The Hidden Summer

by Gin Phillips

  My mother hates movies based on video games. She hates sci-fi. And she especially hates movies about the end of the world. So this movie has three strikes against it. I breathe in the chili while I wait for her to answer.

  She shrugs. “Sure. If you want. It’s going to be one of those where all the women wear tight leather pants and carry guns, isn’t it?”

  “Probably,” I say.

  “I don’t want to sit on the ground,” she says. “But I’m up for it as long as we can find the folding chairs.”

  She stands and walks past me, running her hand through my hair. I watch her pour oil in the cast-iron skillet and turn on the oven. She looks toward me, and her brown eyes are wide and deep. She’s really extremely pretty. Sometimes I wish I had her eyes.

  “Lionel should be home any second,” she says. “Would you rather it just be us at the movies, or would you like to invite him?”

  “I’d like him to come,” I say. “And I’ll set the table.”

  I’m glad Lionel’s coming home. He makes conversation easier—he chats about nothing and everything, and even if Mom and I start making little jabs at each other, he keeps on talking like we’re just trading compliments. He’s sort of a protective cushion between us. If we have awkward silences, he fills them up.

  I like setting the table for three better than setting it for two. It feels more substantial. I grab a handful of silverware and three plates. Mom used to make fun of me when I was younger for always pestering her to let me set the table. She said kids were supposed to hate setting the table because it’s a chore. “Chore” means you shouldn’t like doing it. And she’s always preferred to eat in front of the television with her plate in her lap. But sitting down for a real meal at the table has always made me feel like I’m on a television show, like we’re all acting out parts and saying our lines, and that when we clear our plates and head back to the rest of our lives, we might keep reading our scripts. I think life would surely go better if we had scripts.

  I still feel like that, even though I’m too old for pretend. But I straighten the knives and line up the spoons next to them, and part of me thinks when we get up from this table, maybe we’ll be a different family.

  The front door opens, and Lionel calls out, “Something smells great!”

  I wave at him, a napkin in my hand. His shaggy black hair is getting white over his ears, and he’d be handsome except that all his features—nose, mouth, eyebrows, chin—all seem to be a little too big for his face. But his smile is overly big, too, and it’s completely handsome.

  He gives me a one-armed hug—my head doesn’t even reach his shoulder—and then he walks to the stove and gives Mom the same hug, plus a quick kiss on her cheek. He used to give her two-armed hugs with real kisses on the mouth. Those made me groan and turn my head—who wants to watch kisses on the mouth, especially when the kissee is your mother? But I wish they’d start doing it again now. Over the years, I’ve learned that the shift from two-armed hugs to one-armed hugs is a sign that a stepfather might be on his way out.

  “What did you do to get chili in May?” Lionel asks me, walking back into the den and stooping to pick up the newspaper. “What are we celebrating?”

  “Remedial social studies classes,” I say happily. “All summer long.”

  “Oh,” he says. “Well, that wasn’t my first guess. I thought you loved social studies. It’s been an easy class for you, hasn’t it?”

  I sneak a glance at Mom, who doesn’t seem to have heard. Once upon a time, it used to hurt my feelings that Mom didn’t care about my grades. I’d show her a report card with straight A’s and she’d blink at it once or twice and hand it back to me without a word. She looked more impressed at a menu for Chinese takeout. Eventually I stopped showing her my grades. I don’t show them to Lionel, either, but he asks about tests and stuff. And apparently he pays attention to my answers. Normally that would make me feel all warm and fuzzy—he really is a sweet guy—but right now I’m wishing he paid less attention.

  “Yeah, well, ah, the class was harder than I thought, I guess,” I say.

  “Hmm,” he says. “I never thought you’d be taking remedial classes in anything.”

  “Just because she’s good at crosswords doesn’t mean she’s good at things that matter,” calls my mother.

  Lionel and I look at each other for a second. I think we’re both trying to figure out if she meant to insult one of us or both of us.

