The Brightest Stars of Summer

by Leila Howland

  “I think you’ll really regret not going to camp,” Mom said now, turning on the stove to heat the teakettle. She took two mugs from the cabinet and put them on the counter. “Shakespeare in a cool outdoor theater with a bunch of other great kids? Sounds awesome to me.”

  “But I don’t want to act anymore,” Marigold said.

  “That’s how you feel right now, and it’s understandable. You’ve had some setbacks.” Mom placed chamomile tea bags in the mugs. “But what would Ronald say? What would Jill tell you to do?”

  “Ronald always says that show business is a hard road, and if there’s anything else you can do that makes you happy, you should do it. Even you and Dad have said that. And Jill would probably tell me to move to Costa Rica!”

  “Okay.” Mom acknowledged this point with a smile. “But you’ve been looking forward to this for months.”

  “And then there’s the deposit to think about. It was expensive, and I doubt we’ll be able to get it back at this point.”

  “I’ll pay you back with babysitting,” Marigold said.

  “That’s a lot of babysitting,” Mom said, leaning against the counter. “Is this really just about acting?”

  “Not exactly,” Marigold said. “There’s this clique at school. The Cuties.”

  “Ah,” Mom said. The water in the kettle rumbled. “Tell me more.”

  “They dress alike and have inside jokes that they call ‘location jokes’ and they’re all on the swim team together and they talk about boys a lot.”

  “Boys?” Mom asked as the teakettle whistled. “Do they have boyfriends?”

  “I think so,” Marigold said.

  “What do you think they mean by boyfriends?” Mom asked. She poured the hot water over the tea bags.

  “I’m not really sure,” Marigold said, thinking about it.

  “What does having a boyfriend mean to you?” Mom asked. She carried the steaming mugs to the table and sat next to Marigold.

  “I guess it means hanging out with a boy who you really like who also likes you back. And you dance together at the dances and go to the movies together and stuff.” Marigold grabbed the bear-shaped container of honey and squeezed some into her tea.

  “Is that what it means to these girls?” Mom asked, blowing on her mug of tea.

  “I wouldn’t know. It’s not like they invite me anywhere. They sit at a lunch table with only eight seats, so no one else can sit with them.”

  “These girls sound mean, honey,” Mom said,. “Why do you care what they think?”

  “They’re the cool kids.” Marigold sipped her tea.

  “I’m going to let you in on the secret to being cool,” Mom said. “Just be yourself.” Mom beamed as if this would solve all of Marigold’s problems.

  “Mom,” Marigold said, “you sound like a cheesy TV show.”

  “Fine, don’t believe me,” Mom said. “But I’m right.”

  “No one wants to be unpopular.”

  “All you really need is one good friend. And you have Pilar.”

  “Not anymore,” Marigold said, feeling her lower lip start to tremble.

  “What?” Mom’s sympathetic look brought tears to Marigold’s eyes. Marigold told Mom about how Pilar had been with the Cuties yesterday—there hadn’t actually been any deer.

  “Oh, sweetheart, you and Pilar can work this out,” Mom said, touching Marigold’s cheek. Her hand was warm from holding her mug. “You’ve been friends for so long. Why don’t I take you two to the Farmers Market tomorrow for some frozen yogurt?”

  “She’s going to Mexico to see her abuela really soon. I think the day after tomorrow.”

  “You need to talk to her before she leaves. But this is another reason you should go to camp. You’ll make tons of new friends there.”

  “Not if I’m totally miserable.” Marigold sighed. “Remember when you said that I could quit acting if it stopped being fun? Well, it’s not fun anymore.”

  “I just want to make sure that dropping out of camp is about acting and not about the girls in your class.” Mom looked deep into Marigold’s eyes.

  “It’s both,” Marigold said, wiping her teary face with the backs of her hands. “I thought that if I was in the movie, the Cuties would think I was cool and they’d want to be friends with me, even if I didn’t want to be friends back. And because I’m not on Seasons anymore and I’m not in the movie, I can’t stop worrying that I’m not good enough. What if I’m not cool enough or good enough?”

