The Hidden Summer

by Gin Phillips

  Lydia can get a little sarcastic when she’s tired.

  I try to pry the leg-door open, but it won’t budge. Finally I push it—a couple of light shoves and then a hard one—and it springs open with a whine. A lightbulb comes on inside.

  “Everyone knows brontosauruses had lightbulbs inside their stomachs,” says Lydia, but quietly. “Um, Nell, surely they turned off the electricity when this place closed down. I mean, didn’t they?”

  “I guess not.”

  “Could be ghosts,” she says, sounding a little too excited for my tastes. Lydia loves horror movies.

  “It’s not ghosts,” I say.

  “Could be,” she says, squinting at the open doorway. “Ooooh, like, maybe creepy golfer ghosts, floating around and dragging their clubs behind them.”

  Well, that image makes the idea of ghosts a little less scary. Still, I walk in slowly, just in case there’s some long-lost janitor trapped in here. Or in case Lydia’s right and a very weird ghost—golfer or not—has chosen to haunt the inside of a dinosaur. But there’s nothing here, at least nothing alive. The light is soft and warm, not the kind that gives you a headache. The door must have been sealed tight, because we don’t see any bugs or spiderwebs or birds’ nests. What we do see are ribs and veins and a very large fake pink heart tucked in between fake pink lungs.

  All around us, the inside of Marvin’s body is pale and pink and crisscrossed by painted veins and arteries. It’s actually very pretty—it makes the walls look fragile and delicate, like butterfly wings. Marvin’s eyes are made out of some sort of screen, so when you look toward his head you can see the night sky through two eye-shaped holes.

  I don’t say so to Lydia yet, but I decide in a split second that I want to move into Marvin’s rib cage. When you go to a summer camp, you stay in a cabin. Lydia’s taught me that much. Marvin will be my cabin. I will cover his floor with blankets and pillows, and I’ll close the door to keep out mosquitoes and roaches. I notice an electrical outlet, and I think a small Lava lamp would go really nicely with the veins and arteries.

  “Better than we thought, huh?” I say, in an encouraging way.

  “Yeah,” she says slowly. “It’s not bad.”

  I suspect she’s still thinking about her comfortable bedroom, but I know I’ve got her attention when we get to Hole Six. It’s a spaceship. Or maybe it’s a rocket. I’m pretty sure it’s what I thought was a tower from my bedroom window.

  “Where do you think you’re supposed to hit the ball?” Lydia asks.

  I was wondering the same thing. Hole Six starts with a long, Z-shaped course, maybe a par 3, but there’s no place for you to putt the ball. Instead of a hole at the end of the Z shape, there’s this huge rocket ship. Maybe whoever designed it got so interested in building the rocket, they forgot about adding a hole for the ball. Really, now that I think about it, this whole putt-putt course feels like maybe somebody had a little too much fun designing it. I mean, Marvin has veins on the inside. He has pores on his skin. And he has toenails. That seems like more details than are actually necessary.

  This rocket is nearly as tall as Marvin, and it also has a door. A pink light glows from underneath.

  “Ghosts?” I say.

  “We can hope,” says Lydia with a grin, and she makes a dash for the door.

  I follow right behind her, and the first thing we see is a control panel with blinking yellow and red lights. It’s lit up like the flashing lights on a Christmas tree. (You can understand why the people who owned the golf course went out of business if they couldn’t even remember to turn the lights out after they went bankrupt.) There are two chairs by the control panel, and we sit down in them for a little while and push buttons while we spin the chairs around. Then we head up the spiral staircase behind the chairs, which looks like it leads to some sort of loft.

  “Do you think they built fake aliens up here?” asks Lydia as our feet thud on the staircase. “Who sleep in fake bunk beds?”

  “Maybe fake astronauts?” I suggest. “Or maybe astronauts who have fake aliens bursting out of their chests?”

  Like I said, Lydia’s a horror movie nut, so she actually gets that joke.

