The Hidden Summer (6 page)

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 [email protected] 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.”

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.