The Summer I Saved the World ... in 65 Days (2 page)

The love seat has become almost creepy now, part of the garden, with a long strand of ivy wrapped around one of the armrests and a huge spiderweb underneath.
A dry leaf twirls from a tree and lands next to the birds, and they fly off. Empty cushions. How sad—a love seat that needs love.

The last time I sat on it was with Grandma. Just her and me, in the quiet of our yard, holding hands. Hers were white and frail, bumpy with blue veins, and I tried to memorize the way they looked. She'd been sick for a while. Her heart was failing, and I knew she didn't have much longer.

It has been almost a year since she died. I get hit with these moments, when I miss her so terribly—and can't even think about what has happened with my family—that I don't know what to do, how to make it not hurt so much. I've tried running around the block and turning my music up really loud, but that helps for only a short time.

Sometimes it feels like the dull ache in my chest is going to spill all over, seep into my cracks and corners, and stay forever.

The warm breeze lifts my hair, skims the back of my neck, moves across the grass like an electric current.

And there it all is, right in front of me. My prompt, I guess you could say. Grandma's Simple Truth and the empty love seat and Mrs. Chung's empty garden. Thomas's question. Mr. Pontello's advice. Even Mr. Chung doing our shoveling all those winters.

Get up. Do something. Now
.

I walk to Mrs. Chung's and peek through her window. She's stretched out on the sofa, exhausted, that big, thick white cast covering her leg. How'd she break it? I don't even know.

I find a little digging tool in our garage, then drag the first tray of flowers to Mrs. Chung's evergreen bushes. Every spring, she arranges her marigolds in curving waves of color—deep reds on the outside, a middle wave of oranges, to golden, then the lightest yellow. Like a sunset.

As I dig the first hole, I feel a little panicky that she'll come out and be mad or something. You know how adults can jump to the conclusion that teenagers must be doing something wrong.

I don't know what I'll say if she does come out, so I take the flower from the chair and just focus on patting it into the dirt. Then another, and another. And suddenly I have a row.

I get up and look in the window again. Mrs. Chung has fallen asleep, so I keep going.

No one is around. Mom and Dad—at work. Matt—BMIA. Brother Missing in Action. Friends—complicated.

It's just me and the flowers.

One hour later, I have strips of black dirt under my fingernails and crisscross impressions of grass on my
knees, and my back and neck are really stiff. But when I soak the flowers with water from our hose, there is Mrs. Chung's sparkling, dripping marigold sunset, just the way it's supposed to be.

For the first time in my life, I didn't wait for someone else to step up.

And that is the beginning of everything.

I
can't tell Jorie. She won't get it.

We both know we became friends because we're neighbors. She lives on the other side of Mrs. Chung. But when you look at us—her with the newest, smartest phone in one back pocket of her skintight jeans and a lip gloss and mascara in the other, and me in need of some reworking—I wonder how it has lasted this long. In first grade, when Jorie moved into the cul-de-sac, we had playdates and did the things firstgrade girls do. That was enough back then.

But now? Jorie and I are in between two places.
Like an intermission between the first and second acts of a play. I'm not sure how things are going to end up.

It's Saturday afternoon and I'm in her room. As usual, she's doing twenty things at the same time: zooming back and forth between five open windows on her laptop, dissecting the advice in three beauty magazines, tapping on her phone, finding some music, talking nonstop. I'll say this: she's always been fun to watch.

I'm on her bed, trying to find the right-size mushy pillow to mold under my sore neck. There are about a dozen neon-colored ones to choose from.

Jorie pops her gum and blows a bubble, turns a magazine page. “Hey, did you see Mrs. Chung this morning?”

I sit up. “No. What about her?”

“She was walking around the sidewalk on her crutches, like, crying and all upset. Freaked out, talking to herself.” Jorie looks at me. “Wait. I never remember, is she Chinese or Korean?”

“Korean.”

“Oh, yeah. Anyway, so my dad went over to talk to her, and get this. Someone sneaked into her yard and planted her flowers.”

“Really? Was she … mad? I mean, what did your dad say?”

“He said she was totally confused but also, like,
elated. Over flowers. That's kind of weird, don't you think? I mean, who would go plant someone else's flowers?”

“She was happy?” A funny feeling spreads through my chest, as if a rush of lighter air is shooting into my lungs.

Jorie tilts her head and half smiles. “Yeah.”

I get up and look out Jorie's bedroom window. I have a perfect view of the marigolds, standing straight, reaching toward the sun. And Mrs. Chung was elated, Jorie said. What a great word. “Elated.” The opposite of “deflated.” How she was before.

“Nina!” Jorie is waving her arms.

“What?”

“Hello? I've been talking to you for the last two minutes. Have you heard anything I've said?”

I grin at her. “Yes, everything.” And I did, in the background.

She sighs. “Sometimes I just get the feeling you're not all there.”

“I'm here. Of course I'm here.”

Jorie pulls a long string of gum from her mouth and winds it around her finger. “I was
saying
that my mom can drive us on the first day of summer school. I am not walking in by myself, like a loser.”

“Okay.”

I walk to her shelf and spot the picture frame from
her seventh birthday party, decorated with fake jewels, glitter, and foam stars. “You still have this?”

She laughs. “Apparently. I don't know why, though. I was such a dork.”

“No, you weren't.”

