When Summer Ends

by Jessica Pennington

  I’ve taken art classes with Winters since I was a sophomore, but this is the first time I’ve ever come through the back door. On a Wednesday, in June. Talk about going the extra mile. Winters uses the art room as his personal studio through the summer, so even though school is out, there’s a canvas splashed with bright colors set up on a big easel at one end of the room, next to a desk full of paints and other supplies. Winters opens the door with a clumsy shuffle, a cardboard box cradled in his arms. It’s overflowing with … randomness. I can make out huge striped feathers, and scraps of fabric, and there are a few books stacked on the top. Supplies. There’s an entire wall of the room that’s dedicated to random artifacts. Under brightly colored letters that say INSPIRATION is a long table full of baskets, bins, and jars. Everything from feathers and pinecones to dried lotus pods used for stamping and old glass bottles for their textures on clay. He sets the box down on the table clumsily and pushes his glasses up on his nose.

  “Aiden!” I’m sitting at one of the two-person stations, and he claps a hand against my shoulder and shakes me a little. Mr. Winters reminds me of my grandpa, with his thin wire-rimmed glasses and curly gray hair that hangs longer around his neck. “How’s it going?”

  Even without saying it, I know he’s asking about everything. About my art project, but also about me. He’s the only person outside of my family that I’ve told about my vision problems. I had to, to convince him to give me a crack at the senior art intensive. Because I’m already two months past the normal deadline.

  I let out a long rush of air, and decide it’s easiest to start with the uncomfortable stuff. “Same. Still no license.” I nod toward the door, where the bike he can’t see is leaned up against the building. “But I’m good.”

  “Good, good.” He pulls his glasses off of his face, sets them on the table, and rubs the bridge of his nose. “And your portfolio? You feeling good about it so far?” He’s letting me submit my portfolio late, but I still have to go through the same process as other students—a blind jury of teachers that doesn’t include Winters. Blind, as in they don’t know whose art is whose. Not blind like me. That way, Winters can help us all while still being impartial. Someone doesn’t get in just because he’s invested a ton of time into them.

  I pull the zipper back on my portfolio and start pulling things out. I spread out a few pieces of paper on the table in front of us—a charcoal drawing of a loon, a sketch of the river, and my pastel drawing of the sunset, looking down from the dunes—my secret spot. I have more, but these are my favorites so far.

  Winters pushes papers around, pulling them in front of him then pushing them back. Tipping up the paper to get a better look. He’s been appraising everything for at least five minutes before he breaks the silence. “These are all wonderful, Aiden. You know I’ve always thought you had a lot of talent for art.”

  There’s a “but” hanging in the air. I’m tempted to say it, but I also don’t want to know. They’re wonderful. Isn’t that enough? I can’t help myself—after years of being coached, I’m a sucker to know what I’ve done wrong and how I fix it. “But?”

  Winters laughs and shakes his head. “There’s just something missing. A spark.”

  “A spark?” This makes me ache for baseball. The objectiveness of it. A strike is a strike. And sure, you can bitch about the ump, but if you throw a good pitch, 99 percent of umps are calling it. And no one’s judging your pitch on the feeling you put behind it, or if it has “spark” or not.

  “I know, it’s the worst kind of feedback. They’re all just lacking any sort of—and I hate this phrase, I really do—but they’re lacking any kind of feeling. They’re … flat.” He says the last word like it came to him in a dream and he’s finally put the word to what he’s been thinking for ages.

  Flat.

  “So…” I’m waiting for him to tell me how to fix it.

  “So maybe you haven’t found your thing yet,” he says.

  I found my thing when I was eight. My thing was baseball. This is supposed to be my new thing. I can feel the heat rising up in my chest as frustration starts to take over.

  “Keep working on these, but I also think you should check out ArtPrize and get some new ideas.”

  I nod, because I’ll do whatever it takes to make sure I end up in this program and have something to look forward to my senior year.

