The Summer I Saved the World ... in 65 Days

by Michele Weber Hurwitz

  Eli’s phone buzzes, and he pulls it out of his pocket, then texts someone.

  I pour the sauce into the pot. The spaghetti water starts boiling.

  “Thanks,” Eli says, coming over to look. “Much better.”

  “Put in the spaghetti.”

  He does, and I hand him a spoon. “Stir. So it doesn’t stick.”

  “Okay.”

  “Can I sing you a song?” Thomas asks me.

  “Sure.”

  “I made it up.”

  “All right.”

  “Don’t be afraid! Don’t be scared! Thomas Bennett is here! And he can fight a bear!”

  He grins, and I clap. “That was great!”

  Eli smiles, still stirring.

  I glance around. “What else are you making? Garlic bread? Salad?”

  Thomas and Eli look at each other. Eli says, “I guess.”

  The door to their garage flies opens. Jorie calls, “E?”

  E?

  She walks in. “What’s going on? You guys are cooking?” She takes the spoon from Eli. “I make amazing spaghetti.”

  Since when?

  “Eli’s cooking it,” Thomas tells her.

  Jorie adjusts the burner. “Now, you want them al dente, not mushy.”

  Who is she?

  “Oh.” Eli watches her.

  Jorie picks a noodle up with the spoon and holds it to Eli’s mouth. “See if it’s done.”

  He chews, shrugs. “I think so.”

  “Perfect,” Jorie says. “Where’s that strainer thing?”

  I want to throw the boiling pot at someone. I’m not sure who.

  Eli turns off the burner. “Thomas, where’s the …”

  “It’s called a colander,” I say.

  “That bowl with the little holes? There.” Thomas points.

  Eli takes out the colander, puts it in the sink, and then dumps out the spaghetti. Jorie grabs his arm and takes a picture of the two of them on her phone. “I’m setting this as my background!”

  Eli looks at the picture.

  “Well,” I say. “I think things are under control now.”

  Eli is supposed to say, “Don’t go.”

  Nope. He stands there.

  I storm over to the pot of sauce and furiously turn off the burner. “This is done!”

  That kiss? I was right. Just a moment. What was I thinking? He likes her. They’ve probably kissed a hundred times. I’m just the cook.

  Jorie scoots herself up onto a counter, crosses her legs. “Hey, we should make brownies!”

  Thomas points his sword in her direction.

  “You could really hurt someone with that,” Jorie says.

  He growls.

  Thomas, I want to say, I couldn’t agree more.

  I stomp home, mad at myself. I just let her take over. She stole number fifty-one. He rang my doorbell. But what was I supposed to do, wrestle Jorie for the spoon? Take a cuter picture on my phone?

  Eli didn’t exactly seem to be stopping her. Right. Because they’re going to HC. The whole neighborhood knows.

  Fine.

  I’m so done with this.

  The next day, Sariah and I go to a clinic for girls who are thinking of trying out for the freshman basketball team. Her mom drops us at school. Sariah’s mom looks just like Sariah, and she tells us to have fun. No warnings. What a concept.

  Sariah and I stand at the entrance to the gym, watching the girls warm up. “They’re gigantic,” Sariah says.

  One girl sinks a three-pointer. “And amazing,” I say.

  “We’ll be benchwarmers for sure. If we even make the team.”

  A coach sees us. “You here for the clinic?”

  “Um, yeah,” I say.

  “Well, grab a ball.”

  We start shooting around with the other girls. I’m out of practice, missing a lot, but it doesn’t matter. It feels so good just to move, sweat, clear my head. Love the sound of twenty basketballs bouncing on a gym floor.

  We do some drills, then a scrimmage game. Sariah and I barely get the ball. The three-point girl is also a ball hog. The coach pulls her aside after the clinic.

  “I bet he wants her to come to the varsity tryouts,” Sariah whispers.

  “Maybe we should consider something else,” I say, and smile. “The debate team? Student council? Fencing?”

  “You’re not serious? Have you ever fenced?”

