The Invincible Summer of Juniper Jones

by Daven McQueen

  “Ethan?” Aunt Cara called after Juniper had been there for about half an hour. “Are you talking to someone?” She opened the door before he could respond, and did a double take. She first seemed to notice the floor, almost completely covered in papers now—then she looked up and saw Juniper Jones, sitting in the middle of the mess with a big smile on her face.

  “Hi, Mrs. Shay!” Juniper said brightly.

  Aunt Cara looked at her for a moment, then fixed them both with a confused smile. “Hi, Juniper,” she said, shaking her head. “How—when did you get here?”

  “Oh, not too long ago. I climbed through the window!”

  “I see. That’s right, Robert mentioned the two of you were friends.”

  Ethan grimaced, expecting his aunt to be upset, but to his surprise, she seemed to be holding back a laugh.

  “Ethan’s my best friend.” Juniper corrected his aunt. “As of a couple weeks ago. See, I have this plan to have this amazing, invincible summer, so anyway, I told Ethan about my plan and he agreed that it’s an amazing plan, and now we’re best friends and we’re gonna go on adventures and have the best summer anyone has ever had, ever.”

  She finished with a gulping breath.

  “Well,” said Aunt Cara, smiling, “that is certainly some story.”

  “Sorry, Aunt Cara,” Ethan said sheepishly. “I shoulda told you she was here.”

  But Aunt Cara shook her head. “No, that’s all right, honey. I’m glad to see that y’all are friends. But next time, Juniper, maybe you could use the front door?”

  Juniper grinned and gave Aunt Cara a mock salute. “Will do, ma’am,” she said. “Just call me Juniper Starfish Uses-the-Front-Door Jones.”

  It took a week to plan their invincible summer. A week of meeting after Ethan finished at work, of sitting by the lake or at Aunt Cara’s kitchen table with biscuits and chicken sandwiches, and of pieces of paper secured together with tape. Soon, it was a blend of his messy scribbles and her neat cursive loops, barely legible even to their eyes.

  “Community garden,” Juniper would shout, and Ethan would scrawl it onto the page. “Discover a new planet! Write a book! Compose a song on the mandolin!”

  “See Frank Sinatra in concert,” Ethan suggested one day.

  Juniper scoffed. “Bo-ring. See Elvis Presley in concert.”

  “No way, I can’t stand Elvis. I don’t understand the whole hip routine.” He stood up on the grass beside the lake and attempted to demonstrate a pelvic thrust.

  Juniper winced. Leaning over the paper, she added, “Convert Ethan to an Elvis fan. Also, teach him to dance.”

  Other days, they would be starved for ideas, biting on the backs of their pencils and staring at the makeshift scroll with furrowed brows.

  “How about,” Ethan would suggest, then trail off into silence.

  “Oh!” Juniper would exclaim, jumping to her feet. “What if we—wait, actually, maybe not . . .”

  It wasn’t until a week later, sitting on Aunt Cara’s front porch with stomachs full of chicken sandwiches, that they put the finishing touches on their list.

  “We, Juniper Jones and Ethan Charlie Harper,” Juniper wrote in curling script, “hereby declare that we will follow this list to the best of our ability and that we will have what is, for all intents and purposes, an invincible summer.”

  She signed her name, two big Js with a lot of wavy lines between, then slid the paper over to Ethan. Rolled out flat, it stretched all the way across Aunt Cara’s front porch. He wondered, absently, how many days of summer it would take to finish everything. He never once considered it impossible.

  He scratched a signature next to Juniper’s.

  “I feel like I just signed the Declaration of Independence.”

  “No, Ethan,” she chastised him, sticking a finger in his face. “You’ve signed something much, much more important. This is the most important document in the history of mankind.”

  She looked at Ethan seriously for a long moment before bursting into loud, shaking laughter. Ethan grinned, rolling his eyes.

  “You’re such a nerd,” he teased. “Come on, let’s roll it up.”

  It took their combined efforts—and a lot of tape—to roll their earthshaking decree into a tight scroll. “I hope you remember what was on here,” Ethan remarked, “because we won’t be unrolling this anytime soon.”