  There aren’t any aliens at the top of the stairs. But there are bunk beds. And a steering wheel that looks like it belongs on an old ship instead of a rocket ship. The walls are mirrored, so I see at least twenty versions of myself and Lydia. There’s a skylight at the top of the rocket and round windows everywhere you look. We’re so high that we don’t even see the trees—all we see are stars and sky and endless reflections of ourselves.

  Lydia doesn’t say anything, but I can see she’s impressed.

  “Like it?” I say.

  She shrugs. She’s still thinking things over, so it’ll take her a little while to be able to actually say she’s impressed. I can deal with that.

  We check out the rest of the course. Hole Seven is a two-level hole with a slide—an actual slide—and it looks like you hit your ball down the slide, and it rolls out by the hole, and then you slide down after it. We try out the slide, but it’s not very slick. We each get stuck about halfway down and have to scoot on our butts the rest of the way down. Hole Eight is a volcano—you’d aim for a hole in the base, and then it looks like the volcano would shoot your ball out of the top. We climb the fake rocks, peer into the open pit, and see the spring that would launch a ball.

  Hole Nine is the most amazing. It looks simple at first—just a flat green with two little empty concrete ponds next to three openmouthed fish. A ball could roll into any of the three mouths. But on the other side of the fish, there’s a staircase leading down into the ground. There’s a soft glow coming from the bottom of the stairs, and, since we’re used to how things work here by now, we jog down the stairs, expecting to see something strange and wonderful.

  We’re not disappointed. We wind up in a hallway, and the walls of the hallway are glass. Pretty soon we realize that they’re not walls at all—they used to be aquariums. There’s still algae in a few spots, plus lonely bits of colorful rocks and coral. We stop and peer through the glass.

  “I bet there were sharks in here,” Lydia says, drawing a circle with her finger on the dust-covered glass.

  “It’s not big enough for sharks.”

  “Small sharks. Small killer sharks.”

  I’d bet there were some jellyfish myself, plus maybe some eels and manta rays. But I do like the idea of sharks.

  Lydia tugs at my shirt. “Look at that, Nell.”

  She’s pointing to a bright green arrow that’s been painted on the glass. It’s right about eye level, and it slants down to the left. Next to the arrow is a group of solid purple circles—not in any order, just a bunch of round purple dots. Next to the dots are scattered blue marks, like eyebrows or sideways commas. The drawings remind me of cave paintings I’ve seen in books, but it seems very unlikely that prehistoric people were living in a putt-putt course. Also, the paint is shiny and new looking.

  “Some other kids got in here and left some graffiti?” I suggest.

  “It’s weird graffiti,” Lydia says. “There aren’t any words in it.”

  The arrow doesn’t seem to be pointing to anything, and there’s no other writing on the glass. But Lydia loves a good puzzle, and she stands there for a while trying to solve the symbols.

  “Go underground to find snow and rain?” she guesses. “Um, there are frog eggs and tadpoles in the basement? Or, wait, balls roll downhill and then they hit . . . worms?”

  I thump her on the back of the head and she glares at me. But she stops talking.

  About ten feet past us, at the end of the hallway, there’s another staircase that leads us to ground level. We climb up and realize that the three fish mouths in the first part of the hole would spit out the golf balls next to the top of this staircase. The aquariums don’t seem to have had anything to d
o with the route of the ball—they’re just here for fun. Like the rocket ship.

  Back in the night air at the end of Hole Nine, we look around us at the entire overwhelming putt-putt course, with its animals and machines and underground shark houses. I feel a twinge of sadness that this place is here, so magical and odd, and no one has been able to enjoy it for so long. It’s such a waste. The crickets are chirping, and the shadows of the trees are waving across the fake grass. We didn’t close any doors, so several of the holes are shining with faint lights. There’s a glow all around us.

  Sometimes when Mom goes out late at night, Lionel leaves on the kitchen light so that she can see it from her car when she gets home. He says that coming home to a dark home is lonely, but a lit-up window means someone is waiting for you. That’s what it feels like here—like the golf course was leaving the lights on for us. And we’ve finally come home.

