Summer Days and Summer Nights (46 page)

Most of the other counselors have taken off. There's only me and Alex Sanchez, a soon-to-be senior who likes to tease me about my freckles, which have been multiplying by the day, and who is generally a lot nicer than he needs to be, considering the fact that he's a whole year older than me and the star of the football team.

But that's the thing about summer: The regular hierarchies collapse like sand castles at this time of year. Everything shifts and settles and takes new shape.

It's a great equalizer, this season.

Soon, the twins' mother pulls up—full of apologies—and Alex heads off, with a sympathetic glance in my direction.

“See you tomorrow, Freckles,” he says, trotting over to his car.

It's 2:22 and the parking lot is quiet. Noah is hunched over, still facing the tree, and through the thin cotton of his camp T-shirt I can see the knobs of his spine. The wind ruffles his red hair as he examines the fraying end of his shoelace.

Behind us, the door to the school opens and Mr. Hamill walks out with a pink Post-it note stuck to his finger. He hands it to me with a sheepish look, and I see that there's a phone number scrawled across it.

“So I tried his mom a few times,” he says. “But there's no answer, and I have to leave for a dentist appointment.” He points at his mouth and winces. “Broken crown.”

My eyes travel over to the entrance to the parking lot, where Griffin's car will soon appear.

“I feel terrible about this,” Mr. Hamill says with a sigh. “But his mom's not usually late, so I can't imagine she'll be long. Do you mind waiting with him?”

Noah shifts on the grass, swiveling to face us. When I glance down at him, our eyes meet briefly, and he holds my gaze for a split second before looking away again.

It's now 2:28.

“Of course,” I say, because that's the kind of thing I always say. “I'm happy to.”

*   *   *

By the time Griffin's car—something old and loud and blue—turns into the drive at 2:30 on the dot, I'm midway through dialing Noah's mother for the second time. I lower the phone and hang up, feeling panicked. This isn't how it was supposed to go. Noah is now walking in circles around the trunk of the tree, dragging his fingers across the rough bark as he spins, and I think again of the small duffel bag I tucked away, full of not just a change of clothes but also deodorant and perfume and a brush, all of which I could desperately use right about now.

But there's no time for any of that: Griffin is already walking toward me, a hand lifted awkwardly, his eyes pinging between me and Noah, who has stopped circling and is now simply staring.

“Hi,” I say, and Griffin smiles. He's wearing the usual blue shirt and khakis, but his hair is freshly combed and still a little damp, and though it's approximately a thousand degrees out—the air so humid it has a weight to it—he still somehow manages to look improbably cool.

Which only makes me feel like more of a mess.

“Hi,” he says.

“I'm really sorry,” I begin, even before he's all the way across the parking lot. I gesture at Noah, then shrug helplessly. “His mom isn't here yet, so I have to wait with him, which means I can't—”

“That's okay,” Griffin says. “I'll wait with you.”

“You don't have to do that,” I say automatically, and he raises his eyebrows.

“I know,” he says stiffly. “But I want to. Otherwise I wouldn't have offered.”

His words linger between us for a beat too long, until I finally say, “Okay then.”

“Okay then,” he says with a nod, already walking past me to where Noah stands underneath the tree. The two of them look at each other for a second, then both immediately avert their eyes. Griffin takes a step forward, and Noah takes a step back, like two dancers practicing a choreographed routine. There's a long pause, and I watch them, curious to see what will happen next. Finally, Griffin lifts his hand in a kind of half-wave.

“Hi,” he says. “I'm Griffin.”

Noah squints up at him, tilting his head. And then, to my surprise, he says it back: “Hi.”

It's not that Noah doesn't
ever
talk. It's just that he rarely does so on cue. If you ask him a question, he tends to look away. If you say hello, he ignores you. If you try to include him in a game that requires singing or chanting or talking, he usually shuts down. When he does speak, it's mostly to himself.

So now, hearing him respond to a greeting like it's something that happens every day, my throat goes thick with unexpected emotion.

