The Hidden Summer Page 3

  I lie in bed that night and think about all the things Lydia and I have seen and done. I miss her. If I’m honest, I also miss her house. It’s nice to have someplace to go when you need to get out of your own house. I think about Memama and Grandpops splashing through water and climbing up trees. I think about escaping. I think about Marvin. I think about the one place Lydia and I haven’t discovered yet.

  That’s when I figure out what I need to do. What Lydia and I need to do.

  We need to move to the golf course.

  CHAPTER 4

  THE CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUSES OF GOLF

  “We can’t move to the golf course,” says Lydia.

  We’re talking softly so that in case her mother gets home early from work, we’ll hear the car door slam.

  “Sure we can,” I say. “I mean, we’d still have to come home at night, but it could be our own secret place during the day. A place for just us.”

  I’m not surprised she finds the idea less appealing than I do. We’re sprawled across her soft bed with its puffy light blue duvet on it—I didn’t even know the word “duvet” before I spent the night with Lydia for the first time. She has a chair covered in fake zebra skin. Her beige carpet is so soft you want to make snow angels on it, and she has a shiny beaded curtain hanging from her doorway. Everything in her room makes you want to touch it. (That includes her dog, Saban, who is a white puffball with eyes.)

  The golf course would be a serious step down for her, bedroom-wise.

  I usually think of Lydia as being braver than me. She’ll always jump into the pool first, even if we haven’t tested the water. She’ll knock on anyone’s door, even if she doesn’t know them. (That came in handy during the summer that we tried to learn how to throw a boomerang. That boomerang landed in a lot of different backyards.) But going to the golf course isn’t just about bravery. It’s about wanting to escape. And I want to escape much more than Lydia does.

  Lydia flops on her back and stares at the stars on her ceiling.

  “What will we eat?” she asks. “What would we do? Where will we shower or go to the bathroom?”

  “We could have our days free to do whatever we want,” I say. “No moms. No checking in with anyone.”

  “No air-conditioning,” she says.

  “No rules,” I say.

  Saban sneezes twice and start licking himself. Lydia looks skeptical.

  “What do you want, really?” she asks. “To run away?”

  I snort. “Of course not. I’m not an idiot.”

  The flaw with most running-away plans is that you have to stop going to school. That may be fun in the short term, but what are you going to do in a year or two or three? When you’re ready to start learning how to be a film director or an astronaut or a veterinarian? You need school for that. But you’ll have given up school—you’ll be wandering the streets or waiting tables or sweeping floors.

  I don’t just want to escape for a little while—I want to escape for forever.

  Lydia and I ran away once before, when we were ten. We got as far as the Chevron station at the bottom of the hill. We’d planned to stock up on snacks and drinks, then we were going to walk to the YMCA, which we knew would give you a bed if you needed one. (Since then I’ve learned that we should probably have gone to the YWCA, because it’s for women.) Anyway, Lydia’s mom drove past us and pulled over and offered us milk and Rice Krispies Treats if we’d come home. Lydia’s mom has some issues, but stupidity is not one of them. We were not strong enough to resist marshmallow.

  I think that I’m steadier now. I think that sweets would not be enough to make me come back.

  “Do you want to stay here?” I ask her, looking around at her perfect room. “If you do, just tell me.”

  She looks at me and pulls her hair out of her mouth.

  “No,” she says. “You know I don’t want to stay here. Not if you’re not here. When you’re here, I don’t mind Mom. Without you, it’s so . . . well, Saban’s not very good at conversation.”

  She pets her dog’s head apologetically, but Saban doesn’t seem insulted.

  There are times when the thing I most want in the world is for my mother to stop noticing me. But Lydia’s mother never notices her, and it does not seem to be a good thing. Actually, Lydia’s mom is sort of like the rest of the house—she looks perfect. Not perfect as in beautiful, but perfect as in exactly what a mom should look like. Sweet and smiling and cuddly. She cooks delicious things and has fresh flowers on the table, and when she picks Lydia up from school, she hugs her and kisses the top of her head. I used to be really jealous. But then I realized that those things are mostly for looks. Lydia’s mom spends most of her time watching TV in her bedroom or out shopping and visiting friends. She’s gives Lydia compliments and leaves her cupcakes and chocolate chip cookies on the kitchen counter, but sometimes Lydia goes days without her mom saying more than “good morning” and “good night” to her. They don’t talk much.