  “No! I wasn’t serious. I wouldn’t trust myself to handle one of those long swords.”

  Sariah laughs. “What about the art club? They make all the posters and flyers for school events. I really want to join. Come with me to the first meeting? Please? No tryouts.”

  Why does Jorie pop into my head? She’d say the club is full of weird kids; no one there would be a potential homecoming date. Maybe they are weird. Am I?

  “Okay, I’ll come.” I smile. “Fifty-two.”

  “Great! What’s fifty-two?”

  “Oh, a good number.”

  That night, my head is too full and I can’t fall asleep. Everything’s tumbling around, like clothes in a dryer. Mom, Grandma, Matt … Sariah and the art club kids … but mostly Jorie and Eli on homecoming night. Her red dress and his matching tie. Him kissing her.

  I finally get up and put on a pair of flip-flops (shoes, for once), then slip out the back door into the dark. It’s after midnight.

  A perfect night. Black, cloudless sky. Warm, steamy air. I settle in the hammock, tuck my hands behind my head, close my eyes, and listen to the quiet.

  Only, it’s not quiet. Muffled voices. Laughter. A light in the Dixon house. And for the first time, movement. A blur of a face. Has Mrs. Millman been right all along? The Dixon house is haunted?

  I roll off the hammock. Someone, or something, is definitely in there.

  I cross the street. Should I call the police? Wake my parents? Where is Mrs. Millman when you really need her?

  I stop on the sidewalk. The weeds are swaying by the front window. If I see something (ghost or person), I will tear back to my house and get my parents.

  Then I hear this laugh.

  I freeze.

  No.

  I inch my way through the dark. Peek through the glass door by the patio in the back. Matt is sitting on the floor of the kitchen, with three other guys, in a circle. Two flashlights point toward the ceiling, lighting the room in an eerie way. They’re all wearing dark sunglasses and caps, looking at something in between them. What? There are a bunch of bottles and chip bags around them, like the garbage I found.

  This is where Matt’s been going all summer? Here? I stand on my tiptoes, but I can’t see what they’re doing.

  He broke in?

  Like what happened at school. When he got suspended.

  I sink into the moist grass. Is he drinking too?

  I thought he was doing so well. He’d gotten it all together, with the job at the pool, getting into a decent college. Oh, Matt.

  I’d never seen Mom and Dad get so mad. Mom yelled at him.… “This is serious. It’s on your permanent record. A disciplinary suspension. This will affect everything. College. Your future. What possessed you?”

  Matt said nothing. Stood there.

  “Don’t you have anything to say for yourself? Why, Matthew, why?”

  It was a year ago, last May, when Grandma was dying. Matt and another kid broke into the principal’s office, stole the elevator key, and went joyriding for an hour before someone caught them. They wrote graffiti on the elevator walls too.

  “You made a bad choice, and now you have to live with the consequences. Don’t screw up again.”

  Matt had detention and loss of school privileges and had to spend two Saturdays cleaning the elevators. Mom and Dad had to pay for a new lock too, and Matt had to pay them back. That’s when he shut them out. Me too.

  Matt turns his head and sees me. He lowers his sunglasses and we lock eyes.

  Maybe Eli’s right.… Is everyone too messed up for good things to matte
r? Can doing good really do any good? Make a difference?

  Someone shouts, “Show me the money!” and Matt looks back and laughs.

  All I want to do is run. From Matt, Eli and Jorie, my parents … from this whole in-between, I-don’t-know-what-I-was-trying-to-do-anymore summer of good things.

  I even want to run from myself. For dreaming up the whole idea.

  I take off.

  The door slides open. “Nina!”

  It’s Matt, but I don’t stop.

  I run, like that day with Eli, except it’s just me. No one to hold my hand.

  I sprint to our patio and throw the cushions off the love seat, then turn and tear out of the neighborhood. I make it only as far as the park before I get dizzy and my legs feel like they’re going to collapse. I plunk down onto a swing and start pumping my legs. More and faster and more and crying. Until I’m swinging high in the night, above the treetops, legs out and tucked in, again and again, drawing the thick summer air into my lungs. So high that I’m leaving the seat with every upswing. Gripping the chains tightly. Like this is the only thing left to do that makes sense. Swing. And breathe.

