was half asleep and listening to a record when the sound of Juniper’s fist against his window sent him jolting out of bed. When he turned, she was standing at the glass with a wide grin on her face and a ratty wicker basket in her arms. She motioned for him to open the window, and he obliged.

  “Hey,” he said, as she pushed the basket through the window and scrambled in after it, “whatcha doing?”

  Juniper looked at him in surprise and opened the basket to reveal stacks of paper in all sizes and colors, a roll of tape, and two perfectly sharpened pencils. “It’s time to get planning,” she said. “Summer’s almost a third of the way over!”

  She sat down cross-legged on the floor and looked at him expectantly. Ethan sat down beside her. Juniper began to guide him—Tape this sheet to that one. No, not that one, that one, and turn it the other way—and he followed her instructions with a laugh. She didn’t mention the incident the previous day, not even once, and Ethan was relieved. He was worried that everything he had told her might have given her second thoughts about being his friend, but as she scrunched her nose at his taping skills and reprimanded his sloppy handwriting, she didn’t seem to feel any differently about him at all.