The Hidden Summer Read online

  The Hidden

  Summer

  Gin Phillips

  Dial Books for Young Readers

  An imprint of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  DIAL BOOKS FOR YOUNG READERS

  A division of Penguin Young Readers Group

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA

  USA / Canada / UK / Ireland / Australia / New Zealand / India / South Africa / China

  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  For more information about the Penguin Group visit penguin.com

  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.

  Contents

  TITLE PAGE

  COPYRIGHT

  DEDICATION

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  CHAPTER 17

  CHAPTER 18

  CHAPTER 19

  EPILOGUE

  CHAPTER 1

  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.

  CHAPTER 2

  INTRODUCING MY MOTHER

  My mother doesn’t answer me. She moves toward the sofa, turning on one dim lamp. It makes the room look slightly green. I take a step toward her, trying to read her mood. I keep my voice friendly.

  “It’s sort of dark in here,” I say.

  She shrugs in a way that might be good natured. I am an expert when it comes to reading my mother, but that doesn’t mean I don’t make mistakes. The trick is to tell when she’s in a carnivore mood or an herbivore mood. (Carnivores have sharp teeth for biting. You shouldn’t get too close. But herbivores never attack.) In her carnivore moods, Mom is usually moving—pacing or fidgeting, tapping her foot or drumming her fingers on her leg. A cozy seat on the couch makes me think she might be in the mood for a conversation.

  “Mom, what happened with Lydia’s mother?” I ask. “She said Lydia can’t see me anymore.”

  She leans forward on the sofa in a way that makes me step back. “And you figure I did something to her?”

  She’s staring at the floor, and I know this is a mistake. But losing Lydia has left me desperate. And angry.

  “I don’t know,” I say, frustration in my voice. “Did you do something?”

  She stands up fast and I take two steps back, turning away from her. I’m headed for my bedroom, where I can lock the door and wait until she calms down. Then my head snaps back, hard—she’s grabbed my hair. She holds tight, so I can’t move. I try to look at her out of the corner of my eye, but it makes my head hurt worse. I don’t feel angry anymore. I feel like one of those gazelles on the National Geographic Channel that looks up from a nice cool drink of river water and sees a lion staring back.

  Escape, escape, escape, the gazelle-me thinks.

  “If you speak to me like that again,” Mom says, “I will rip the hair out of your head. Do you hear me?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  She doesn’t mean it. She’s never actually ripped the hair out of my head. And she hardly ever touches me, period. Not to hug me, not to smooth the wrinkles out of a shirt, and not to yank my hair. It’s a bad sign when she touches me. My mother has a quick temper. That’s the perfect phrase for it—it’s so fast you can’t see it coming.

  “And don’t you smirk at me,” she snaps.

  “Yes, ma’am. I’m sorry.”

  I say this with no tone whatsoever. I am a salesclerk on the store intercom announcing a sale on Aisle Three. I am the person who takes your ticket at the movies and tells you to enjoy your show. One thing you learn when your mother has a quick temper is to keep calm and collected. Parents have all the power anyway. They control whether you leave the house and where you can go and who you can see. You can’t lose your temper if you want to have the slightest chance of winning, even if they have the luxury of losing theirs. I should never have let my anger show in the first place, no matter how upset I was about Lydia. I know the rules better than that.

  It’s taken me my whole life to figure out how to deal with my mother, but the rules aren’t really all that complicated. These are the most important ones: When Mom is in a carnivore mood, avoid her if possible. Disappear—in your room, in the backyard, to Lydia’s. If you cannot avoid her, disappear inside your own head. Make your face a mask and hide behind it. Show her what she wants to see.

  “I didn’t mean to smirk,” I say in my Aisle Three voice. “But Lydia’s my best friend, and I don’t want to spend the whole summer without being able to see her. I just wondered what happened.”

  Sometimes, when I keep calm, Mom starts to realize that I’m the one who sounds like an adult and she sounds like a toddler having a temper tantrum. It makes her uncomfortable. She doesn’t apologize, but she’ll
back down. She’ll stomp out of the room and pretend like she never wanted to talk to me anyway.

  “You can be so hateful,” she snarls at me now, pulling me closer.

  Well, sometimes it doesn’t matter how calm and friendly I am. Sometimes her temper is so loud inside her head that she can’t even hear what I’m saying. It looks like this is one of those times.

  One more try. I try to ignore the sharp sting of my scalp.

  “Did Lydia’s mom do something to you?” I ask, trying to sound sympathetic.

  She lets go of my hair, then spins me around by my shoulders, bringing her face close to mine. Her eyes are red and her blond hair is mashed flat against her head like something stuck to the bottom of your shoe. Sometimes she can be pretty, but she’s not right now.

  “Just go to your room,” she says, and lets go of me.

  I don’t argue. I’m nearly to my bedroom door when she speaks again.

  “It wasn’t my fault,” she says. “She came over here because the branches from the crape myrtles are over her driveway. All those little buds are landing on her car and making a mess. Our landlord won’t return her call. She asked if I would try to reach him.”

  So far this sounds believable. Lydia’s mom is very into how things look. She refuses to leave the house without lipstick, and her purse always matches her shoes. She hates for her Honda to get dirty. And our landlord never returns phone calls.

  My mother crosses her legs as she sits back on the couch. The blue polish on her toenails is flaking off. She has long, slim legs that look like a magazine ad for panty hose or razors. She always says she doesn’t know where I got my short, stubby legs.

  “She treated me like I was her secretary,” she says, although that’s not how it seems to me. “I told her that it’s harder to deal with that sort of thing when you’re single. If she had a husband at home, he could do the yard work.”