  “Nell,” says Lydia. I think she might have called my name once before, because she says it sort of impatiently. “Nell!”

  “What?”

  “All right, we’ve seen what’s here. It’s not bad. It’s really pretty good.” She looks over at the rocket ship. “Okay, it’s really, really good. But we still can’t just disappear.”

  “I know that,” I say. “I’ve got it figured out.”

  So we go back to Lydia’s rocket ship—that’s already how I think of it—and we sit down in the control room while I tell her my plan. I’ve thought this out carefully. I’m not an idiot—I know that even mothers as unenthusiastic as ours would eventually notice if we disappear every day.

  “So how do we do this?” asks Lydia, tipping her chair back as far as it will go.

  “We just walk out the door,” I say.

  She laughs. “That’d be nice.”

  She stops laughing when I reach into my backpack and hand her a piece of paper.

  It reads:

  Dear Mrs. McAllister:

  We are very pleased to offer your daughter, Lydia, a full scholarship to attend Camp Elegant Earth, the only day camp devoted to designing and creating breathtaking jewelry from recycled products. We will show our talented campers how to make earrings from erasers, how to turn bicycles chains into necklaces, and how to turn yogurt cartons into bracelets. And don’t forget our famous aluminum can pants!

  Lydia’s school has nominated her as a student who cares deeply about our planet’s future. She’ll be one of only five campers awarded a free camp registration this year. If you and Lydia are interested in this completely free opportunity to help our planet, we will pick up our campers each morning from several meeting points throughout Birmingham. The closest meeting point to your address is Avondale Library on 40th Street South, where Lydia may catch the Camp Elegant Earth Bus. (Bringing the students in one vehicle is so much better for our environment than hundreds of separate cars!)

  Camp begins on May 30 and ends on August 1, with pickup each day at 9 A.M. and drop-off in the same location at 7 P.M. Please have Lydia packed and waiting at the designated pickup spot on May 30.

  Sincerely,

  Deborah Stalopfield

  www.campelegantearth.com

  P.S. Dogs are welcome at camp! In fact, they give us much-needed material for our popular dog-hair soccer socks.

  “She’ll never believe this is a real camp,” Lydia says, once she’s stopped giggling.

  “It is a real camp.”

  She clearly doesn’t believe me.

  “Look up the Web site when you get home. I’m telling you, there’s a camp for everything. This wasn’t even the most ridiculous one.”

  That would be Camp Flips Not Lips, where a bunch of kids make a pledge not to kiss anyone until they turn eighteen. To take their mind off all that potential kissing, they focus on gymnastics and acrobatics, and they have an hour of trampoline time each day. Even Lydia’s mom, who loves camps of all kinds, would be suspicious of that one.

  “I still don’t think she’ll go for it,” says Lydia. “I mean, I get to bring Saban with me? That’s not very realistic.”

  “It is so realistic! That letter’s even on Camp Elegant Earth stationery,” I say. I’m very proud of that stationery—I designed a planet with a ring around it, like Saturn. Only this planet is surrounded by a circle of bracelets and necklaces and pants. “Your mom will look it up on the Internet, and she’ll know it’s for real. She’ll want it to be real. You’re underestimating how much she wants you out of the house.”

  “Good point.” Lydia carefully folds up the paper. “Are you sending your mom the same letter?”

  “Not exactly.”

  I pull out another piece of paper:

  Dear Mrs. Conway:

  We regret to inform you that Nell requires remedial work in social studies. She’ll be expected to attend citywide summer classes at Avondale Middle School starting on May 30. Classes will be from 9 A.M. until 7 P.M. each day. Classes will continue through August 1. Please send a sack lunch with your child each day.

  Please contact me directly at dstalopfield@gmail.com to let me know if your daughter will be able to attend these classes. We look forward to meeting Nell, and we hope this summer will lead her to make better choices in the future. We regret that you may be forced to sacrifice your own time with your daughter for the next two months in order to help her academic progress.