“What should we do while we wait?” Griffin asks, his eyes trained on the small, startled boy in front of him.

I hold my breath, waiting, as the silence seems to stretch on forever.

But just as I'm about to interrupt—to come to his rescue, to cut through the quiet, to help out by suggesting a game—Noah hops to his feet and says, “Basketball.”

*   *   *

Griffin, it turns out, is better with a basketball than he was with a bag of candy. I stand at the edge of the blacktop with the phone pressed to my ear, listening to it ring for what feels like the thousandth time, as he sinks another effortless shot from the free throw line and Noah chases after the rebound.

“I'm feeling less confident about our Pop-A-Shot competition,” I say, giving up on the call. I've left several messages now, and there's not much more to be done except to wait.

“I don't know,” Griffin says without looking at me. “Someone told me you're insanely good.”

“Who said that?”

The corners of his mouth turn up in a half-smile. “You.”

“Oh.” I flush. “Right.”

Noah is attempting to dribble, which mostly consists of slapping at the ball with his open palms, and Griffin walks over, bending close to demonstrate how to soften his hand. I fold my arms across my chest, watching with interest. I keep waiting for Griffin to make a wrong move and set Noah off, the way I always manage to do when I touch his shoulder or speak too loudly or get too close. But he doesn't. He seems to know instinctively what not to do, and because of it, Noah has said more to him in the last twenty minutes than he's said to me all summer.

I'm admittedly a little jealous.

“Hey, Noah.” I clap my hands, which makes him wince. “Pass it here.”

He stops trying to dribble and glances over at me, his face impassive. Then he turns back to Griffin, handing him the ball.

“Thanks, dude.” Griffin quicksteps around him and darts for the basket. There's something so fluid about him when he has the ball in his hands. He's long and lean, and all of his stiffness, all of his usual guardedness, seems to fall away.

“My turn,” Noah says, and Griffin bounces it to him gently.

“You're good with him,” I say, when he jogs over to stand with me. Around us, the schoolyard is quiet except for the sound of a distant lawn mower, and the afternoon sun is caught in the trees at the edge of the soccer field. “Do you have younger brothers or sisters?”

He shakes his head. “Only child.”

“Well, that explains it.”

“What?”

“Why you never talked to anyone in Spanish.”

He glances sideways at me. “I talked.”

“Yeah, when Señor Mandelbaum asked you a question.”

On the court, Noah flings the ball up toward the basket, but it only makes it a couple feet in the air before falling to the asphalt with a heavy thud.

“You never talked, either,” Griffin points out.

“Did too.”

“Puedo ir al baño? Doesn't count.”

“Hey,” I say, laughing. “Is it my fault if I had to ir al baño?”

He raises an eyebrow. “Twice every class?”

“Señor Mandelbaum was seriously, seriously boring,” I admit. “Most of the time I just ended up reading out in the hallway.”

“En inglés?” Griffin asks, and I laugh.

“Si,” I tell him. “En inglés.”

We stand there in silence, watching Noah heave the ball at the basket again and again. As his arms get tired, each shot falls shorter, until he's basically throwing it straight up in the air, then dodging it as it comes back down again.

When the ball rolls my way, I scoop it up and take a shot myself, but it doesn't go much farther than Noah's attempts, barely grazing the bottom of the net.

“See?” I say, frowning. “This is why Pop-A-Shot is better.”

I glance over at Griffin, who looks amused, and it occurs to me that whatever this is—this maybe-date, which was questionable even before it took such an odd detour—it should be going horribly wrong. With an empty playground for a backdrop and a six-year-old sidekick, how could it be anything else? This certainly wasn't how I'd imagined it, all those times I stared at the back of his head in Spanish class.

But for whatever reason, Griffin looks almost happy right now.

And I realize I am too.

“Let's play a game of caballo,” he suggests, and Noah lets out a burst of unexpected laughter.

“Caballo,” he shouts, pumping an arm in the air. “Caballo, caballo!”

