Leo sounded embarrassed. “I thought you were cute.”
The surprise of his answer made my heart beat quick. “I thought you might have asked me because you felt bad for me. Because of Ben and my dad.”
“No,” he said. “I mean, I do feel bad that that happened to you. But I asked you because after we met I knew the tour would work with you. It wouldn’t have worked with anyone else.”
“Thanks.”
“I mean it,” Leo said. “I had the idea for the tour, but I didn’t actually do it until I met you.”
I hadn’t thought about it that way, but he was right. It made me feel good, like I had helped him too.
Leo took a deep breath. “I wanted to tell you something before you left.”
“Okay,” I said. “What is it?”
“Um,” he said, and for a minute under the streetlamp in the night I thought he was going to tell me that he liked me.
What would I do if he did?
I liked him too. He was cute. I could picture kissing him. I could picture holding his hand.
“I wanted to say thanks,” Leo said. “I have a lot of friends. You might not think that because you saw Cory and those guys bugging me at the festival. But at school, I do. And at home, I’ve got my family. I feel alone a lot, though. I like things they like, but I also like different things. So when you and I became friends this summer it was great. I feel like we get each other.”
I waited for him to say something more. But he didn’t. Is that all? I wanted to ask. He stood there on the sidewalk and I noticed that he had dust from the tunnels on his black T-shirt.
He smiled at me. I realized that what he’d said was a lot.
“I thought you were going to tell me that you liked me,” I said.
“I do like you,” Leo said.
“I mean, I thought you were going to tell me that you wanted me to be your girlfriend or something.”
“Oh man,” Leo said. He looked embarrassed again.
“A minute ago you told me that you thought I was cute.”
“Yeah,” Leo said. “I mean, I do think that. But you’re not my girlfriend. You’re my person.”
I knew right away what he meant.
I thought he was cute and he thought I was cute but it was different than it was when people have crushes.
With Leo I’d fallen into another kind of like. I couldn’t wait to tell him stuff and I loved hearing him laugh at my jokes and I loved laughing at his jokes. He made me feel like I had a spot in the world.
It felt as if Leo and I could like each other all our lives.
So I hugged him.
He was my person too.
11.
I slept in because my room stayed dark for a long time. We’d had to board up the window until we could get a new one installed. I rolled up my blanket and pulled off the sheet to take downstairs. My last set of clean clothes sat out on the dresser.
Through the kitchen windows I saw my mom out in the backyard, wearing work gloves and pulling the smaller branches left over from the big tree cleanup into a pile. The morning was greeny-gold, end-of-summer. Our suitcases and boxes sat in the mudroom, ready to go out into the car.
I went outside to help her.
“I want to get this part of the yard cleaned up,” she said. “Mr. Bishop said he can come and haul the last of the branches away and I don’t want to leave him with too much to do, since he’s already being so nice about it.”
“I snuck out with Leo last night,” I said, pulling some of the sticks into the pile. The grass was dewy and long. I didn’t look at my mom. “We went over to the festival. Meg let us see the tunnels when everyone else was gone. I’m sorry. I know I was grounded. But it was our only chance.” I decided to keep the part about exactly how late we’d been out to myself.
“I guess that’s okay,” Mom said. I glanced over at her in surprise. She shrugged and smiled. “Leo’s been a very good friend. But the next time you break the rules like that there will be big trouble.”
“Okay.”
“So you got to say good-bye.”
“Yeah,” I said. “But we’re going to keep in touch. Write to each other and stuff.”
“Tell him we’ll be back in December,” Mom said. “For the Christmas break. The renters will be gone for the holiday.”
“I will,” I told my mom. “You know who else we should write to? That boy.”
“What boy?” she asked.
“The one who Ben helped,” I said.
Her eyes filled with tears.
The back door opened and Miles came out. “Hey,” he said. “Didn’t you guys hear the doorbell?”
“No,” my mom said. “Who was it?”
“Mrs. Bishop,” Miles said. “She brought this.” He held up a jar of jam. “It’s homemade. She said to tell you guys good-bye and that she’ll keep an eye on the house while we’re gone.”
“That’s nice of her,” Mom said. She wiped her forehead with the back of her hand.
“Where’s the bread?” Miles asked.
“We’re all out,” Mom said. “All we have left is cereal and milk. We can get a hamburger for lunch on the road.”
Miles groaned. “That’s too long.” He went inside and then came back out with the jam and a bowl and a spoon.
“Wait,” I said. “You can’t eat it straight.”
“I can,” said Miles. “Do you want some?”