  “Of course you’re cool enough and good enough. You know what?” Mom said as she smoothed Marigold’s hair behind her ear. “I think you’re right. I think a couple weeks in Pruet is exactly what you need.”

  “Thank you, Mom,” Marigold said, throwing her arms around her mother’s neck and hugging her. “Thank you so much.”

  6 • Chopped

  “Wow!” was all Zinnie could say as she stepped inside the bathroom and shut the door behind her. For a second she wondered if she was sleepwalking, because what she was looking at just didn’t feel real.

  Even though Marigold had been acting stranger than ever, even though she had been wearing clothes she normally wouldn’t be caught dead in, even though she’d claimed she had seen an entire family of deer yesterday that not a single other person had, nothing could have prepared Zinnie for the sight of her sister sitting in the lotus position on the sink counter in her pj’s, taking Mom’s extra-sharp desk scissors to the last lock of hair that hung below her shoulders.

  “Gah!” Zinnie exhaled as the shiny tress fell to the bathroom floor.

  “What do you think?” Marigold asked as she shook out her new, uneven bob. She was cheerful for someone who had just chopped off what she had once referred to as her “golden mane of splendor.”

  “Well,” Zinnie said, catching her breath. “It’s . . . different.” It was different for Marigold, anyway. It was the same length as the hair of that clique of girls in Marigold’s class.

  “Exactly. It’s a whole new me,” Marigold said.

  Her whole life, Zinnie had envied her sister’s gorgeous hair. Unlike her own, which grew out instead of down and required lots of goo for frizz management, Marigold’s straight hair had luscious weight and appealing shine. And now it wasn’t even long enough for a ponytail.

  “I’ll go get the broom and dustpan,” Zinnie said, taking in the piles of hair on the bathroom floor. The waste was criminal.

  “I’m not going to throw it away,” Marigold said. “I’m going to donate it.”

  “Good idea,” Zinnie said as she bent down to collect the hair. “But what about your career? You’ve always said your hair was one of your greatest assets.”

  “What career?” Marigold said. “I’m not an actress anymore.”

  “But you’re going to acting camp next week,” Zinnie said. She placed a handful of hair on the counter as neatly as possible for some lucky wigmaker.

  “No, I’m not. I asked Mom last night and she talked to Aunt Sunny, and Aunt Sunny said that if I want to go to Pruet early to help her get ready for the wedding, I can.”

  “Just you?” Zinnie said. “That’s not fair.”

  “Relax. We can all go. It’s up to us.”

  “Really?” Zinnie asked, delighted. She’d been dreaming of her return to Pruet ever since last summer. She couldn’t wait to walk along the harbor to the town beach, where her friend Ashley worked at the snack bar. Or to float on her back down the estuary as the sun warmed her face. Or to go to a clambake and eat lobster, corn on the cob, and fresh clams dripping with butter. Or to gaze up at the stars from the pear orchard while Aunt Sunny told stories of her sailing adventures. And of course she couldn’t wait to see Aunt Sunny and give her a hug.

  So the news that she would get to visit Pruet twice this summer, once for the wedding and again before school started, gave her a jolt of happiness. Or maybe, even better, they would have one extra-long visit to Pruet. She was about to ask Marigold what the exact plan was when Mom
knocked on the door.

  “Zinnie? Honey, are you in there?”

  “Yes,” Zinnie said, opening the door. “Is it true—”

  “Wait,” Marigold interrupted. “I haven’t told—”

  But it was too late. Mom was standing in the doorway, holding what looked like a magazine.

  “Oh . . . ,” Mom said. “What happened here? Zinnie gave you a . . . trim?”

  “I had nothing to do with this,” Zinnie said.

  “I did it myself. I wanted a new look,” Marigold said. “For a new me.”

  “I see,” Mom said, and took a deep breath. “We could’ve made you an appointment.”

  “I wanted a new look right away,” Marigold said. “Before I could change my mind. What do you think?”

  “I wish you had asked me,” Mom said. She put down the magazine and stood behind Marigold. Then she combed her hands through her daughter’s hair. “But I gotta say, I think it’s cute. It’s a little . . . choppy, though. We can see if someone at the salon can fix it up for you. Actually, I hear bobs are coming back into style.”

