The Hidden Summer

The Hidden
Summer

Gin Phillips

Dial Books for Young Readers
An imprint of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

D
IAL
B
OOKS FOR
Y
OUNG
R
EADERS

A division of Penguin Young Readers Group

Published by the Penguin Group

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Text copyright © 2013 by Gin Phillips

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Phillips, Gin.

The hidden summer / a novel by Gin Phillips.

p. cm.

Summary: When twelve-year-old Nell and her best friend, Lydia, are forbidden to see each other, they hatch a plan to spend their summer days in an abandoned miniature golf course, where they soon find others in search of a home.

ISBN 978-1-101-59334-9

[1. Best friends—Fiction. 2. Friendship—Fiction. 3. Mothers and daughters—Fiction. 4. Family problems—Fiction. 5. Homeless persons—Fiction. 6. Alabama—Fiction.] I. Title.

PZ7.P535Hid 2013

[Fic]—dc23

2012034033

The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

To Laughlin, Liza, and Eli. The putt-putt course is for you.

THE TASTE OF HONEYSUCKLE

Behind our apartment building, past the chain-link fence, there’s a dead tree that somehow hasn’t fallen yet. It’s standing up tall and straight, pretending to still be alive. Or maybe it’s just scared to fall down—it’s surrounded by briars and poison ivy and all sorts of weeds. It looks like nobody’s set foot near that tree for a hundred years. Except for me and Lydia.

I like that the tree is an undiscovered place. I also like the honeysuckle, which grows in clumps of twisted, looping vines with delicate yellow and white blooms. They smell like honey tastes. Over time the honeysuckle has taken over the stumps and the shrubs and even the dead tree. Lydia and I stomp our way through the briars to get to the tree, and we sit on its roots, which stick out of the ground like the humps of sea monsters. We look up and it’s a honeysuckle sky, little bits of blue showing through the vines. The honeysuckle is over us and around us—it falls down like curtains and hides us. We drink up the flowers sip by sip.

Today was the last day of school, and it’s getting close to sunset. We can hardly see each other—it’s all shadows under the tree. I don’t need light to talk to Lydia, though—she’s my best friend and I can see her face even with my eyes closed.

“Mrs. Hughey definitely dyes her hair,” she says, pinching the end off a honeysuckle blossom. “Amanda Elliot saw the roots when she was standing at Mrs. Hughey’s desk.”

Mrs. Hughey is the sixth-grade math teacher. We’ve always suspected her hair isn’t naturally possible. It’s the color of mustard.

“I heard Adam can do four one-armed push-ups,” I say. I pull on the string of my own honeysuckle, taking my time, waiting for the little droplet to bead at the end of the flower. I hold it up to my mouth and let the liquid drop on my tongue.

Any and all things related to Adam Cooper are of interest to us. He’s in seventh grade—one grade ahead of us—and, so far, has never actually spoken to either one of us. (The one boy who does speak to me plenty is named Gabriel Johnson. He has two parts in his very curly hair, so he has a puff of hair on the left, a puff in the middle, and a puff on the right. He looks slightly like a poodle. He writes me poetry, and I wish he’d stop.)

“Can you do a one-armed push-up?” Lydia asks.

I don’t know. I’ve never tried. We both try to arrange ourselves on the dirt and roots and give the push-ups a shot, but neither of us can quite manage it. I can do one on my knees, but I’m pretty sure that’s cheating. Eventually we just collapse on our bellies, propped on our elbows, and catch our breaths. The air smells like dirt and grass and honeysuckle.

“I have to tell you something,” Lydia says as she rises, brushing dead leaves off her stomach. She looks serious.

“You have to go to camp again this summer?” I guess. Last summer she got sent to an art camp in Tennessee for a whole month. Her mother loves camps.

“Worse,” she says, picking at a leaf. Tearing a leaf to shreds, really. And she’s got a piece of her hair in her mouth. She does that when she’s nervous. Her hair is dark brown and long, but it’s also usually got dried spit in it.

“Okay,” I say, nervous myself now. She could be moving to another city. She could be sick. All of a sudden there’s a bitter taste in my mouth that’s nothing like honeysuckle.

Lydia’s looking at me like she doesn’t know how to finish what she started. I stare back at her. Her father is from Guatemala, and she has his lovely brown skin, but she has her mother’s green eyes. I have freckles and light brown hair that’s hardly any color at all.

“Nell,” Lydia says, “my mother says we can’t see each other for a little while.”

I frown. It doesn’t make sense. “Why? Why would she say that?”