  “Of course,” Juniper said dismissively, looking at Ethan through the scroll like it was a telescope. “And anyway, if we forget, we can improvise. This invincible summer has already set sail, Ethan. It can’t be derailed.”

  Ethan looked at her in amusement. “Boats don’t sail on train tracks, Starfish.”

  “Whatever, Chameleon. Maybe I’ll invent one that can.”

  “I don’t doubt that you will.”

  Juniper grinned smugly and handed Ethan the scroll. “Anyway, two things. First of all, it is absolutely urgent that you come with me right now to a super-top secret location. It’s a matter of life and death.” She ignored Ethan’s skeptical frown. “Second, I have another super-top secret location where we can hide this scroll, but we can only do that after we visit the first secret location, because . . . well, that’s just how it works. So go tell your aunt that we’re leaving, and I’ll meet you around back in five minutes.” She held up her hand, palm flat, fingers splayed. “Five minutes, Chameleon. Don’t you dare be late.”

  “Aye-aye, Starfish.”

  As Juniper scurried off to get her bike, Ethan cradled the scroll to his chest and stepped inside the house. It was early evening; the sun was just beginning to dive into the horizon, and Aunt Cara was listening to the second episode of a five-part series of Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar. She sat on a stool in the kitchen, her fingertips resting on her stomach and her neck craned toward the little green radio.

  “Expense account item number twenty-four,” came Bob Bailey’s smooth voice. “Two dollars and thirty-three cents. A cab to downtown Los Angeles.”

  “Aunt Cara,” Ethan whispered, as insurance investigator Johnny Dollar launched into the next description of his case. His aunt looked up, blinking away the glassy expression in her eyes. “Juniper and I are going out,” he told her. “I’ll be back for dinner.”

  She offered him a tiny, crinkle-eyed smile. “Have fun,” she mouthed. She was more relaxed, it seemed, when Juniper was around. Ethan hadn’t seen Aunt Cara smile so wide as when she came into the kitchen to find him and Juniper seated at the table, and she’d asked him almost every morning that week whether Juniper would be coming over that day. She seemed relieved that they’d found each other.

  After waving good-bye to Aunt Cara, Ethan hurried into his room, thrust open the window, and launched himself to the ground, Juniper style. He expected to land the three-foot drop without a problem, but found himself losing his balance and, seconds later, flopping flat onto his back.

  “Ouch,” he muttered, and squinted to see Juniper looking down at him, a mocking smile on her lips.

  “Two minutes and forty-three seconds.” She tapped the face of her watch. “Not bad. Not bad at all.” She pulled Ethan to his feet, and he followed her to her bike a few feet away, where he dropped their scroll into the basket. As had become their custom, she climbed on, he took the pegs, and they both held on for dear life as she pedaled at top speed down the forest lane.

  Ethan knew fairly quickly that they were heading toward the lake. He was still confused by most of the forest paths, but this one he knew; after all the days he and Juniper had spent planning by the grassy shores, this route had become almost second nature.

  Still, he called “Where are we going?” into Juniper’s ear.

  She reached up with one hand, still pedaling, and smacked him upside the head. “No questions, Harper,” she snapped, though he could hear the smirk in her voice. “You’ll see.”

  When they ar
rived, Juniper eased her bike to a slow stop next to the boathouse. Ethan assumed they would be meeting Gus inside and going for another spin around the lake, but his redheaded companion marched right past the wooden building, and Gus was nowhere in sight. They walked along the perimeter of the lake, toward a new crowd of trees that Ethan hadn’t yet explored.

  “Juniper, just tell me where we’re going,” he implored, watching her leap clumsily from rock to rock in the shallow water.

  “No can do,” she replied. She paused for a moment, swaying precariously on one toe, before barely righting herself and hopping along to the next slippery stone.

  “Well, at least stop that, then. You’re going to break your neck.”

  “Negative. I was an acrobat in a past life, you know.” She attempted a ballerina’s leap and just barely cleared the water. “I was in the circus and I wore a costume covered in glitter and people came from miles around the country to watch me.”