“What's caballo?” I ask Griffin, who's already walking over to the basket, and when he turns around, he can't help laughing.

“It's horse,” he says with a grin. “En español.”

*   *   *

It's nearly four o'clock by the time I start worrying that this is more than just lateness and that something might be seriously wrong with Noah's mother.

The good news is that he doesn't seem to have noticed. Having finally grown tired of basketball, he's lying on his back in the grass, an arm shielding his eyes from the sun, his foot moving in time to some unknown rhythm.

“It's been two hours,” I say to Griffin, who is sitting beside me in the shade, our backs against the brick wall of the school. Our shoulders are only a few inches apart, our knees almost touching, and I keep hoping that he'll scoot closer. But he doesn't.

“That's a long time,” he says, gazing off in the direction of the empty soccer fields in the distance. “A lot can happen in two hours.”

I tip my head back and close my eyes. That's exactly the thought I've been trying to avoid. Beside me, I can feel Griffin studying me in profile, and it's hard not to turn and face him. But I know that if I do, he'll look away again, those pale eyes of his like tropical fish, so quick to dart away.

“Maybe something happened to her,” he says, and I look over at him sharply.

“Don't say that.”

“Why not?”

“Because…” I say, before trailing off.

“Because it might be true,” he finishes, and there's something too matter-of-fact in his tone, a bluntness that's unsettling. I can't decide if that's because what he's saying is true or because I'm rarely so honest myself.

I clear my throat. “I'm sure everything's fine.”

“Based on what?” he asks, but there's no challenge to his words. There's not even any emotion behind them. He's simply asking.

“Because,” I say, fumbling a little. “Because it has to be.”

Griffin considers this. “That's not very logical.”

“Who said anything about logic?” I say, just as my phone rings, jittering roughly across the pavement. I grab it, relieved to see the number I've been dialing all afternoon, and angle myself slightly away from Griffin.

As soon as I pick up, there's a flood of words, rushed and frantic and apologetic. “His sister broke her arm on the swings,” Noah's mother says. “One minute she was pumping her legs and the next she was jumping off, and everything was so chaotic with the ambulance and the hospital and getting the cast, and I didn't have the number for the camp with me, and my husband is out of town on business, and—”

“It's fine,” I say for what feels like the millionth time this afternoon. “We have him. He's totally fine.”

“I'll be there in three minutes,” she says, and then the call ends, and I let out a long, relieved breath.

“See?” I turn to Griffin, who I can tell has been listening. “Everything's fine.”

“Well,” he says with a shrug, “there were only ever two options. Either it was going to be fine or it wasn't.”

*   *   *

A few minutes later, as we head over to the parking lot, I'm astonished to see Noah reach up and take Griffin's hand.

Without meaning to, I come to an abrupt halt.

I've never once seen Noah initiate contact with anyone before. And for that matter, I've never really seen Griffin do it, either.

But now he folds the younger boy's hand in his own as if they've known each other forever, as if this happens every day, as if it's not the most extraordinary thing in the world.

*   *   *

That night, my sister pokes her head into my room.

“So,” she says, her eyes very bright, “was it a date?”

I think of Griffin in his blue button-down, the flicker of surprise on his face when Noah reached for his hand, the nearness of him as we sat against the brick wall of the school, the way the clouds passed overhead and the world had been quiet around us.

I think of the way we'd left things in the parking lot. By then, it was too late to head out to the arcade, and we decided to try again another day. As he walked back toward his car, though, I felt a rise of panic at the open-endedness of it all, and without thinking, I called out, “Tomorrow?”

He stopped.

“Mañana,” he agreed with a smile that made me dizzy.

“
Annie.
” Meg's voice is full of impatience, and I realize she's still waiting for an answer.

“Yeah?”

“Was it?” she asks, and I shake my head.

“No,” I say. “It was better.”

*   *   *

In the morning, once everyone is assembled in the gymnasium, where we start our day, I ask the kids what they'd like to play first.