  When I run out of energy, I let the swing slow. And stop.

  I look at Grandma’s wedding band on my finger. Why isn’t she here to help me? No one else is that patient, or calm, or honest. I can’t remember all the Simple Truths by myself. Why didn’t she write them down for me?

  I know she didn’t want to keep going.… It was too hard. She never wavered. But that decision also meant she would leave me.

  One of the last things she told me was “Love your mom. She’s the kind of person who needs love more than she can give.”

  Even when I was little, I had this feeling of trying to reach out for Mom. Like her love was there but just beyond my grasp. She held on to her love tightly, like she didn’t want to let it go. I thought if I was funny, or looked really pretty, or did good in school, she’d love me more. The way I wanted her to.

  I used to think Grandma didn’t get how hard Mom can be to love sometimes. But now I know that’s why she told me. She knew she wouldn’t be here anymore to love Mom, so I had to take over.

  And Matt. He’s a lot like Mom. Holds things in. He’s been hard to love too.

  The swing next to me moves slightly. I turn my head and see the fox across the park. Just like before, she looks right at me. She has one tail.

  And I remember something else I read that night when I looked up the meaning of the kumiho.

  In some legends, a fox possesses wisdom, courage, and the ability to step back and see its surroundings from a unique perspective. Because of its ability to camouflage and become invisible, a fox is an animal of in-between times and places.

  A faithful guardian. Like me.

  She is so beautiful.

  The fox is still for a few more breaths, and so am I.

  Then she’s gone in the night.

  And one of Grandma’s STs comes to me: When you make up your mind to do something and you know it’s right, don’t let anyone tell you different.

  It’s the thought of Thomas that really saves me, though.

  Running through the park with his cape, fighting the bad guys he sees everywhere. Believing in superheroes. Believing that I am one.

  I walk slowly out of the park.

  All these things I’ve been doing.

  They’re like stitches. Some are neat. Others you have to tear out and redo. But in the end, they’re connected.

  I turn the corner and see the circle of eight houses.

  A different perspective from the way I drew it for art. Where’s the vanishing point?

  The Dixon house is dark. Matt and his friends must have left. I look at my own house.

  This whole time, this entire summer, I’ve been doing things for the neighbors, but what was I really trying to sew back together? Or who?

  Matt is avoiding me, and Mrs. Millman is out to catch a ghost. If I tell her there isn’t one, she will ask how I know. I’ve sent Matt a few texts, but he hasn’t responded. I think he slept at a friend’s after I saw him at the Dixons’.

  At nine o’clock the next night, the Millmans, with Beanie at their side, set up watch. Mrs. Millman is dressed in all black, wearing a headlamp, and she has a camera strung around her neck. Mr. Millman is loading a backpack with a first-aid kit, a flashlight, and water bottles, and the staticky cell phones are on his lap.

  They are sitting on chairs on the sidewalk in front of the Dixon house.

  “Just what do you expect to accomplish tonight, Myrna?” Mr. Millman asks.

  She holds up a small white plastic box that’s beeping every few minutes. “This is an EMF detector, Stan. Electromagnetic field. Very sophisticated. If there are ghosts in there, this will locate and track them. We take a picture, and get proof.”

  “Then what?”

  “We will ask the spirits to stop haunting the people in this neighborhood and move on.”

  Mr. Millman crosses his legs and shifts in his chair. “So we’re going to sit here all night until a ghost appears on your little detector, kindly ask if it would mind posing for a photo, and then demand that it fly away.”

  “In short, yes.”

  “Myrna, we have been married for forty-two years. I’ve lived through your suspecting that your brother wasn’t really your brother, believing my boss was on the terrorist watch list, and thinking my cousin was in the witness protection program. But this, this takes the cake.”

  She shakes her head. “There are things going on in that house. I have been saying it all summer, but no one believes me.”

  Mr. Millman sighs. “I’ll say one thing. You do know how to keep life interesting.”