  “I just don’t want to leave if we’re only going to be dragged back with things even worse than they were before,” Lydia says. “If we’re doing this, I want to make sure we’re doing it right.”

  “So what else do you want to know?” I ask.

  “How will we keep our mothers from noticing we’re gone? Why would they let us disappear every day? And how do we even know we’d like the golf course?”

  The thing about Lydia’s questions is that she’s not being difficult. She’s not looking for an excuse to say no. She’s assessing the plan, trying to find the holes in it. Before she decides to do anything, she likes to know what she’s getting into. She’s someone who would never have gotten on the Titanic before counting all the life rafts.

  Lydia pops her hair back in her mouth, but I interrupt before she can comment on Marvin. “Just come with me tonight,” I say. “Just once. Let’s see what’s out there, and we’ll decide if it could work.”

  She stares at the ceiling a second, rolls over on her stomach, and then she smiles. I know I’ve won.

  “You think it’ll turn out better than last time?’ she asks.

  We’d tried to explore the golf course a couple of years ago, but it didn’t go very well. It hadn’t looked like it would be that hard—all we had to do was climb a five-foot chain-link fence. We’d climbed fences that high plenty of times. We went at the same time, racing over the fence. But some of the wire was rusted, and as we swung our legs over the top, a stray bit of chain link cut Lydia’s ankle. She had to go get a tetanus shot.

  We hear a car door, and I’m off Lydia’s bed and headed toward the hallway before she even opens her mouth. I nearly trip over Saban, who apparently thinks he’s going with me.

  “Meet me under the honeysuckle at eleven o’clock tonight,” I say. “No flashlights.”

  I do not want to run into Lydia’s mother. I have a feeling she would not seem so sweet and cuddly if she found me in her house right now. Actually, I’m not sure she’s ever spoken to me beyond “don’t slam the front door.” Barring me from the house would make more sense if it had seemed like she’d ever noticed I was in her house in the first place.

  I hear Lydia’s voice just as I open her mother’s bedroom door.

  “Make it eleven thirty,” she says. “My mom will go to bed at eleven P.M. after Supermodels in a Submarine is over. The mosquito trucks have been driving by between eleven and eleven thirty every night. They make enough noise that I can get down the stairs and out the front door without her hearing me.”

  This is another reason Lydia and I work well as friends—I like words and she likes numbers. She’s very good at schedules and budgets and math tests. I close her mother’s bedroom door quietly, then slip out the sliding glass door to the balcony and jog down the outside staircase.

  That night I slip out of our apartment at eleven fifteen, just to make sure Lydia doesn’t have to wait on
me. I don’t want to give her a chance to change her mind. The front door creaks too loudly, so I climb through my window until I’m sitting on the outside of the windowsill. A tree limb comes within a foot of the window, so I swing one leg and then the other over the limb. (I worry about roaches, which an exterminator once told me live in trees, but I can’t see any.) I scoot along the branch until I can jump down onto the fire escape coming off Mrs. Woodard’s kitchen. From there it’s easy.

  It’s a crescent moon tonight, but it’s a bright one. I can see the lights of the city past the golf course—the fire red letters of the City Federal Building, the dark column that’s Alabama Power, and the balls at the top of the Harbert Building. I try to focus on my feet, taking tiny steps and feeling for any sudden dips in the ground. I wonder if snakes sleep at night and whether they sleep on top of the ground or deep in holes. I’m hoping for deep holes. I’m nearly to the honeysuckle tree when I hear other footsteps.

  “Nell?”

