Summer Days and Summer Nights (49 page)

All of them except Noah, who has found a basketball.

I bend down beside him so that we're both surveying the hoop from the same angle. He's already panting from the heat, which is muggy and thick, and he smells the way all little kids do in the summer: like bug spray and sunscreen and sweat. He's holding the ball with both hands as he considers his next shot, his arms already sagging.

I think of the miniature basketball from yesterday with a pang.

“How's it going?” I ask, and he continues to squint at the basket as if he hasn't heard me. “You know,” I say, pointing at the hoop, “the trick is to line yourself up just right.”

“No it's not,” comes a voice from behind me. “The trick is to get the ball in the basket.”

I whirl around to find Griffin standing on the grass just beyond the pavement, wearing his usual outfit and holding the green and white basketball from the display case in one large palm.

“Hey,” I say, looking from the ball up to him and then back at the ball again. “What are you doing here?”

He nods at Noah, who is staring at him, too. “I thought this might work better,” he says, holding out the ball. Noah doesn't move; he just continues to watch Griffin for what feels like a very long time. But then some switch flips inside of him, and his face brightens, and he rushes over to grab the ball.

“What do you say?” I yell after him, as he tucks it under one arm and runs back toward the basket.

“You're welcome,” Noah calls over his shoulder, and I laugh.

“Close enough.”

Griffin is still standing a few feet away, looking nervous and out of place. Amid the frenzy of high voices and peals of laughter and churning legs, he's like an oasis: calm and still and focused.

He clears his throat. “Do you think we could talk for a minute?”

“Sure,” I say, looking behind me and catching Grace's eye. I make a motion toward the corner of the building and mouth, “Be right back.” When she nods, I turn back to Griffin. “Come on,” I say, and he follows me around the side of the brick wall, where it's shady and cool and the voices are muffled and distant.

We stand facing each other, and he steps forward so that he's very close to me. This time, I'm the first one to look away, glancing down reflexively, where I notice an apple juice stain on my camp shirt. I lift my chin again, forcing myself to meet his eyes, surprised when he doesn't waver.

“That was really, really nice of you,” I say, trying to hold onto my thoughts beneath his clear gaze. “To go buy a ball for him.”

There's a hint of a smile on Griffin's face. “I didn't buy it.”

“What do you—” I stop, and my mouth falls open. “No way.”

He nods. “I went back last night after I dropped you off.”

“It must've taken so many hours.”

“It did.”

“And so many quarters.”

“It did.”

“Well, thank you,” I say. “I mean, I have no idea how you managed to do that, given your Pop-A-Shot skills, but—”

“I need to tell you something,” Griffin says, cutting me off. He looks instantly apologetic. “Sorry, I didn't mean to … Well, see? This is what I mean. This is why I don't have very many friends. I interrupt a lot. And I don't always notice other people as much as I should. I once left my grandma in a department store because I was so busy reading about mycology on my phone.”

“What's mycology?”

“The study of fungi.”

I squint at him. “What does that have to do with your grandma?”

“It doesn't,” he says impatiently. “But I was so wrapped up in it that when I got up to leave, I totally forgot she'd come there with me.”

“Oh.”

“It's something I'm working on. But there's a lot that I'm working on, and I have been my whole life. I don't always listen. And I spend too much time talking about certain things—”

“Like mycology?”

“It's
fascinating
,” he says, so emphatically that it's hard not to smile. “And I can't always tell if people are upset about something, so if you were, you'd have to tell me. Because I probably wouldn't ask. And I have trouble looking people in the eye—”

“Yeah,” I say, with an encouraging smile. “But you're doing it.”

“I know, but it's hard. It's like trying to hold in a sneeze or something.” He looks away quickly, widening his eyes and then squeezing them shut before turning back to me again. “Not that I don't like your eyes, because I do. They're very pretty.” He takes a short breath, rocking back and forth on his heels before hurrying on. “And I'm way too honest. Even though you said you like that, you don't realize—”

“Griffin.”

“Yeah?”

“Is this what you wanted to tell me?”

He stares at me blankly.

“You said you needed to tell me something…”

“Oh yeah,” he says, taking a quick step forward. “Just this.”

It happens so fast there's not even time to be surprised; just like that, Griffin is kissing me, a kiss that's soft and tentative and much too quick. He pulls away again almost immediately, blinking at me. “I don't know if that was okay—”

Before he can finish, I grab his shirt and tug him toward me, and this time, I'm the one who kisses him. For a split second I feel him tense up, but just as quickly, he relaxes into it, and then—as if he's forgotten there's any reason to be uncertain, as if we've done this a million times before—his arms fold around me, and the space between us disappears, and the rest of it falls away. Suddenly, he's just a boy I really, really like, and I'm just a girl he's finally worked up the nerve to kiss. There are still about a thousand ways this could all go wrong. But there are a thousand different ways it could go right, too. And for the moment, none of the rest of it matters. It's just him and me. Me and him. The two of us.

Until it's not.

At the sound of high-pitched giggling, I force myself to pull away from Griffin. For a second, I stand there completely frozen, afraid to turn around. He blinks down at me a few times with a lazy smile, but then I see it register on his face, too, and he leans around me to look.

“Oops,” he says with a sheepish grin, and I cover my face with my hands.

“Gross,” says Nikko Heyward with obvious glee.

“Eww,” agrees Jack Doyle.

“Disgusting,” says Henry Sorenson.