  Including finding a way to get to ArtPrize, a huge city-wide art contest ninety minutes north of us. I haven’t been in years, not since I got busier in the summer with baseball and my parents couldn’t drag me around with them. My mom loves arts and crafts shows. I remember it being a lot of paintings in hotels, and weird stuff like giant yarn murals. And as much as I’m enjoying the bicycle lifestyle, a hundred-mile ride isn’t exactly practical. Not unless I want to leave on day one of the event and arrive on day four. Which I don’t. No excuses. “I’ll definitely check it out,” I say.

  I’ll figure it out. I always do.

  OLIVIA

  I never realized how many things you could make with cherries. There is a sea of round, red cherry faces staring out at me from bottles of salad dressing, bags of dried fruit, barbeque sauce, jars of jam, and an entire shelf of glass-bottled sodas. There’s a rack of stuffed cherry faces next to me, their shiny black eyes staring down from a gigantic display. I tear my eyes away when I hear Emma’s voice.

  “Lunchtime,” she sing-songs, as she unties her white apron and deposits it on a hook outside of the double doors I assume lead to the kitchen. She has a foil-wrapped something in each hand.

  “Are we not eating here?”

  “Outside,” she says quietly—almost eerily quiet for Emma—as I follow her through the glass doors and into the parking lot. “It’s old-people dinner time.”

  I follow her to a red picnic table under a red and white awning. When it comes to businesses that use entirely too much red, I wonder which came first, The Cherry Pit or River Depot. Emma sets a foil-wrapped log in front of me, and opens hers. She takes a giant bite and makes a satisfied noise. “There is something so amazing about cherries in chicken salad.”

  I eye the silver roll in front of me. “Do they make anything here that doesn’t have cherries in it?”

  She stops chewing to think for a second. “The potato salad,” she says with a smile, then gets serious. “Have you talked to your mom yet?”

  I let out a little grunt. “Not yet. I had a revelation today though. After the reporter ambush.” I texted Emma on my bathroom break after Aiden and I returned from our canoe trip. She got the short version, which included my mom’s stroke of luck and the reporter ambush, but I sort of glossed over everything else.

  “Spill.” She makes a little waving motion with her hand. “And quickly, because I have the world’s shortest break.”

  “You’ll love this, actually.” I start to unwrap the sandwich, but I’m not actually hungry, even though I missed lunch and it’s close to dinner. Which is very unlike me. “I decided that since playing things fast and loose has worked so well for my mother recently, I’m going to do the same.”

  “You’re going to ditch your kid to find yourself?”

  I roll my eyes. “I’m not going to stress this summer. I’m going to let fate make all of my decisions.” I reach into my purse and pull out two glossy red dice. “For example … evens, I text Ellis back and tell him I’ll hang out with my new coworkers tonight—”

  “Definitely un-Olivia-like,” Emma says around a giant bite of sandwich.

  “Odds, I get to stay home and recover from my first—and probably only—paparazzi incident.”

  “Damn paps,” Emma mutters. “But they did get you alone in a canoe with Aiden Emerson, so…”

  Ignoring her attempt to goad me into talking about Aiden, I shake the cubes in my hands and let them drop on the table.

  Emma looks at the dice and laughs. “Oh man, I love this idea so much.”

  I groan. “You would.”

  “I actually just
had an amazing idea.” Emma’s eyes light up and I’m not sure I want to know what has her looking so excited. “This is your essay.”

  “What?”

  “Write about your summer of taking chances. How letting fate decide made you less uptight and got you over the breakup of your one true love—” Emma rolls her eyes, but she’s smiling.

  “I’m not uptight.”

  “Like when someone starts running a mile every day, or stops eating meat, or something, and then writes about how it changed their outlook on life, or whatever…”

  “That’s…” I want to tell Emma that this is a horrible idea, like most of her ideas, but I can’t. “… Sort of perfect.”

  “I wish you’d give me more credit for being the genius that I am.” Emma takes another bite of her wrap and smiles. “This is going to be so much fun.”

  God, I hope she’s right.