  She smiles and takes his hand.

  They grow quiet. The sky darkens. And they wait.

  I’m about to go inside. Nothing’s going to happen. I’m sure what she saw was the shadows of Matt and his friends. The Millmans spent all this money on ghost tracking equipment when, as Dad said, there must be a perfectly reasonable explanation—

  The EMF detector starts beeping wildly.

  Mrs. Millman jumps up from her chair and switches on her headlamp. “The ghost!”

  Oh, God, please don’t tell me Matt has been dumb enough to go back into that house.

  Mr. Millman grabs the cell phones and hands one to Mrs. Millman, and the two of them tiptoe around the back, looking like something out of a Scooby-Doo cartoon. I’m right on their heels. They’re standing in the weeds, staring into the kitchen, clutching each other. The glass door is open a crack.

  “Look at that!” Mrs. Millman screams. “Take a picture! Take a picture!”

  Mr. Millman grabs the camera from around her neck and starts snapping like crazy. The flash is going off everywhere, and Mrs. Millman’s headlamp is beaming like a lighthouse.

  I peek around them. There’s water on the kitchen floor, with a mist above it, circling in the stale air of the house. Then—a huge bang. Followed by rattling.

  Mrs. Millman turns and runs faster than I’ve ever seen her move before.

  Mr. Millman spots me. “I’ll be damned,” he yells, running after her. “For once in her life, Myrna is right.”

  I’m still at the sliding door. I pull it open. “Hello?”

  Nothing.

  “Hello?”

  Maybe ghosts don’t respond to “hello.” Maybe I need Mrs. Millman’s advanced equipment in order to make contact.

  I take a step inside. I don’t actually believe in ghosts. It has crossed my mind, like it has for most people, but I can’t really buy into the idea. Which is too bad, because if I did, I could try communicating with Grandma.

  “Matt? Is anyone here?” I feel like he’s hiding upstairs with his friends, but the house seems to be empty. The mist has stopped swirling above the water on the floor. I walk around a little. There are some flies buzzing. It smells sort of mildewy. The water’s all over but looks deeper by the sink. I hear a gurgling noise.

&nbs
p; Wait. The sink?

  Mrs. Millman’s ghost could quite possibly be a leaky water pipe.

  I slosh through the water to the sink and open the cabinet underneath it. Water is dripping from the pipe. Not only that, but there are full bottles and unopened chip bags inside the cabinet. Matt’s secret stash? What are those guys doing in here?

  I pick up a bottle with a wet paper label, fearing the worst. But I’m relieved to see it’s just root beer.

  Root beer …

  Right after Grandma died, Matt set up a game of war, opened two bottles of root beer, and asked me to play. I looked at him, feeling so raw and empty, and said, “How could you think of playing cards right now? That’s so wrong.”

  He swiped his hand across the table, threw the cards onto the floor. I knew he was crying. He ran upstairs, slammed his door.

  I should have run after him. Why didn’t I? I should have played. It’s my fault too, how he closed up. I could have tried more.

  I stare at the pipe, thinking, If my parents find out … If someone reports this … If the Millmans come back …

  If Matt gets in trouble again, Mom and Dad said the college could withdraw his acceptance.

  I kneel and try to tighten the part of the pipe where the water is coming from. Disaster. Water starts pouring out faster. I try to turn it the other way, but it doesn’t move, and now my hands are wet and slippery.

  This is a good thing that I can’t do alone. Or anonymously. There’s only one person I can go to. Eli. Even if I sort of hate him right now. I know he can help. He’s been fixing stuff in their house since his dad left.

  I sprint across the street and knock softly. Please be here. I knock again, a little louder.

  No answer. I’m going to have to figure this out. I run into my house and grab a stack of towels and any tool I can dig out of the kitchen drawer. I barely know what they are, let alone how to use them. I’m running down the driveway with everything, when I crash right into Eli. The towels fall and a screwdriver clatters to the ground.

  “Come on!” I gather them up.

  “What’s going on?”

  “I’ll explain when we get there.”