Summer Days and Summer Nights (5 page)

“
You're not dying,
” Gracie shouted. “You're dehydrated, or you have hypothermia.” But even as she said it, she realized the water was warmer than it should be.

“It was me that day. You were skipping stones. You'd skinned your knee. I saw you just for a second. It was the last day of May.” His eyelids stuttered open, shut. “I shouldn't have kissed you, but I wanted to for so long. It was better than ice cream. It was better than books.”

She was crying now. “Eli, please, let me—”

“It's too late.”

“Who says?
Who says?
”

He gave the barest shrug. It became a shudder. “The lake. Three months to walk the land. But always I must return to her.”

Gracie's mind flew back to that day at the cove, the creature in the water. It was impossible.

“There are no books, below,” he said. “No words or language.”

No Dairy Queen. No bicycles. No music. It couldn't be.

Gracie blinked, and Eli's form seemed to flicker, ghostly almost, part boy and part something else. She remembered Annalee tapping her hand with the pen.
Some of us wear our hearts. Some of us carry them.

Gracie's eyes scanned the beach, the tangle of brambles where the woods began. There, a dark little hump in the leaves. She'd never seen him without it—that ugly purple backpack—and in that moment, she knew.

She scrambled for it, fell, righted herself, grabbed it open, and split the zipper wide. It gaped like a mouth. It was full of junk. Skee ball tickets, mini golf score cards, a pink and gold lip gloss tin. But there, at the bottom, glinting like a hidden moon …

She pulled it from the bag, a long, papery cape of scales that seemed to go on and on, glittering and sharp beneath her fingers, surprising in its weight. She dragged it toward Eli, trailing it behind her, stumbling through the shallows. She pulled his body close and wrapped it around him.

“Here,” she sobbed. “Here.”

“Three months,” he said. “No more.”

“It was only a few days—”

“Leave Little Spindle, Gracie. Get free of this place.”

“No,” she shouted at the lake, at no one at all. “We can make a trade.”

Eli's hand gripped her wrist. “Stop.”

“You can have me, too!”

“Gracie, don't.”

The water lapped against her thighs with its own slow pulse, warm as blood, warm as a womb, and she knew what to do. She curled herself into the cloak of scales beside Eli, letting its edges slice into her arms, letting her own blood drip into the water.

“Take me too,” she whispered.

“Too late,” said Eli. His eyes closed. He smiled. “It was worth it.”

Then the hand around her wrist flexed tight, retracted. Gracie watched it stretch and lengthen—a talon, razor sharp.

Eli's eyes flew open. The smell of rain clouds reached her, then the rumble of thunder, the roar of a river unleashed. The rush of water filled her ears as Eli's body shifted, blurred, shimmered in the fading light. He rose above her, reeling back on the muscular coils of his body, a great snake, a serpent of gleaming white scales, his head like a nodding dragon, his back split by iridescent fins that spread like wings behind him.

“Eli…” she tried to say, but the sound that left her mouth wasn't human.

She raised a hand to her throat, but her arms were too short, the wrong shape. She turned and felt her body, strange and strong, thrash through the shallows, as her back arched.

In the sunlit water, she glimpsed her reflection, her scales deep gray and alive with rainbows, her fins the bruised violet of twilight, a veil of starlight cast against the darkening sky. She was monstrous. She was lovely.

It was her last human thought. She was diving into the water. She was curled around … who was this? Eli. The dim echo of a name, something more ancient and unpronounceable, lived at the base of her brain. It didn't matter. She could feel the slide of his scales over hers as they slipped deeper into the lake, into the pull of the current, together.

HEART

When they found her bicycle leaning against a pine near Little Spindle, Annalee did her best to explain to Gracie's mother. Of course, her mother still called the police. They even sent divers into the lake. The search was fruitless, though one of them claimed that something far too big to be a fish had brushed up against his leg.

Gracie and Eli had summers, three perfect months every year, to feel the grass beneath their feet and the sun on their bare human shoulders. They picked a new city each summer, but they returned most often to Manhattan, where they'd visit with Annalee and Gracie's flummoxed mother in a penthouse on the Upper East Side, and try not to stare at their beautiful host with her running-water skin and river-green eyes.

When fall came, they shed their names with their bodies and traveled the waters of the world. The lake hated to give them up. She threatened to freeze solid and bind them there, but they were two now—sinewy and gleaming—monsters of the deep, with lashing tales and glittering eyes, and the force they created between them smashed old rules and new arguments. They slipped down the Mohawk to the Hudson, past the river god with his sloped gray shoulders, and out into the Atlantic. They met polar bears in the Arctic, frightened manatees near the Florida Keys. They curled together in a knot, watching the dream lights of jellyfish off the coast of Australia.

Sometimes, if they spotted a passenger leaning on the rails of a freighter by himself, they might even let themselves be seen. They'd breach the waves, let the moonlight catch their hides, and the stranger would stand for a moment—mouth agape, heart alive, his loneliness forgotten.

 

I don't realize how early I am until I open the door. The rows of desks and chairs are empty, the room is silent, and Mr. Trout peers at me from behind the podium.

“It's been a few years,” he says. “I got a note that you're auditing this class?”

“Yeah. I want to brush up.”

“For what?”

“I don't know. My future?”

He laughs. “I'm not supposed to say this, but you don't really need this stuff for your future. You need it for high school. It's a box to check, and you've already checked it.
Perfectly,
if I'm remembering correctly.”

“Maybe I just want to feel really good at something.” I cross the room and claim a front-row desk. “Maybe I just happen to love geometry.”