  I flash my cell phone at Lydia. It’s not as noticeable as a flashlight, but it’s enough to see by. It’s not the only thing I’ve brought with me—I have a backpack with a blanket, a bottle of water, a couple of pieces of paper, and a Swiss army knife that Marvin (the stepdad, not the dinosaur) gave me. I’ve given some thought to where we should climb over the fence. There’s an old gate with a padlock on the Highland Avenue side, but we’d have to walk half a mile to get to the gate. Instead I’ve decided we should climb across right behind my apartment building.

  We’ve both worn jeans and tennis shoes instead of shorts and sandals—in the years since the course has been abandoned, the plants have taken over. There’s no telling how much poison ivy or thorns there might be back there. We clomp through the weeds of the Wasteland until we get to the fence, and the only thing we can see other than the fence is tall clumps of pampas grass. It looks sort of like pussy willows at the top, with soft feathery plumes, but the grass itself will slice your skin open if you touch it wrong. It’s growing along the fence, and it’s just as dangerous as the rusted bits of metal.

  “You ready?” I ask.

  Lydia nods and reaches one hand toward the fence.

  “Wait,” I say. I dig through my backpack and pull out the blanket.

  “You cold?” Lydia asks.

  I answer her by tossing the blanket on to the fence, hoping it’ll protect our hands and feet. “I’ll go first,” I say.

  I wedge the toes of my tennis shoes in the fence holes, and the wire bites into my fingers as I climb. When I get to the top, the pampas grass makes it impossible to jump straight down. I take my time and get balanced on the top of the fence, with the arch of my foot curved around the metal bar. Then I raise my other foot so that for a couple of seconds I’m squatting on top of the fence, frog-like. I take a breath and launch myself up and out. I clear the pampas grass other than my little finger, which stings as it brushes against a long leaf. I’m hurtling forward, not seeing anything, and then I land hard, collapsing into a pile. Long grass tickles my nose.

  I check for blood on my finger—it’s not too bad—as Lydia makes her way up the fence. As soon as she’s landed, we brush ourselves off and start moving forward. The underbrush is thick, and it’s hard to see anything, even with the light from my cell phone. The grass behind us blocks out any light from the houses and the streetlights. Little saplings are all around us, and we use them for handholds as we push our way through the weeds and vines. Finally we’re in a clearing, with no tangles of plants around our feet. There’s nothing but tall grass.

  We take in the view. At first it’s not much. It’s dark and the sky with its bright moon and few stars is more eye-catching than anything around us. But as we stand there, our eyes sharpen. I can tell this must have been a fairway—it’s long and flat. I think I see the shine of a lake in the distance.

  I wonder how many snakes are in this grass.

  “What are the four deadly poisonous snakes in Alabama?” I ask Lydia.

  “Shut up, Nell.”

  I answer myself silently. We learned them in fourth grade: copperhead, cottonmouth, rattlesnake, coral snake. Once I watched a slow-motion video of a rattlesnake killing a bird—the snake moved so fast that the bird couldn’t even fly away. It just sat there and let the snake sink its fangs into its feathery little body.

  I am beginning to wish I didn’t watch so much National Geographic.

  Still, for all we know, this golf course has turned into the lost city of snakes since people stopped coming here. I saw a movie about a snake—it had old crumbling ruins full of human skulls, and snakes were crawling in and out of their eye sockets. There’s also the possibility—especially in the dark—of falling into a big pit full of snakes just waiting for a snack.

  I am beginning to think I should just stop watching television altogether.

  I focus on the sound of our feet moving through the grass. Swishhhh crunch. Swishhhh crunch. Snakes make swishing sounds, too, it occurs to me.

  “I was thinking that maybe we should live downtown,” Lydia says.

  I wonder if she could tell that I needed distracting. This is one of our favorite topics—what we’ll do when we grow up. We’ll be roommates, of course.

  “We could get a loft,” she continues. “My aunt has one. We could get one with high ceilings and brick walls. And wood floors. And a big couch where we can watch movies at night.”