I looked at the jar. The jam was colored the most beautiful red. It was like bottled rubies, but better, because you could eat it. “Sure,” I said.
“Me too,” said my mom.
“Really?” Miles and I asked at the same time.
“Really,” she said.
Miles went inside to get more bowls and spoons. He dished up the jam and handed each of us a bowlful. I turned the spoon upside down in my mouth so I could get it all. It tasted sweet and full. Like summer.
We ate every bit of the jam. I took the jar inside to wash it out. When I did, the sunlight caught the facets of the jam jar and it was like a prism, sending bits of rainbows around the room. Like my broken diamond window used to do.
I went upstairs and found the things Miles had left for me—screwdriver, toothbrush, map, wooden spoon. I took them downstairs and put them in the jam jar and brought it out to the backyard.
“There,” I said.
“What are these?” Mom asked.
“Ben objects,” I said. “Miles found them. He’s been leaving them for me.”
“Oh, Miles,” my mom said.
Miles had jam on his face.
“We need something for Dad,” I said.
Mom stood up and went out to the yard. She came back with a splintered piece of wood. At first I thought it was part of the deck but then I realized it was from the fallen tree. One of the old trees that my dad would have loved. It stuck out above the toothbrush and spoon and screwdriver and map like the tallest flower in a bouquet.
12.
We put the jar in the cup holder of our car to bring it home safe with us.
“I wonder if the vultures will come back to live in our yard when everything’s cleared up,” I said as we backed out of the driveway. I craned my neck, looking out my window. Trying to see the birds in the sky. Or Leo in his yard.
“Maybe,” my mom said. “I hope so.”
The baby birds died in their nest.
Lisette died in a hotel room.
My dad and my brother died in an accident.
The end is what people talk about. How they died.
Why does the end always have to be what people talk about? Think about?
Because it’s the last thing we knew of you. And it breaks our hearts because we can picture it. We don’t want to, and we know we might get it wrong, but we do. We can’t stop. Those
last moments keep coming to our minds, awake, asleep.
At the end, everyone is alone.
You were alone.
But other times you were not.
You clomped around onstage, your face red with embarrassment, your knees knobby in your cargo shorts, and you looked back at your wife and kids who laughed and cheered.
You rolled down a hill. You had been crying but now you smiled. There was grass on the back of your shirt and in your hair and your eyes were bright. I put my arms around you.
Your last moment was the worst moment, but you had other moments.
And people were with you for some of them.
I was with you for some of them.
There were times when we were all, all around you.
EPILOGUE
Leo wrote to me and told me that Harley got out of her box. Celeste got kidnapped by someone in the Mafia and so no one knew about Harley in the grave and things looked really dire and Harley kept getting weaker and weaker, but then Rowan had a dream that told him exactly where to go and how to find Harley. He rescued her and also resuscitated her and also kissed her, and then everything was okay. It took until November before that happened and Leo stopped watching Times of Our Seasons as soon as she was free. Zach still records it to watch when he gets home after school.
Leo’s mom and dad gave him the last of the plane ticket money as an early Christmas present, so Leo and his dad did go to London and see Barnaby Chesterfield in Hamlet. Leo called me when he got back. “How was it?” I asked. “To witness greatness?”
“Amazing,” he said. “But the best part wasn’t the play. It was the day after we went to the play. We had no plans. We spent a whole day walking around London looking at things and eating stuff. We never ran out of things to talk about.”
“That does sound great,” I said, and even though I was happy for Leo my heart hurt because I wanted a day like that with my dad.
Leo cleared his throat. “But the play was pretty awesome too,” he said, in his best Barnaby Chesterfield voice.
“I hope he sounded better than that,” I said.
“He did,” Leo said.
Miles and my mom and I move the jam jar around. Sometimes it’s on the kitchen table like a centerpiece. Sometimes on a bookshelf. Sometimes one of us takes it into our room for a few days. When I take it into my room, I put it on the windowsill.
Meg sent me a postcard the festival had printed up to commemorate the opening of the Costume Hall. They used the Lisette costume as the picture on the front of the postcard. On the back, next to the information about the exhibits and the hours, Meg wrote, Hope you will volunteer again next summer. We’ll keep you away from the jewelry.
That made me laugh.
The family of the boy who Ben helped sent us a letter too. My mom put it on the counter with a bunch of other mail. It’s there if we want to take it out and look at it. When we’re eating cereal in the morning. When we’re up at night.