  “I don’t think I said thanks for cooking the chili, Mom,” I say, because I want to pretend she didn’t mean to insult either one of us. “That was really nice of you.”

  She nods. Of course, when she’s being sweet to me, there’s always the part of me waiting for it. Waiting for her to get tired of playing Mom. Waiting for her to get tired of liking me. Waiting for the bad thing to happen. But the minutes or the hours pass and that part of me gets lazy and forgets to be on guard. And then it hurts worse when everything goes bad.

  Even though I know the bad thing will happen—that it always happens—I just want, so badly, for it not to happen right now.

  “Sure, sweetie,” she says. “And, Lionel, those social studies classes mean Nell will be gone most days this summer. It’s a full two months.”

  Lionel’s folding the crossword puzzle into a convenient size. When he glances up—and I admit that I feel more flattered than guilty about this—he looks disappointed. Like he’ll miss me. It occurs to me that maybe I’m not the only one who likes having a protective cushion around when it comes to Mom.

  Lionel doesn’t say anything, though. He knows she doesn’t want him to question me going away. Lionel is a good guy, but he is an object at rest. He likes to stay at rest. He likes as little conflict as possible.

  He rattles the newspaper. “Okay, Nell,” he says. “Eight-letter word for ‘how we communicate.’”

  I count it out on my fingers. “Talking” is a letter short.

  “Language,” I say after a second.

  Dinner goes pretty well, and then we all pack into Lionel’s gray Buick. I sit behind Mom because Lionel has to have the driver’s seat back as far as it will go. We’re only about ten minutes from Railroad Park—it’s in the middle of downtown, built along the old railroad tracks. According to Memama and Grandpops, those railroad tracks used to carry people from place to place. Now the trains still run, but they carry materials from place to place . . . sort of like semitrucks, only bigger and louder.

  The park is great because you can watch the trains rumble by and hear their whistles blow. You look out over the acres and acres of park, with its flowers and thick grass and waterfalls, and at night the waterfalls are lit up pink and purple and blue with colored spotlights. The skyscrapers of downtown are right over your head—the red lights of City Federal, which look so far away from our golf course, seem like they’re just a few feet away when you’re lying on the grass in the park.

  Every Thursday night, the city shows a different movie on a big inflatable screen set up in the park, and everyone arranges their blankets and chairs on a soft, sloping hill. Children run around and fall down like clumsy puppies. A few feet away from me, there’s a little black girl with amazing hair—hundreds of tiny braids—picking clovers with her mother. There’s a little white boy trying to stand on his head. All around us, adults are falling asleep. (Lionel is snoring so loud in his chair that I have to poke him in the side a few times.) And some people, like me, are actually watching the movie.

  We’re about halfway through Outrun the Apocalypse when two toddlers, just off to my left, run full speed into a Labrador retriever. They hit its side so hard that their feet leave the ground and they flip over the dog and land on their backs. The dog wags its tail, then there’s a whole lot of screaming.

  I wait for a second, but I don’t see any parents around. So I stand up to go see if I can at least get the dog to quit slobbering all
over the kids’ faces. It’s acting like they’re screaming lollipops. Still, it wasn’t the dog’s fault that the kids were out of control, so I call him a good boy as I push him away with my elbow. The little boys’ faces are screwed up so tight that they have no eyes at all, just giant open mouths.

  “Hey,” I say, touching one of them lightly on the head. “Hey, are you okay? Do you know where your parents are?”

  “I’ll take him,” says a voice. “He’s my little brother.”

  I look up and there’s Adam Cooper. The one who can do one-armed push-ups. The one who has never spoken to me. And now he has spoken to me, although, of course, he didn’t know he was speaking to me. So I need to speak to him. Right.

  “Okay,” I say. I try to smile.

  He scoops the redheaded boy into his arms. The other boy gets to his feet and scrambles off, hopefully to find someone related to him. Adam’s brother is still crying, and Adam starts bouncing him up and down a little. He looks from me to his little brother and then back to me again.

