Summer's Desire (3 page)

"Somewhere over the rainbow, way up
high,

There's a land that I heard of once in a
lullaby.

Somewhere over the rainbow, skies are
blue

And the dreams that you dare to dream,

Really do come true..."

When the first lyrics resonated around
him, Seth stopped breathing for long moments. Her voice was sweet and vibrant,
her tones the purest he had ever heard. They engulfed him in warmth. Under the
impact of her angelic voice, he felt his heart tearing and then melding back:
stronger than before, complete as never before.

When she was finished, he blinked the
moisture in his eyes, touched his forehead to hers and whispered, shattered:
"Thank you, Sunny."

* * *

After that night, when Seth spoke to
Summer, she started to speak back. The first time Grandma told her something
and Summer answered, Grandma took at least ten minutes to contain her tears of
joy.

Still, Summer never really became
talkative or spoke just for the sake of it. Her words were always carefully chosen
and meaningful. And whenever she opened her mouth, she instantly had Seth's
full attention.

Though to be fair, she always had that.
He was her best friend in the whole world and she would do anything for him (again,
to be fair, he was actually her
only
friend; she was very reserved with everyone
she met, so she didn't make any other friends. In fact, the only person besides
Seth who she allowed herself to care for at all was Grandma).

Therefore, Summer was delighted when,
each night, Seth asked her to sing for him in their bed, and she could give her
songs to him and please him in this little way. She only ever sang for him.

* * *

When Summer finally became old enough to
start at Seth's school, she was always near him at recess. Because of this, the
other boys soon started to make fun of him and his little "shadow". So
he found it necessary to beat some respect into them.

The school's administration was very
unhappy with Seth's aggressive behavior (to put it mildly), but he had made
sure that nobody would mock his Sunny anymore, and that was the only thing that
mattered to him.

* * *

When Seth was nine years old and Summer
almost seven, his mother returned to town. She had never been gone so long
before and Seth had gradually allowed himself to forget about her, to imagine
his life with Summer and Grandma as permanent. His Mom's sudden arrival dealt
him a heavy blow.

Despite his protests, his Mom dragged
him away with her, his last view that of Grandma wringing her hands in worry—and
of Summer collapsed to her knees in tears, hand reached out to him in futile
appeal.

Without Seth to hold her safe at night,
Summer started having nightmares again. With each passing day, the dark shadows
under her eyes grew deeper, her face paler.

Even Seth's frequent sneaking away to
Grandma's house quickly came to a halt after one afternoon when his Mom was
desperate for crack and he wasn't around to be sent on a buying errand. When he
finally showed up in the evening, his Mom asked him that, in the future, he
should head from school straight home. And since her request came with the lashes
of a pitilessly employed belt buckle... he obeyed.

Summer didn't find out the whys of it. All
she knew was that she barely got to see her best friend anymore—for no longer
than a few stolen minutes in school, at recess—and that in his absence, all
possible joy had been sucked out of life.

Helpless before Summer's obvious
suffering and his own longing for her, not to mention his hellish problems at
home, Seth started getting into more fights than ever before. At the slightest
perceived offense, he would explode into violence.

After he nearly got expelled for the
second time, Summer at last found the courage to confront him. She begged him
to stop the brawls, before he'd be forced to leave the school that was the only
place where they could now see each other.

Seth stopped getting into fights.

Six months later, his Mom found herself in
trouble with one of her boyfriends. He made some vicious threats, so she
skipped town overnight, and Seth went back to living with his Grandma. He and Summer
finally had each other again.

Their first night back together, lying
in their bed, Summer cried in his arms and wouldn't stop until he promised to
never leave her again. Then she snuggled deeper into him and eventually drifted
off with a smile on her lips, proceeding to enjoy her first uninterrupted sleep
in more than six months.

* * *

When Seth was eleven years old and
Summer nine, his mother returned for him once again. This time, he refused
point blank to leave with her.

When she started to curse at him, he
remained unaffected. When she tried to hit him, he caught her wrist and
squeezed tightly. He had shot up several inches over the last year and now
stood taller than his petite Mom. The strength which he held her wrist with made
her pale.

She left the house alone, amid threats
of reprisal, but Seth knew that her reign of terror over him was over at last.
He was finally old and strong enough not to be her victim anymore.

* * *

On Summer's tenth birthday, Seth gave
her a delicate silver heart necklace. He had worked the entire autumn delivering
newspapers in the mornings to afford buying her this gift.

The necklace immediately became Summer's
most prized possession, and despite Seth's teasing about her exaggerated
attachment to the pendant, she never once took it off. She couldn't always be
with Seth but she could always have his necklace with her, which was the next
best thing.

* * *

In fifth grade, Summer made the
horrifying discovery that she couldn't leave Seth on his own anymore.

He was not yet thirteen, but his tall, sinewy
frame exuded power and confidence, and his blue eyes, made lighter by the
contrast to his raven black hair, were always quietly watchful. He was
beautiful and mysterious and aloof, and girls, even older ones, were starting
to notice him in a different way.

Summer took these changes in, first with
confusion, then with gradual understanding quickly followed by increasing
agitation until she was boiling inside.

At first the girls were happy just to
eye Seth and moon over him from afar. But then they grew bolder and started to
approach him, asking for his help with homework, flinging their hair and
giggling and generally acting—in Summer's humble opinion—like demented sheep.