  And with that, she slid from the rock with a shriek and dropped heavily into the water. Both she and Ethan were silent for a moment, staring at each other in surprise—then, before Ethan could even try to say “I told you so,” she was scrambling to her feet, her slim frame racked with earth-splitting laughter.

  “Are you okay?” Ethan asked. He watched, half horrified, as she clambered back onto the grass and wrung a good bucketful of water out of her skirt. Her entire backside was drenched and muddy.

  “Better than ever,” she hummed cheerfully, glancing over her shoulder to examine the damage. “Good thing today is laundry day.” She gave her still sopping skirt a final shake and kicked off her oxfords. “These need a good drying too, so I’ll just take the rest of this adventure barefoot. Let’s hope I don’t get bitten by a rattlesnake.”

  She sounded so chipper that it made Ethan pause. “Juniper,” he said slowly.

  She whirled to face him. “Calm down, city boy—there are no rattlesnakes in this part of Alabama. Probably. Anyway, if there are, I have a special dance that will scare them off. Trust me.”

  He shook his head. “Whatever you say.”

  Though still skeptical, Ethan had figured out by now that there was no way to stop Juniper Jones once she put her mind to something. So he shut his mouth and followed her into the thicket. It seemed like they had only taken a few steps before the trees thinned again, revealing a closet of a house perched right on the lake’s edge, only a few wooden support beams away from sitting straight in the water. Gus stood just behind it in the grass, looking too big to fit through the door. At the sound of the kids’ rustling, he whirled around, blocking something behind his hefty frame.

  “Ethan, Juniper.” He greeted them warmly, lacing his fingers at his stomach. “Fancy seeing you here.”

  “Hey, Gus.” Juniper, as usual, was bright as a lightning bolt. She regarded Gus with a conspiratorial grin, then turned to Ethan. Her crooked teeth seemed eager to leap right out of her mouth.

  “What?” Ethan questioned, suspicious anticipation tickling his gut. “What is it?”

  “Ethan Charlie Harper,” Juniper began, “also known as Ethan, Ethan Harper, Chameleon, and Ol’ Harper-sichord—”

  “What?”

  “—I present to you, an extra special, very cool, extremely-secret-but-not-really gift that will change the rest of your summer forever. Gus?”

  Smiling his half smile, Gus stepped aside for the big reveal.

  “Ta-da!” Juniper cried, throwing her hands in the air.

  Ethan found himself staring at a scuffed-up red bike, its handlebars slightly rusty and its paint peeling at the edges.

  “It’s old,” Gus said gruffly, “but works just fine. Tires pumped, gears oiled. Ready to ride.”

  Ethan had still said nothing, and Juniper’s smile faltered slightly. “Well? Do you like it?”

  He paused for another moment, his mouth half-open in reply, then, finally, he grinned. “It’s cool,” he said. “Really, really cool. Thanks, Gus. Thanks, June.”

  Gus held up his weathered hands. “Don’t thank me,” he insisted. “Was all her, really. Found it in the junkyard outside of town, brought it to me. Did most of the fixin’ up herself.” He glanced proudly at Juniper. She blushed a pleased pink.

  “Well, what are you waiting for, Ethan?” she asked. “We all know you can’t beat me on foot, but maybe now that we’ve evened the playing field . . .”

  “Oh, is that a challenge, Jones? Bring it on.”

  Juniper set her jaw in gleeful determination. “Prepare to get pounded, Ethan Charlie Harper!” she shouted. “Just let me grab my bike.” And she whisked away, leaving a wind-blown Ethan and Gus in her wake.

  Gus watched her go, that small smile still curving his lips. “Great girl,” he noted. “Wonderful, really. Always means well. But doesn’t always understand.” Then he looked Ethan in the eye and delivered the first full sentence of their friendship: “You take good care of her, son. Do you understand?”

  “Yes,” Ethan said quickly. “Yes, sir.”