Behind them, Noah is staring at us, too. The ball that Griffin brought him is tucked under his arm, and he holds it out hopefully.

“Caballo?” he says, and Griffin smiles.

“Vamos!” he says, rocking forward again. Then he claps his hands once and begins to jog back toward the basketball court, Noah and the rest of the kids skipping after him. “Vamos a jugar!”

I stand there, watching him: the way he stoops to give Noah a high five, the way he waits so patiently for the others to catch up, the way he looks back at me and smiles, sending a jolt of electricity right through me.

And I think,
That's why
.

Just as they get to the court—just as Noah sends the little ball sailing, and it clangs off the rim, and he jumps up and down as if he'd performed a game-winning dunk—Griffin turns around, again looking vaguely alarmed, then jogs back over to me.

“Almost forgot something,” he says, reaching out a hand, and I take it.

 

It was August 4th, and I guess it already had been for a while. To be totally honest I didn't even notice the change at first. My life was already serving up these big fat sweltery summer days anyway, one after the other, each one pretty much exactly the same as the one before it … probably a more powerfully alert and observant person would have picked up on the change sooner.

What can I say, it was summer. It was hot. Anyway, here's what was going on: Time had stopped.

Or it hadn't stopped, exactly, but it got stuck in a loop.

Please believe me when I say that this is not a metaphor. I'm not trying to tell you that I was really bored and it seemed like summer would never end or something like that. What I'm saying is, the summer after my freshman year of high school, the calendar got to August 4th and gave up: Literally every single day after that was also August 4th. I went to bed on the night of August 4th. I woke up, it was the morning of August 4th.

The chain had slipped off the wheel of the cosmos. The great iTunes of the heavens was set on Repeat One.

As supernatural predicaments go it wasn't even that original, given that this exact same thing happened to Bill Murray in
Groundhog Day
. In fact one of the first things I did was watch that movie about eight times, and while I appreciate its wry yet tender take on the emotional challenges of romantic love, let me tell you, as a practical guide to extricating yourself from a state of chronological stasis it leaves a lot to be desired.

And yes, I watched
Edge of Tomorrow
too. So if I ran into an Omega Mimic, believe me, I knew exactly what to do. But I never did.

If there was a major difference between my deal and
Groundhog Day
, it was probably that unlike Bill Murray I didn't really mind it all that much, at least at first. It wasn't freezing cold. I didn't have to go to work. I'm kind of a loner anyway, so I mostly took it as an opportunity to read a lot of books and play an ungodly amount of video games.

The only real downside was that nobody else knew what was happening, so I had nobody to talk to about it. Everybody around me thought they were living today for the first time ever. I had to put a lot of effort into pretending not to see things coming and acting surprised when they came.

And also it was boiling hot. Seriously, it was like all the air in the world had been sucked away and replaced by this hot, clear, viscous syrup. Most days I sweated through my shirt by the time I finished breakfast. This was in Lexington, Massachusetts, by the way, where I was already stuck in space as well as time, because my parents didn't want to pony up for the second session of summer camp, and my temp job at my mom's accounting firm wouldn't start till next week. So I was already killing time, even as it was.

Only now, when I killed time, it didn't stay dead. It rose from the grave and lived again. I was on zombie time.

Lexington is a suburb of Boston, and as such is composed of a lot of smooth gray asphalt, a lot of green lawns, a lot of pine trees, a bunch of faux-colonial McMansions, and some cute, decorous downtown shoppes. And some Historick Landmarks—Lexington played a memorable though tactically meaningless role in the Revolutionary War, so there's a lot of historical authenticity going on here, as is clearly indicated by a lot of helpful informational plaques.

After the first week or so I had a pretty solid routine going. In the morning I slept through my mom leaving for work; on her way she would drop my impressively but slightly disturbingly athletic little sister at soccer camp, leaving me completely alone. I had Honey Nut Cheerios for breakfast, which you'd think would get boring fast, but actually I found myself enjoying them more and more as time went by. There's a great deal of subtlety in your Honey Nut Cheerio. A lot of layers to uncover.

I learned when to make myself scarce. I found ways to absent myself from the house from 5:17 p.m. to 6:03 p.m., which is when my sister muffed the tricky fast bit in the third movement of Vivaldi's Violin Concerto in A Minor seventeen times straight. I generally skipped out after dinner while my parents—they got divorced a couple of years ago, but my dad was over for some reason, probably to talk about money—had a nastier-than-usual fight about whether or not my mom should take her car into the shop because the muffler rattled when you went over bumps.

It put things in perspective. Note to self: Do not waste entire life being angry about stupid things.

As for the rest of the day, my strategies for occupying myself for all eternity were mostly (a) going to the library, and (b) going to the pool.

Generally I chose option (a). The library was probably the place in Lexington where I felt the most at home, and that's not excluding my actual home, the one where I slept at night. It was quiet at the library. It was air-conditioned. It was calm. Books don't practice violin. Or fight about mufflers.

Plus they smell really good. This is why I'm not much of a supporter of the glorious e-book revolution. E-books don't smell like anything.

With an apparently infinite amount of time at my disposal, I could afford to think big, and I did: I decided to read through the entire fantasy and science fiction section, book by book, in alphabetical order. At the time, that was pretty much my definition of happiness. (That definition was about to change, in a big way, but let's not get ahead of ourselves.) At the point where this story starts it had been August 4th for I would say approximately a month, give or take, and I was up to
Flatland
, which is by a guy named, no kidding, Edwin Abbott Abbott.