  “It’s Nell, right? Don’t you go to my school?” He has to raise his voice so I can hear him over the crying.

  “Yeah,” I say, and I’m proud of how steady my voice sounds. “Yeah” was a very reasonable response. Not stupid at all. Good call.

  “I’m Adam.”

  “Right,” I say. “Your brother, um, ran into a dog.”

  Hmmm, I think. That response was not quite as good.

  “He’s a moron,” he says, but he says it fondly. Like he likes morons. “You here with your parents?”

  The little redhead is calming down slightly. He’s whimpering instead of screaming.

  I nod. “My mom and stepdad. They’re both asleep.”

  It occurs to me suddenly that maybe it’d be better if I were here with Lydia. Or a massive group of friends. Not that I have a massive group of friends.

  “You’re lucky,” he says. “My parents are awake. They think this is good family time.”

  Okay, good. I feel better about being with Mom and Lionel. “I guess it is if you don’t count that your brother’s going around attacking Labrador retrievers,” I say.

  He laughs. “Yeah, he’s vicious.”

  I need to come up with something else to make him laugh. Am I supposed to be thinking this much before every sentence? Can he see the wheels turning in my brain? Still, I would really like to make him laugh again. I look at his brother, who is now quiet and squirming.

  “My friend Lydia has a Maltipoo that might be a better match for your brother,” I say. “We could put them in a ring and let them fight it out.”

  “A Maltipoo?”

  “Maltese poodle. Very macho.”

  He does laugh again, and I definitely feel like I am on a television show now. I am playing a character who makes Adam Cooper laugh.

  And then I hear my mother’s voice.

  “Nell, come on back and stop flirting,” she says, loudly enough that an old couple in lawn chairs several feet away turn toward us.

  I look away from Adam because I can’t stand to see his reaction. My mother is a couple of steps away from me. The wind blows her strapless dress around her knees.

  “I’m just talking, Mom,” I say it in a robot voice, no emotion.

  “If you wanted to come here tonight for a date, you should have said so,” she says. She flips her hair over her shoulder.

  “It’s not a date,” I say.

  Sometimes I think my mother doesn’t know me at all, but at other times, like now, I realize she can read every thought in my head. She can tell I like Adam. And she can tell this is, of course, not a date. And she can tell that the thing I want most in the entire world at this moment is for him not to know that I like him.

  “We just go the same school, ma’am,” says Adam. “I hardly know her.”

  I hear those words, and I try very hard to keep my face blank so my mother doesn’t see into my head. But I feel like I just ran full speed into a Labrador retriever and hit the ground hard.

  “You can come sit with us,” Mom says to Adam, “if you’d like.”

  “No, that’s okay,” he says, and I hear how much he wants to escape. I know the sound of wanting to escape.

  “Well,” he says to me, “see you.”

  “Bye,” I say. My feet step on my mother’s shadow as we walk back to our chairs.

  “He’s a nice-looking boy,” my mother says cheerfully. “He’s got good bones. I bet he’s got plenty of girls after him.”

  What I hear her say is that he would never pick me, not when he has so many better options. Prettier, smarter, more likable options. I might also be hearing her say that she’s doing me a favor by keeping me from getting my hopes up.

  “If you were trying to embarrass me, it worked,” I say.

  She laughs. No, it’s more of a giggle.

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” she says. “No one’s trying to embarrass you.”

  I wonder if she believes that. I wonder if I believe it. Part of me thinks of course your mother wouldn’t want to embarrass you. Why would she? What would she get out of it? And I don’t have an answer to that.

  But another part of me knows without a doubt that she did mean to embarrass me. I don’t know why she does it, but I know that she does. And as I steal looks at her in her pink sundress, long legs crossed so gracefully, I know that she thinks if she were my age, she would be one of those prettier, smarter, more likable girls that Adam would be interested in. I think she’s probably right.