She gets up, takes the frame. “Yes, I was. Look, I couldn't even glue.” She points to the dried spots where nothing is glued, then puts the frame back on the shelf, facedown. “Anyway, you know that was a sad birthday for me; we don't need to go there.”

“In a way, Jor, it was a great birthday. If you think about it.”

She shakes her head. “Uh-uh. Don't do your quality-over-quantity thing.”

Jorie had invited the whole class, but just two other girls came besides me. Jorie hadn't known there was going to be another party at the same time. One of the cool girls. So you know how that goes. But the four of us decorated the frames and ate pizza and cake and tie-dyed T-shirts purple and green. I had a great time, but Jorie cried at the end, after the other two girls left. Told her mom to throw away the T-shirt and the rest of the cake. Said she was done with birthdays forever.

Jorie is studying a magazine page. “What about this top and shorts for the first day of summer school?”

I nod. “Cute.”

“Do you like the crop top?”

“Yeah. That'll look good on you.”

She had twenty-five friends at her thirteenth birthday party this year, so (a) she obviously wasn't done with birthdays, and (b) the cool girl who ruined her seventh birthday party was there, and Jorie insisted on sitting next to her at the restaurant.

Jorie stands and reaches for my hands, then examines my fingernails. “What's going on here?” She laughs. “Sit down. Your toenails are fine, but you are in serious need of a manicure.”

In five seconds, she has emptied her bag of nail supplies onto the shaggy purple carpet. She picks up my right hand and starts filing. “You really shouldn't let your nails get this bad. I mean, it's important, you know?”

I jump as she nicks a piece of skin.

“Sorry.”

“No problem,” I say, squirming. “Anything for beauty, right?”

“Absolutely. Sit still.” Jorie concentrates intently on the base coat, then two coats of light pink, blowing softly on each nail.

I look at her array of polish colors. “How come you always do pink for me?”

“Because your nails are so short. Can't go too dark. Besides”—she holds out her hands, with beautiful oval nails—“I'm red. You're pink. That's us.”

She piles everything back into her bag. “You have to let them dry a good half hour.”

“I know.” I stand and go back to the window as she keeps talking. Her voice is a constant hum, like the air-conditioning that's on in my house from April to October, and the heat that's on from November to March. I have long suspected that the windows in my house don't really open and they're fake, just made to look like real windows. My parents have a serious issue with climate control. Control in general, really. Which might be one reason that my brother keeps his headphones on and his bedroom door closed whenever he decides to be home.

It's right then, when I'm standing in Jorie's room, that the idea starts to come to me. I look out onto the cul-de-sac, built in a crescent shape, one road in and out. Seven houses, eight including Jorie's, all basically the same style but different colors. Brown, white, tan, repeat. Even though this is northern Illinois, it makes me think of the Fertile Crescent we learned about in social studies. The cradle of civilization. A place where people settled down, lived in a community. Had neighbors.

And I see things from her window that are there every day but I never really notice. Toys scattered all over the Cantalonis' lawn because their three boys are full of energy and Mrs. Cantaloni is pregnant. Mr.
Dembrowski's neat house, the cleanest one by far, but he never comes out. Does he still live there? Is he even alive? What if he's dead in there and no one knows? And Eli Bennett's house at one end, with his little brother, Thomas, running around their driveway in a bathing suit and black cape, slicing a plastic sword through the air, fending off imaginary enemies.

Or maybe a more real kind of enemy that he senses is lurking around our quiet little neighborhood—connected houses but unconnected people.

Thomas darts behind a tree, then leaps out with his sword pointed forward. What does he see? He staggers backward, clutches his stomach, and falls to the ground.

Maybe it's not what he sees but what he feels. I feel it too. Something dark. We aren't the only ones with fake windows.

And I think again about Mrs. Chung's marigolds, and Mr. Pontello telling us to be remarkable but unnoticed, and Grandma saying things happen only when they're meant to happen.

But what if—really,
what if
—a person could play a part in that? Affect what's meant to happen?

Or maybe even alter it. In a good way.

I
'm suddenly possessed with this crazy idea.

“Jorie, I have to go.” I don't think she hears me. She's still talking, even as I walk down the stairs and open her front door.

“Wait!” she calls then. She's at the top of the stairs, pulling her hair into a bun. “Don't leave!”

“I need to do something right now. I forgot. Hey, thanks for painting my nails.”

“Hold on. You need quick-dry.” She dashes into her room, then runs down the stairs with a small bottle.
She grabs my hands and sprays the nails. “It hasn't been a half hour.”

I smile. “Of course. Thanks again.”

She blows a huge bubble that pops on her nose.

I laugh while she makes a heart shape with her fingers, the gum still all over her face. I heart her back.

Jorie hugs me. “You're the best.”

“You too.”

At home in my mismatched room, a relief after the brightness of Jorie's, I flip through my eighth-grade assignment notebook and count the days of summer. Sixty-five before the first day of high school.

The only thing I'm doing is a summer school class (Art Form I) and reading the two books for freshman accelerated English. Jorie's around, but my friends from school, the group I was kind of sort of in last year, went on an adventure trip to the Pacific Northwest. I guess I could have gone too, but I'm not really a rugged, mountain-climbing, risk-taking person. Okay, the truth is, they never officially asked me to go. And … I don't think I was ever really
in
their group. We hung out mostly because we were all on the basketball team.