“All right. Whatever floats your boat, Flora. But I have never in my career had a student repeat a class for fun. And during
summer
.”

He turns to the window, the bright morning light streaming in as if to prove my foolishness. But I look instead to the stacks of geometry textbooks on his desk, and I swear, the sight of them sends beams of light straight to my heart.

“I can pass these out,” I offer.

“Sure,” he says.

As I'm centering them at each desk, placing the bright yellow textbook checkout slips inside each cover, I send silent thank yous to Jessica for letting me do this. It was the last week of school, and the impending summer at home with my parents—with both of my best friends away the whole time (Rachel working at a summer camp in Tahoe, Tara in Barcelona with her cousins)—was closing in on me. It was like a creeping fog. So much heaviness. “What do you need?” Jessica asked me. Even she wouldn't be here for me over the summer break, and my weekly visits to her office had become the best part of school. I was going to miss the way she touched her fingertips together when she asked me questions, and her plants by her window, and even her tissue box, perched next to me like a suggestion to cry. I told her I didn't know what I needed.

And then I said, “Actually, maybe I need summer school. A reason to get out of the house every day. Homework, so I can stay in my room whenever I'm home.”

“I don't know what we're offering this summer…” she said, opening her laptop and pulling up the schedule. “Too bad there isn't art or theater.”

“What about geometry?” I asked.

She cocked her head. “Aren't you in trig?”

“Maybe I could audit.”

Her fingers tapped the keyboard. “Tim—Mr. Trout—he's teaching it on the Potrero campus.”

I smiled. Even better. He was my teacher the first time I took it, my freshman year. He's the one who first talked about axes and symmetry.

“Perfect,” I said, and she enrolled me right then. She made it so easy, even though it wouldn't have made sense to any other adult.

I finish passing out the books, and Mr. Trout and I make small talk for a few minutes, until he tells me, “Okay, go take a lap. I need a few minutes to plan the first lesson.”

I leave my backpack on a front row desk and head to the corridor. For a week or two, when I was a freshman, I rode the bus here after school to hang out in the front quad with Blake. He liked to stand with his arm around me. I liked being mysterious, the girl from Baker High. All these random kids would come up to me and ask if I knew their cousins or exes or friends, and I would say yes and yes and yes, and Blake's arm would be there around my waist the whole time, and I usually liked having it there.

I never got past the front quad then, so I give myself a tour now. The main buildings are squat, a faded blue, and behind them are rolling hills, golden with summer. I trace the campus's edges, along the basketball court and the pool and the administration wing, and the morning is so bright, and I'm glad to be here, about to learn something I already know. I reach the parking lot. Heading toward the stairs to the campus entrance is a group of three kids, and my breath catches.

They're taller now. A little wilder. Louder.

Travis stops walking and squints at me.

“Hey,” Mimi says. Her hair is the same length as it was then, but now part of one side is buzzed short. Her cutoff overalls are only clasped on the right, the left buckle dangling. I feel my face get hot at the sight of her. “It's you. Blake's ex-girlfriend.”

I force a laugh. “I didn't realize that month of my life would define me forever.”

Hope, still kind, says, “Our long lost Flora!”

“Hi, you guys,” I say.

“Please tell us you're here for geometry,” Travis says.

I nod because I can't speak. Sharing a class with them was the furthest thing from what I imagined when I thought about what summer school would offer me. When I chose this class, I was choosing shapes and logic, angles and numbers, strangers and anonymity. Not this gang of three who I never thought I'd see again. Not this girl whose presence makes my head tingle and my hands shake. Even though I'm trying to look anywhere else, I can't help but stare at the bare skin of Mimi's hip, between where her overalls end and her tank top begins, as I follow the three of them up the stairs.

When I was a freshman and stood in this same quad with Blake, I knew that it would never last between us. Even when I was enjoying the feeling of his arm around me. Even when I liked the way he looked at me, liked being his girlfriend. Because, even then, certain truths about myself were floating up from the depths of my heart. Standing right here, now, in the corridor outside of a class I don't need to take, those truths flare up again. Because Mimi Park was what dislodged them in the first place.

Back then she always had at least one earbud in, and often she'd be looking into the distance, and her head would bob so slightly it would have been imperceptible to anyone who wasn't riveted by her. Once she asked me if I'd heard a certain song, and I said no, and she took the right side out and fit it, gently, in my ear. It was Nirvana, “Come as You Are.” Kurt Cobain had been dead for almost twenty years, and I'd heard of him but never
heard
him, and now he was singing to both of us at the same time.
Only
us. His voice in her left ear, my right one. We listened through the whole song, right there in the quad, and I smiled and nodded early on so that she wouldn't take it away, but after that I couldn't look at her face anymore. Too much happened when our eyes met. I looked at my Converse and a gum wrapper. I looked at her Vans and a yellow flower growing through the concrete. The guitar sounded like it was being played underwater. The lyrics were confusing and contradictory, a lot like standing with your boyfriend's arm around you while sharing earbuds with a girl you wished you were kissing.

When the song was over, she reached to my ear and took it out.

“What do you think?” she asked.

“It was good,” I said.

And now it's the summer after junior year, and I'm remembering what it was like to be chosen out of a quad swarming with people to listen to a song. I'm remembering asking her if she'd be at homecoming, and how she'd said something about going camping. I'm remembering how hard I cried when I broke up with Blake, and how so much of the sadness was about losing those afternoons on the Potrero High campus and the riot of light that filled me each time I saw Mimi in the distance.