“Your mom.”

This could mean a lot of things. But Lydia’s mother has known my mother for years, and Mom hasn’t changed any in the last few days as far as I can see.

Lydia’s chewing her hair with a lot of enthusiasm now. “Something . . . happened. I’m not sure what. My mom said she’d put up with your mom long enough, and she didn’t think I should, um, like, hang around with you.”

I don’t know what to say to that.

“She also said we spend so much time together that neither of us get to have other friends. She said it would be better for us to get a little space.”

“That’s stupid,” I say.

“I know,” she says.

“How long is this break supposed to be?”

“She said for a couple of months. Or so.”

“Two months is the whole summer! And what’s ‘or so’ mean? That could be forever.”

“We can still figure out how to see each other,” says Lydia. “You know we can. I’ll sneak out and come over. Otherwise what good is the back staircase for?”

She smiles, and I know she wants me to smile back. To see this as some big adventure. But I can’t. I’m all for adventures, but Lydia has always been part of them.

Even if we sneak out, it means I can’t go to Lydia’s house. No more eating lunch at her kitchen counter, no more spending the night, no more throwing water balloons off her balcony or dressing up her dog in her mom’s old nightgowns. We always stay at her house. Some of our best times have been after everyone else has gone to bed, whispering all our best secrets. That’s when you really know you’re best friends with someone, I think—when the entire world is asleep and there’s no one left but the two of you and you can say all the things you’re afraid to tell anyone else.

Now we’ll hardly see each other this summer. Maybe not at all.

“Okay,” I say, not looking at her.

“I’ll let Mom calm down some and then ask her again. In a week or two.”

“You better go home now,” I say.

“Yeah, we should go,” she says, and starts to stand up. I don’t move.

“You go on,” I say.

I don’t know why I say it. It hurts her feelings. Her hands fall to her sides and flop around like fish out of water.

“You know I hate this, too,” she says.

“I know,” I say, because it’s what I’m supposed to say. I do know that she hates it. But it’s different for her. She’s not the one who’ll be alone in the apartment with my mother all summer. She’ll have her nice bedroom and parents who don’t pay much attention to her but never yell at her. Even though I love Lydia as much as I love anyone on this planet, for right now it all seems so unfair that I can barely keep the it’s-okay-don’t-worry-about-me smile on my face. And, trust me, I’ve had lots of practice keeping a smile on my face when I really don’t feel like smiling.

Lydia waves at me and ducks under the honeysuckle curtain. I hate the sight of her leaving. But it hurts worse to see her next to me, like everything’s normal, when I know it won’t last.

Lydia’s not the kind of friend you can replace. We’ve known each other since we were five, and she knows everything about me. I have nearly thirteen years worth of stuff that I’d have to explain to a new friend, and the thought of all that work is exhausting. Plus there are probably hundreds of inside jokes that are funny to me and Lydia and not anybody else. But, more than that, Lydia is never boring. She doesn’t want to just sit in front of the television or fix her hair or read a magazine, which is more than I can say for plenty of girls in our class. She’ll play volleyball and try back handsprings and watch horror movies. She’s not afraid of anything. She will climb a tree no matter how tall. She will walk right up to a slobbering, growling dog and growl right back at it (at least if it’s on a leash). She’s sort of ferocious. In a good way.

I watch her climb over the fence into my backyard, then slip into her own yard. There’s a broken board in the fence between my apartment building and Lydia’s house. I met Lydia at that fence. My parents had just gotten divorced, and Mom and I hadn’t even unpacked the boxes in our apartment. I was wandering through weeds growing in the back lot, hoping maybe there was a swimming pool Mom hadn’t told me about, and I heard a voice say from the fence, “You can tell poison ivy because it has three leaves together.” And there was Lydia, her dark head sticking through the hole in the fence.

I stay by myself for a while, breathing in the warm, sweet air. I don’t know if they have honeysuckle in places other than Alabama, but here it’s the best part of summer. There’s a downside, of course. By the time the honeysuckle gets here, the air is so thick you can’t breathe. The heat presses down on you until you think you’ll sink right into the asphalt. Two seconds after you leave the air-conditioning, you can hardly remember what it felt like to ever be cool. That’s summer.

I walk as slowly as I can up the stairs to our apartment. I turn the knob, and the apartment is as dark as the hallway, except for a light under the bathroom door. As I close the front door, the bathroom door swings open, and I can see someone step out. The light is behind her, so she’s just a dark shape, but I can tell she’s already in her nightgown. She just stands there.

“Hi, Mom,” I say.