  Sincerely,

  Deborah Stalopfield

  Assistant to the Assistant Superintendant of Schools, High-Risk Division

  Lydia frowns at me. “You made an A in social studies.”

  “She never looks at my report card.”

  “She doesn’t know you always make A’s?”

  “Nope. She does not know that.”

  “So what happens when she e-mails Deborah Stalopfield?” asks Lydia.

  “I set up a gmail account. I am Deborah Stalopfield. I’ll e-mail her back. Then, five days from now, I’ll just walk out of the house on May thirtieth, and we’ll start setting up things here.”

  Lydia looks at her own sheet of paper again. “Huh. And at nine A.M., my mom has to be at work, and she’ll have to drop me off early at the library. She won’t know that a Camp Elegant Earth bus never comes.”

  “Or just tell her you’ll walk.” Avondale Library and Avondale Middle School are both about a mile away. No highways to cross—just neighborhood streets.

  Lydia chews her lip for a moment. I can practically hear her brain humming.

  “What if my mom calls the camp?” she asks.

  “Yeah, that’s the main danger,” I say. “If she says she’s going to, tell her that the principal gave you Deborah Stalopfield’s e-mail address and that she travels so much she’s almost never reachable by phone.”

  “What if our moms talk?”

  “That’s the beauty of your mom hating my mom at the moment. She won’t go within twenty feet of her.”

  Lydia has a few more questions, so we talk a little longer. Then we both get quiet and just spin around in our chairs. I’m pumped on adrenalin, giddy about escaping for two whole months. And I’m realizing I’m not just excited about getting away from something—I’m excited about coming to something. Coming to this hidden place that’s been waiting for us to rediscover it.

  Still, underneath the excitement, I’m starting to feel sleepy. A little nauseous even. It must be one or two o’clock in the morning.

  “Let’s head back,” I say. “We need to find another spot to get over the fence, then we’ll need to walk back to where we left the blanket. Mom’ll notice if it’s not on my bed in the morning.”

  CHAPTER 6

  THE GOING-AWAY PARTY

  The next morning, when the “mail” comes, my mother is every bit as thrilled by my remedial classes as I thought she would be. She sits me down at the table and talks sternly to me about trying harder in school, and I nod my head and look depressed.

 
“You need to think about how you are responsible for getting yourself into this situation,” she says. “You made certain decisions. You’ve done this all by yourself.”

  I fight back a grin and keep my head down. She’s right—I did this all by myself. And so far it’s working out perfectly.

  I go to my room for most of the afternoon—Mom thinks it’s so I can think about actions and consequences, but it’s really so I can start planning a summer at Lodema. It’s after five P.M. when I come back into the den, and I’m still trying to hide my good mood.

  But Mom seems to have had a mood change herself. She turns toward me and smiles a real smile. She’s not wearing any makeup, and her hair is soft with curls falling around her shoulders. I smile back at her without meaning to.

  “So I was thinking that you’ve only got four more days at home,” she says. “We should do something special. I made your favorite for supper.”

  I look toward the kitchen and wonder how I missed it. The air is heavy with the smell of chili. I open my mouth to speak, and I can almost taste the meat and spices on my tongue already. My mom never makes chili in the summer—I usually have to wait until at least November before she’ll consider it.

  “I just need to put the corn bread in the oven,” she says. “And then I thought we could go out to a movie. Your pick.”

  This is when my mother is most dangerous—when she decides that the idea of being a mom is appealing. When she turns into the mother I’ve always wanted. It’s not as impossible as you might think. This mood falls, obviously, into the herbivore category. She’s not showing any sharp teeth at all. But she’s like a big-eyed, fluffy, squeezable herbivore. A deer, maybe. When she chooses to be, Mom is sweet and funny. Beautiful and charming, and there’s a part of me that really wants to make her happy. To keep her happy. To keep her smiling like this, at me, day after day after day.

  “Can we go see Outrun the Apocalypse?” I ask. “They’re showing it on the big screen in Railroad Park tonight.”