  As Mom placed her hands at an angle under Marigold’s hair, evening it out and tilting it forward with her palms, Zinnie realized that even with this self-styled haircut, Marigold looked glamorous.

  “Is it true that we can go to Pruet next week, Mom?” Zinnie asked.

  “That’s what I was coming to talk to you about, Zin,” Mom said with a smile.

  “Yay!” Zinnie said, too excited to let Mom finish. “I can’t believe that we’re going twice this summer!”

  “We aren’t going twice. Way too expensive,” Mom said.

  “So we’ll stay the whole summer?” Zinnie asked.

  “I wish,” Mom said. “Dad and I have to work, and Aunt Sunny is going on her honeymoon right after the wedding. But if you’d like to go early and stay until the wedding, that’s fine. It was Marigold’s idea, and when I called Aunt Sunny, she said she’d love the extra help getting ready for her big day.”

  “Of course I want to go!” Zinnie said.

  “Helping the bride prepare is totally part of a bridesmaid’s job,” Marigold said, changing her part to the other side of her head and checking out the effect in the mirror. “I looked it up online.”

  “I know how much you’ve been looking forward to writing camp,” Mom said.

  “It’s called the Summer Scribes,” Zinnie said. This sounded much better to her than “writing camp.”

  “You can stay here with us if you’d like and then just go to Pruet for the wedding,” Mom said. “It’s up to you.”

  “I can’t do both?” Zinnie asked.

  “Not unless you can be in two places at once,” Mom said. “This summer you get to choose. By the way, this came today.”

  Mom handed her the magazine, which had been facedown on the countertop. It was Muses, the publication that Mrs. Lee’s Writers’ Workshop produced at the end of the year. Zinnie had been anxiously awaiting its arrival ever since school ended.

  “Cool,” Zinnie said, taking in the cover artwork, a photograph of the blood moon everyone had stayed up late to see.

  Meanwhile, Mom was enjoying playing with Marigold’s new haircut. She made two lopsided pigtails that stuck straight up in the air. Marigold made a face to match.

  “Zinnie, will you tell me a story, only not one with any witches this—” Lily started as she came into the bathroom. But she didn’t finish her sentence. She took one look at Marigold and burst into giggles.

  7 • To Go or Not to Go

  Zinnie flopped back onto her bed and stared at the ceiling, her copy of Muses clutched tightly under her arm. After an hour spent reading it cover to cover, one thing was clear: the story that she had turned in to be considered for the Writers’ Workshop didn’t belong. Zinnie’s stories and plays all involved fairies, magic, and even—she blushed at the thought—talking animals. There was time travel, at the very least. “Spell of Warriors,” the work she had so proudly handed in to Mrs. Lee during the last week of school, was no exception.

  But Muses was full of writing about real people and actual places. There was the narrative of the girl who had just arrived a few years ago from El Salvador, written in both Spanish and English; a series of character sketches of the people who lived in another student’s Little Tokyo neighborhood; a story about a family who got lost on a camping trip; a funny essay about when all the kids in the Writers’ Workshop first landed in England for their annual retreat and they had jet lag; an interview with one girl’s great-grandmother, who had been in an internment camp in the 1940s; and a collection of poems called “The Wandering Question,” which Zinnie didn’t understand at all.

  Zinnie was now certain that she was going to have to change her writing style if she wanted to get into the Writers’ Workshop. Her only hope was to email Mrs. Lee and ask her to ignore her submission from last week. Then she’d have to attend Summer Scribes and write something new—something real. There was no way she could write something real on her own. Zinnie wasn’t sure she’d ever even had any real ideas. Summer Scribes was the only way she stood a chance of getting into the Writers’ Workshop. And Zinnie had to get in. She’d never wanted something so badly in all her life.

  Throughout Muses were photographs of England, and even though her writing didn’t seem to belong, Zinnie could so easily picture herself in those shots, standing with the other girls among the mysterious rock pillars at Stonehenge, walking through the grassy ruins of Tintern Abbey, and visiting Shakespeare’s thatch-roofed home in Stratford-upon-Avon. Zinnie could envision herself scribbling away in her notebook as her imagination burst open in the English countryside. Instead of feeling left out like she did on the sports teams, she would fit right in.