  Ethan did not win the race. This was partly because it had been a while since he’d used a bike instead of his legs, and partly because he had absolutely no idea where they were going.

  “Follow me!” she’d called as they’d taken off away from the lake.

  “Then how am I supposed to win?” Ethan had yelled back, but his voice was lost in the breeze. He’d resigned himself to defeat pretty soon after that, and instead just tailed Juniper as close as he could without tangling his tires with hers. She veered down fork after fork, around bend after bend, and he squinted to keep from losing sight of her so deep in the thicket.

  “Coming up ahead!” she announced at last, and by then, Ethan was hunched over his handlebars, panting. She made a sharp left turn straight into the woods so suddenly that Ethan almost missed it, and careened down a hill with an echoing yodel.

  “By the way, watch out for the trees!”

  Ethan, who had just swerved to avoid meeting a hulking pine head-on, shouted, “Yeah, no kidding!” As their tires bumped over the needle-strewn mulch, they came to a slow, rolling stop.

  “I won,” Juniper informed Ethan as he walked his bike to her side. “But we’re here.” She pointed in front of them to a tiny, nearly perfectly circular clearing, fenced in on all sides by towering trees. A softly murmuring brook ran straight down the middle.

  “Whoa,” Ethan mumbled, raising his eyebrows. “This forest is just full of surprises.”

  “Sure is,” Juniper agreed. “Welcome to my hideaway, and also, my third favorite place in all of town.”

  Ethan counted off on his fingers. “Number one, Alligator Hill. Number two, the lake. Number three, this place.”

  “You’ve been paying attention.” Juniper grabbed the scroll from her bicycle basket. “Follow me.” She took a running start and leapt over the creek—not that it would have mattered if she had walked right through it; her skirt was still damp with lake water. Ethan followed, his arms flailing above his head. Juniper disappeared behind a tree, and when Ethan circled to the other side, he saw that the gargantuan fir had a hollow large enough for him to crawl inside.

  “Cool, isn’t it?” Juniper said proudly, squatting at its entrance. Ethan nodded. She reached into her pocket for the roll of tape and, leaning into the hollow, carefully secured the scroll to the inner wall of the tree. “Here it’ll be safe. Every tree in this clearing is hollow, you know. I’m convinced that this clearing was built by fairies, and they used to have their houses in there, before the people came.” She straightened and beckoned to him, and he trailed her in a circle around the secret grove. “This is where I keep some of my art supplies,” she told him, pointing from one tree to another. These were smaller than the first, just large enough to stick a head in. “My easel here, brushes here, paints here . . .”

  She was continuing her list when Ethan cut her off. “
You paint?” he asked.

  Surprised, she tilted her head. “Well, yeah. I don’t talk about it much, I guess. My dad did too, so I guess it just runs in the family.”

  It was the first time Ethan had heard her mention either of her parents. He studied her carefully as she pushed her hair out of her face with a half smile. “I think that’s really cool,” he said finally.

  Juniper blinked. “Really?”

  “Yeah. I’ve always been useless at art, so I mean—I don’t know, I just think it’s cool. I never understood how it worked.”

  A slow smile spread over Juniper’s face. “Well, then, Ethan Harper,” she said, “today’s your lucky day.”

  Ethan sat cross-legged on the damp grass to watch as Juniper set up shop. She dragged out a small wooden easel and unfolded it next to the brook, propped a canvas against it, and wriggled into a paint-splattered white smock.

  “All of this really fits in the trees?” Ethan asked dubiously, craning his neck as Juniper appeared with a fresh palette of primary colors.

  “Of course,” Juniper replied with a sneaky smile. “I told you: it’s magic.”

  Once everything was in place, she raked her hair up into a ponytail. Then, grinning at Ethan, she picked up a paintbrush in each hand, knelt in the grass, and said, “Watch and learn.”

  Leaning back against one of the trees, Ethan silently studied Juniper as she squinted, bit her lip, raised one hand, then the other, and finally dunked both brushes into the palette. It took a moment for it to register in his mind that she was painting with not one but two hands.

  “Wait, wait, wait. How—what—how are you doing that?”