  A few years ago, before I had really developed my strategy, I would try to get back at Mom when she acted like this. When I was furious and hurt, I’d find ways to get revenge without her knowing. I sprayed Windex on her toothbrush. I let Saban lick her favorite coffee mug and then I put it back in the cabinet. I’d eat all the pecans in the mixed nuts because they’re her favorite.

  That was kid’s stuff. I’ve learned that revenge doesn’t help you feel better. It makes you feel guilty, when what you really need is not to feel anything. Feelings are the whole problem. Anger, hurt, sadness, guilt—it’s all too much. The only thing that really helps is to stop feeling altogether.

  To stop feeling, you have to disappear. So that’s what I do. For the rest of the night, I think of my body as a robot that stands up and walks to the car and then walks to my bedroom and brushes my teeth and gets in bed, while that whole time the real me is gone. The real me is wandering around Lodema and setting up a new home inside a dinosaur. The robot deals with my mother, nods at her when necessary, while the real me walks barefoot on cool fake grass and looks up at the moon.

  The next morning, I head to see my grandparents. I feel like I’m back inside my body. I will not think about Adam Cooper anymore. I have more important things to think about, and my grandparents can help me.

  I hug and kiss them both, breathe in Grandpops’s grassy smell, and then I plop down on the sofa. I take a long moment to look at them both, from Memama’s small, perfect hands to Grandpops’s stubbly cheeks. I can’t stand to lie to them about remedial classes—I assume eventually Mom will tell them.

  I see Memama flash a look at Grandpops, a look that is like a kiss.

  I think of Adam Cooper’s face while he was laughing, and then I think of him saying, “I hardly know her.”

  I need to focus. I need to concentrate on planning for Lodema. That’s what matters.

  “Memama, I need a favor,” I say. “I need you to teach me how to cook a fish.”

  CHAPTER 7

  THE NEW WORLD

  Finally it’s May 30. I hug Mom and Lionel good-bye at about 8:30 and tell them I’m going to walk to the middle school. Mom tries to neaten my hair, and Lionel hugs me extra hard. I walk out the front door and around the block before looping back to the golf course.

  I’m only carrying my backpack—I figure I can t
ake a few things each day, and today I’ve focused on the basics to make Marvin feel like home. Lydia and I have plenty of time to think through our supply list—the bigger issue has been figuring out how to get in and out of Lodema in the daylight without anyone noticing. Vaulting over grass like knives everyday isn’t going to work. I’ve spent the last few days walking the perimeter of the golf course, looking for the best place for Lydia and me to climb the fence. We’ll want to stay off the streets and sidewalks as much as possible.

  I’ve found a spot with a crape myrtle growing close to the outside of the fence, and the tree is surrounded by high shrubs. We can climb the tree instead of the fence, and the shrubs will hide us. Plus there’s nothing but weeds on the other side—no sharp pampas grass. It’s perfect, and as I make my way there with my backpack, wading through the weeds, I only have one small worry: painted on the side of the crape myrtle are the same symbols we saw on the side of the empty aquarium. Green arrow, purple circles, blue eyebrows. Lydia and I have hardly talked over the last few days—we figured we should do everything possible to keep her mom from getting suspicious—so I haven’t told her about it yet. She might have something smart to say. Or she might just talk more about tadpoles and snow.

  I decide to walk to the Chevron. I have a sandwich and an apple in my lunch bag, but I’d like to buy a little treat for our first day on the course. Plus I always like any excuse to go to a gas station. I like the smell of gas, I like the snack marts, and I like all those people driving off to faraway places. Or even just across town. If you want to get somewhere, if you want to put some distance between yourself and where you started, you have to get friendly with gas stations.

  I look both ways before I cross the street, not just looking for traffic, but looking for anyone who might know me. I jog across Clairmont Avenue quickly, keeping one hand up to shield my face. The gas station is just ahead of me on the corner.