She couldn't leave Seth alone for a
moment without finding him surrounded like a juicy meat slab by a pack of
hungry hyenas. He didn't seem to enjoy the attention and never responded to the
girls' advances, but neither did he send them away, Summer observed with utter
frustration. Well, she determined grimly, then it was up to her to protect him
from those hussies!

She took her old role as his "shadow"
to new extremes. She stuck with him like glue, always attached to his arm or
his hand and shooting menacing glares at the encroaching girls. Seth was hers alone,
and she wasn't
ever
going to share him, not with anyone! Standing in her
fiercely protective pose by his side, she would often feel his gaze on her,
tender and amused, but he never made any comment on her behavior.

Then one day, three eighth-grade girls
waylaid her in the bathroom.

"You freak!" the tallest one,
a blonde, spat at her. "What's with you always hounding Seth Lewis and glowering
at us when we talk to him? You need to back off, you nasty stalker!"

Summer stood straighter, meeting the
girl's angry gaze with her own. "I'm not stalking Seth! He's my best
friend just like I'm his, and you skanks are the ones who need to back off. It's
yucky, the way you keep chasing after him."

Those words were apparently a greater challenge,
however, than the eighth-graders were willing to take on the chin. With a
screech of fury, the blonde jumped Summer, and the other two quickly joined the
tussle.

Later, Summer met Seth sporting wild
hair, a blackening eye, scratched hands and torn jumper—as well as a satisfied
smirk on her lips. She had given as good as she got, and the three hussies
would definitely think better the next time they thought to mess with her!

Seth took her appearance in with
widening eyes that swiftly clouded with anger. After examining her war wounds
with careful hands and determining that nothing was damaged irreversibly, he gritted
out, "Who did this to you?"

Taken aback by the menace in his voice,
Summer blinked and blurted, "Just some girls. It's nothing, really."

If anything, her words threw more gas on
the fire of his rage. "Sunny, it's
not
nothing, not by far, and
those girls are about to regret the day they were born!"

Highly attuned to the aura of danger
around him, Summer suddenly became afraid for her attackers. "It's
nothing," she insisted quietly, placing her hand on his corded arm and
trying to calm him down. "We had a small disagreement, I dealt with it,
and that's it; end of story."

Cradling her unhurt cheek in his palm,
Seth held her gaze protectively. "Nobody hurts my girl and gets away scot-free!"

"Oh, they didn't exactly get away
scot-free
."
Her smile was mischief itself. "Besides, it's got nothing to do with you,"
she lied.

He heard the lie—he knew her far too
well not to—and gave her a searching look. But studying her mutinous
expression, he clenched his jaw and gave up; he could tell that he'd get
nothing more out of her on the subject.

However, the next time some girls
started to approach Seth, they weren't met by Summer's glare alone but by his
as well. As his glare was infinitely more intimidating than hers could ever be,
the girls stumbled in their quest and fled as quickly as their feet could take
them in the opposite direction.

Summer couldn't have been happier, and
that night she sang all of Seth's favorite songs to him.

Nonetheless, she knew that the danger
wasn't past; she could still see the girls watching her Seth with hungry eyes.
How much worse would it get when he started high school and she wasn't there
with him as a barrage before the flood of older, attractive girls wanting to
steal him away from her?

No, she wouldn't let him go on his own!
she decided with fierce resolve. All she had to do was skip two grades, then
she could be with him in high school from the beginning.
Easy peasy... yeah,
right!
Summer snorted to herself.
Next you'll be wanting to fly to the
moon in your Superman cape.
(She had never owned a cape of any kind, much
less a Superman one.) Still, some things were worth fighting teeth and nails
for, so fight she did, pushing herself harder than ever before.

Seth watched her with increasing puzzlement
when she started to forgo play time with him in favor of her school work; she
had never done that before. At first he went off alone, started hanging out
more with his other friends (unlike Summer, Seth was very popular, and also
unlike her, he had made a few other friends even if no close ones). But when he
was away from Summer, a feeling of incompleteness nagged at him, so very soon
he too started to stay in more often.

With a resigned grimace, he would gather
his books and notebooks and go up to Summer's room to work beside her. He only
made it known that he was there under sufferance by sighing heavily every once
in a while, and each time he did this, Summer would hide a smile.

Seth's grades improved so dramatically
that when Grandma beheld his next report card, she was struck speechless for at
least five minutes. As for Summer—she managed to skip to sixth grade at mid-year
and was already anticipating high school life with Seth by her side. Then
tragedy struck, and her happy world and dreams crumbled around her.

Chapter 3

It was the beginning of spring in the
sixth year since Summer had joined the Lewis household. Seth was thirteen years
old, Summer eleven. It was a cold day in March, the frost having returned
overnight.

Summer had spent the last week battling a
nasty case of the flu, and even though she had been feeling better the last
couple of days and was heartily sick of being cooped up indoors, Seth wouldn't
even hear of her going for a walk outside. Allegedly, he didn't want her
turning into an icicle
and
having to deal with a return of her flu. Still,
if she had to spend another afternoon under house arrest, keeping warm, at
least her best friend (and current jailer) was sharing her imprisonment (though
most annoyingly, he didn't seem the slightest put out because of it!).