  AIDEN

  It’s weird how much one change in your life can crash into every other part, like a highway pileup. My crappy vision means I can’t play baseball, which means I’m avoiding most of my friends, which means I’m home most nights, because I can’t drive anywhere else. Except eating dinner with my parents every Wednesday night probably shouldn’t be described in terms of injuries and fatalities. My parents don’t suck. My dad can be really intense, but mostly he’s just a really passionate, enthusiastic person. People like to cast him in the role of the overbearing wannabe-coach dad, but I always got that he was just as invested as me. He was never dragging me out of bed and out onto the field, but he was building me my own practice mound in our backyard and driving me to clinics on the weekends and camps in the summer. I’d rather have a dad who pushes me and dreams big with me than one who doesn’t care at all.

  But this last month it’s become apparent that after thousands of games and hundreds of tournaments, baseball was definitely our thing. The thing we did together and talked about together, and dreamed about. And without it, I’m not quite sure how Dad and I fit anymore. I kind of wish we could just rewind it all and go back to the days of hammers and drills and weekend projects together.

  “How was work? I heard you helped out the Henry girl.” Dad nods to Mom. “Joanie’s daughter.”

  Mom cuts a piece of broccoli with her fork. “She’s working at the Depot?”

  “I stopped by to meet her this afternoon after that incident I told you about,” Dad says to Mom. “Good kid, actually. Not what I expected when Ellis told me he hired her.”

  “What did you expect?” It’s not that I care what they think about her, so much as it’s weird that Dad sounds like he’s talking about some kind of pseudo-delinquent, which seems like the opposite of the Olivia who was clearly trying to do everything perfect on her first day.

  Mom scrapes her fork around her plate, pushing the tiny remnants of broccoli and potato together. Yuck. It’s utterly unholy to mix food like that.

  “Well, just with her mom being the way she was, I was expecting something else,” Dad says.

  I nod, because I’m not sure what to say. And she surprised me too. Zander has never been one of my favorite people. He has this way of being friendly to you while at the same time making you feel like you’re not quite worth his time. I don’t even know how to describe it, there’s just something off about him. For me, at least. No one else seems to have a problem with the guy. “It turned out okay. The reporters were gone when we got back.”

  “Well if they come back, call me.” He shoves a forkful of meatloaf into his mouth and talks around it. “They shouldn’t be harassing her like that, she’s a kid.”

  I nod. Part of me wants to tell Dad about the canoe trip, and how Olivia didn’t know about her mom winning the freaking lottery, but I don’t really want to see my mom’s eyes light up the way I know they would if I mentioned the same girl more than once at dinner. Maybe you can meet a nice girl now. That’s what I’ve heard ever since I quit, like it’s the one bright spot of this whole situation. Except I’m not trading in baseball for a girlfriend. A girlfriend isn’t going to help me focus on these art projects, or make me feel like I still know who I am. And it’s not like I haven’t gone out with girls, but I’m not bringing them home.

  “Do you think I can get my car back soon?”

  Mom sighs. “Let’s wait until your next appointment with Dr. Shah, okay?” She picks up her plate, sets her fork and knife on top, and walks to the kitchen. Like this is the end of the discussion, and she can just casually excuse herself.

  “That’s not for another eight weeks. How am I supposed to survive an entire summer without my car? The last month has been hellish.” I tear my roll in half, even though I don’t want it. “And I feel like my vision’s getting better. It seems like it.” I close one eye, and then the other, watching my dad’s face fade away.

  Even a room away, with her back to me, I can tell that Mom is sighing. “I know, but Dr. Shah said that might happen. That you’d get used to your decreased vision.” She turns from her spot at the sink. “Right?”

  “Maybe we can make an appointment?” I plead.

  Dad stops his fork just short of his mouth. “Six months, Aiden. The treatments take time. Just give it time.” It’s ironic, coming from my dad, the world’s least patient person.

  “How am I supposed to get around all summer?” It’s not like I live in some big city. It’s a three-mile ride just to get to work every day. Which is fine, but other than that, I’m pretty much screwed. There are no buses in beach towns. No subways, no trains, no ride-shares.