  But if she went to Summer Scribes, then she wouldn’t be able to go to Pruet for more than a few days. The thought made Zinnie’s heart ache. She was wearing the oversized Cape Cod T-shirt she’d gotten at the Pruet general store last year before the drive to the Boston airport and the long flight back to Los Angeles. She brought the soft sleeve to her nose and inhaled. Even though the T-shirt had been washed a hundred times, she believed its threads still held the scent of the Massachusetts coast: the sun-drenched dunes, Aunt Sunny’s living room, the salty air, and even the faintest hint of a waffle cone. She closed her eyes and sniffed again.

  She could almost see herself in her flip-flops and rash guard—the surfer-style bathing suit she preferred—with a towel slung over her shoulder, walking home from the town beach. Or opening the gate to the pasture where the hairy cows wandered, with a dirt road that led to the beach with the rolling dunes, the big waves, and the estuary. Even though last year had been her first trip to Cape Cod, the idea of a summer with only a weekend-long visit to Pruet didn’t seem like summer at all. She needed at least a week there in order to make it count.

  But was it worth sacrificing her only hope of getting into the Writers’ Workshop?

  Mom had told her “you get to choose” between Pruet and Summer Scribes like it was a good thing, but the decision already had a weight that was getting heavier by the minute. No matter which option Zinnie went with, she’d have to give up something awesome. Ever since she could remember, she’d wanted to make her own choices: what clothes to put on in the morning, what to eat for dinner, what activities to join after school. But as she’d gotten older and been asked to make more of her own decisions, she’d noticed how much easier it was to just have someone tell her what to do. She closed Muses and stuck her thumb in her mouth—an old, secret habit.

  “Knock, knock,” Dad said, tapping on her door. “Can I come give you a good-night kiss?”

  “Sure,” Zinnie said, wiping her thumb on her pajama bottoms as Dad opened the door.

  “Uh-oh,” Dad said after taking one look at his fretful daughter.

  “What?” Zinnie asked.

  “I see a worry line,” Dad said. Zinnie pressed a finger to the place between her eyebrows where a line appeared wh
en she was anxious.

  “I don’t know what to do,” Zinnie said as Dad sat next to her on the bed. “I really want to go to Summer Scribes.”

  “That’s fine,” Dad said. “You can stay here with us and then go to Pruet with Mom and me. You won’t miss the wedding. There’s no chance of that.”

  “But I’ll miss going to the beach every day and jumping in the waves and climbing the dunes. I’ll miss Aunt Sunny’s stories. I’ll only have three days to get Edith’s ice cream. There probably won’t be time to collect any shells. And Ashley told me she’d show me a hidden rope swing, but now that’s out!”

  “Then go to Pruet, honey,” Dad said, and rubbed her back.

  “But then I won’t be able to concentrate on my writing enough to write the best thing ever so that I can get into the Writers’ Workshop in the fall. And then I won’t get to go to England and I’ll have to play soccer and basketball, and, ugh, run track. And I really hate track.” Zinnie’s breath became shallow at the memory of “bringing up the rear.” She was now nearly in tears. “Look,” Zinnie said, opening Muses to the page with the picture of the girls on a double-decker bus. “They go to England over spring vacation, Dad. England! Do you know how bad I want to go to England? Do you know how many stories I could think of there? And all year long I’d get to meet real authors and go to plays and take field trips to interesting places.”

  “That sounds great, Zinnie. But what makes you think you need to do this summer camp to get in? Didn’t you already write something for this program?”

  “It’s not good enough. I see that now.”

  “You’re such a good writer. That play you wrote last summer was dynamite. That chicken character brought down the house.”

  She knew he was trying to make her feel better, but bringing up Gus the dancing chicken only triggered her biggest fear. She felt her voice climb higher in her throat. “The girls in the Writers’ Workshop do real writing. I need to learn how to write about people and serious things. Not made-up warriors and dancing chickens and fake fairies.”