  While she talks, we keep heading in a straight line, using the red letters of the City Federal Building as a compass point. As long as we head toward it, we won’t get lost. Everything looks the same. There’s just grass and occasionally a tree, and I think I might have seen a lake off to our left. The sounds are more noticeable than any of the sights. The crickets are playing their little legs like violins—reek-eek, reek-eek—and the bullfrogs are croaking out their own rhythm. There’s the howl of coyotes nearby. Very nearby. I shiver. At least the howling takes my mind off snakes.

  We live at the bottom of Red Mountain, which was named for the color of the iron they used to mine out of the mountain. They stopped mining a long time ago, so now there are boarded-up mines—strewn in the middle of all the nice neighborhoods—that haven’t been used in sixty or seventy years. I’ve always heard rumors that coyotes live in the abandoned mines. Sometimes you’ll hear a neighbor say they saw one through their window, slinking across the street in the middle of the night. If a yappy dog goes missing, usually people blame it on coyotes. (I personally think it’s a very long list of suspects if you’re asking who would want to get rid of that Pomeranian that used to bark at leaves falling.)

  We stand for a minute, listening to the howls. A few neighborhood dogs bark back. Then, from right next to me, comes the loudest howl of all.

  “Ah-ooooooooh,” howls Lydia, her face tilted up to the sky. “Ah-ah-oooooooh!”

  “What are you doing?”

  “I’m saying hello,” she says. “And I’m saying it’s a nice night for hunting mice.”

  I giggle. “Do coyotes hunt mice?”

  She pauses and cocks her head to the side. There’s another howl or two in the distance. “Oh, yes,” Lydia translates. “They say mice are delicious. They taste like hot dogs.”

  “Well, tell them to stay off the golf course tonight. They might think we taste like hot dogs.”

  She doesn’t howl much longer, and then we both just settle into the stillness. I look up at Red Mountain and there are a few houses still lit up, but mostly just streetlights. None of the sounds we hear are human. There are no voices, not even any cars. The wind blows past us, and it feels like we’ve just landed on a new planet. All of a sudden I don’t worry about snakes or coyotes or anything creeping around in the dark. All I can think about, as the wind lifts up my hair, is that anything is possible out here. You know that feeling you get when you have a nice brand-new set of colored pencils, you pull out a sketch pad, and you ju
st stare at that blank page for a minute? Because there’s a kind of rush knowing you can draw anything, create anything—that snow-white page is just waiting to be filled.

  Standing on the golf course is like that feeling, only way, way bigger.

  “I wonder if this is how Christopher Columbus felt,” I say.

  “I think he explored America during the daylight,” says Lydia.

  I see Marvin over the trees, and the dark seems a little less dark. Everything seems a little more familiar.

  “Let’s go see the putt-putt course,” I say.

  CHAPTER 5

  HERE BE MONSTERS AND ROCKET SHIPS

  The putt-putt course is like nothing I’ve ever seen. Unlike the real golf course, the grass is fake here, so it looks a lot like it must have when it was still working. Everywhere we step is either concrete or green carpet. There are some standard things—Holes One, Two, and Three involve a windmill, a lighthouse, and a dry waterfall. But then things start to get interesting. On Hole Four, if you actually had a club and ball, you’d hit the ball through the legs of a zebra, and then it would roll around the curves of a giant sleeping python.

  Hole Five is Marvin, and he looks even better up close. He’s at least twelve feet tall—I can barely touch his huge chest. He’s an orange brontosaurus with subtle splashes of purple, if purple can be subtle. He’s smiling so you can see stubby little teeth and a pink tongue. He’s like a cartoon come to life. I reach up and pat his belly, and it makes a surprisingly loud sound—there’s a clang and an echo, like maybe Marvin is hollow. I walk around him slowly, running my hand along his short legs and his thick tail. When I come to his back leg, I notice a crack in his skin, and I trace the crack until I realize it’s a rectangle.

  “I think this is a door,” I say to Lydia.

  “Of course,” she says. “Everyone knows brontosauruses had doors in their back legs. That’s where they stored their food for the winter.”