  “We’ll take you places.” Dad looks serious, like he’s fully committed to carting his seventeen-year-old son around like I’m still twelve.

  I laugh. Because my parents are never around. Dad is running between the Depot and his newest project—a riverboat he bought and is turning into a down-river snack station (until he can convince the town that what it really needs is a bar on the river). It’s a huge project: flipping the old boat, and clearing the land he bought along the river, where he’ll dock it and have parking and another small building. They’ll have to rename this river someday. That’s what Dad always says when he’s talking about his plans. He’s hardly ever at River Depot—Ellis is practically running the place—so the idea that he’s going to drive me anywhere is ridiculous. And a few years ago my mom would have been all over this, but now she’s no better. She’s the new president of the Riverton Transformation Committee. They’re working to turn Riverton’s main corridor—an ugly set of peach-tiled buildings with teal awnings—into a more appealing entrance to the downtown area. She spends most of her time working with architects and designers to draw up plans for refacing buildings, proposing ideas for businesses that can move into the empty spaces, and going to meetings where people yell about not wanting to spend money. You have to spend it to make it. That’s what Mom says to the angry local people who call our house at any hour they please.

  “Whatever.” I could argue but it’s no use, I’m not going to be driving my car anytime soon. The keys hang on a hook next to the door, taunting me with their silver gleam. It’s not even that I’m one of those guys obsessed with his actual car—an old hand-me-down Honda from my sisters. I just can’t stand being trapped here.

  When I get the text message from Ellis after dinner, wanting me to hang out with the crew from work, so I can get to know everyone, my first thought is to say no. The only reason I don’t is because I need to get out of my house. Luckily, River Depot is one of the few places I can still get to.

  Chapter

  Eight

  OLIVIA

  I’m not sure what I’m doing here. I should be at home, figuring out how to stay in Riverton when Aunt Sarah leaves or planning out what I’m going to say to my mother when I finally work up the nerve to track her down. Except I’m pretty sure that second part is the whole reason Ellis invited me tonight. You look like you’re about to flip a car or something, he said, as I finished stacking the kayaks at the end of my shift, after Aiden
and I returned from our two-hour escape-via-canoe. My arms are still a little shaky from the long day of lifting and pulling and rowing—I don’t think there’s any car-flipping in my near future.

  He was right though. If I weren’t on my bike, my bathing suit riding up under my sundress as I pedal, I’d be trying to hunt down my mother. I’d be showing up to whatever hotel she’s allegedly at and spilling my guts about how messed up it is that she gets to win the lottery after years of being a shit mom and doing everything wrong. I’d cry and leave my heart lying on the carpet of some hotel, and she’d just stand there. Cool and calm. No, confronting my mother never ends with anything but me being frustrated and her looking like she’s won. Won what, I don’t know. Certainly not me.

  A group outing after the first day of work—when I barely even know anyone’s name, thanks to my midday escape and Ellis’s prank—really isn’t my thing. Big groups of new people, late-night outings I know nothing about—not my usual. But the dice I rolled at The Cherry Pit said differently. Odd numbers, I would have stayed home. Curled up in bed, cracked a book, and eventually fallen asleep to the sounds of Catastophic Love seeping out of my little bedside speaker. By now my sheets would be sprinkled with slice-and-bake cookie crumbs.

  But here I am, thanks to lucky number eight. When I got home, I had put together my arsenal of taking chances. An old deck of cards Aunt Sarah keeps in a cabinet over the refrigerator, next to her bottles of wine and a cup full of old corks; and the pair of dice that are now in the beach bag that’s slung over my shoulder, dangling dangerously close to my feet as I pedal along the county road that leads to River Depot. There’s a Magic 8-Ball on my desk now—it used to be Aunt Sarah’s, and I had to dig it out of the closet where we keep all of our board games. If Emma saw my new collection, she’d say even my plans for giving up control are too organized and neurotic.