The boy’s name is Jake and he is ten. He has brown hair and a soccer jersey for a team that my dad would have known all about, one of those European league teams. It would be a long time to go without seeing anything, if you went blind when you were ten and ended up getting to have a long long life.
I think a lot about last summer, and ones before that.
Meg, in the costume shop, sewing, remembering her friend. Leo, leaning forward to watch a play in the theater at dusk. My mom, building a deck at night while the birds rested in the trees. Miles, eating Fireballs and playing Life and leaving things on my windowsill.
My dad, calling to me that it was time to watch our favorite show.
Ben, sitting barefoot on the back porch with a bowl of rainbow sherbet, looking up at the mountains where he liked to ski.
I have been in the presence of a lot of greatness. And people I love who loved me back. It might be the same thing.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
In some ways, this novel was easy for me to write, and in other ways, it was the most difficult piece of work I’ve done. I’m very grateful to those who made it happen.
Calvin’s insightful and heartbreaking questions and comments gave me the initial idea for this story. My husband, Scott, and our four children gave me the time and heart to write it.
My grandparents, Alice Todd and Royden C. Braithwaite, were essential in helping a festival much like Summerlost grow and thrive, and in helping me grow and thrive as well. She gave me poetry to read, taught me how to bake, and had the best laugh in the world. He told me stories in his grandfather-clock voice, took me on “dates,” and was often sitting on the bench outside by the roses to greet me when I came home from school. I miss them every day.
Justin Hepworth was exactly the friend I needed in seventh grade and has continued to be there for me and for my family ever since. I am also indebted to Lindsay Hepworth, one of my London study-abroad roommates, for her unwavering friendship and support.
This book wouldn’t exist without Krista Lee Bulloch, friend since middle school/college roommate/guide extraordinaire, who took my oldest son and me on a tour of the tunnels and who ate Irish jacket potatoes in the courtyard with us afterward.
Fred Adams, who lived in my growing-up neighborhood in Cedar City, Utah, created the award-winning Utah Shakespeare Festival and was a good friend of my grandparents. Fred and his wife, Barbara, have given so much to our community. Fred was the festival’s director for decades and continues unfailingly to work for the festival’s good, and I know many people whose best summer memories include his brilliant smile and ready hello.
My agent, Jodi Reamer, and I exchanged many emails about Disneyland trips and the best convenience-store candy during the writing of this book. She is fierce, fun, a dear friend and a trusted mentor and advocate. Thanks also to the wonderful team at Writers House, especially Alec Shane and Cecilia de la Campa.
My editor, Julie Strauss-Gabel, said yes to this book even though it was different, and, as always, made it better with her questions and comments, her guidance and insight. It’s an honor to work with her.
This is my fifth book with the team at Penguin Random House, and it is not something I take for granted. They are passionate about books and readers, and it is a privilege to be one of their authors. Many thanks to Don Weisberg, Shanta Newlin, Eileen Kreit, Anna Jarzab, Theresa Evangelista, Melissa Faulner, Jen Loja, Felicia Frazier, Rosanne Lauer, Lisa Kelly, Emily Romero, Erin Berger, Erin Toller, Carmela Iaria, and Nicole White.
The beautiful cover art was done by Jennifer Bricking, and the cover design by Theresa Evangelista. I feel very lucky to have such talented artists associated with this story.
I appreciate and love my local community of writers and readers, teachers and booksellers. Special thanks to the Rock Canyon group, Denise Lund, The King’s English Bookshop, the Provo Library, the Orem Library, and Megan O’Sullivan at Main Street Books in Cedar City.
And to all my readers, everywhere—thank you for taking a chance on my stories and for writing to tell me yours. Also, thanks to Noelle Eisenhauer, who read the book to help make sure I portrayed my characters as whole and true.
I also want to express deep gratitude to all of those who work with neurologically diverse kids (particularly the incomparable Holly Flinders, Holli Child, BreAnna Moffatt, Sue Lytle, Dawn Gummersall, Ryanne Carrier, Amy Ericson Jones, Sheila Morrison, and Amy Worthington). Special thanks to Aubrey Mount, Jordan Worthington, and Kyra Ward, who are true friends and old souls. And my deepest admiration and love to all those who live with hard things every day and step up and keep going.
About the Author
ALLY CONDIE is the author of the bestselling novel Atlantia and the critically acclaimed Matched trilogy, a #1 New York Times and international bestseller. The series has been published in more than 30 languages.
A former English teacher, Ally lives with her husband and
four children outside of Salt Lake City, Utah. She loves reading, writing, running, and listening to her husband play guitar.
allycondie.com
Twitter: @allycondie
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