Summer on the Moon

by Adrian Fogelin

  Delia would have a fit when she saw him—he did look a little like Meat now—but too bad. The air felt good on his freshly exposed scalp as he carved his way across the pool.

  He slalomed back and forth, going higher and higher up the pool walls. He’d wiped out a couple of times already, but no one was watching and he hadn’t gotten hurt much. This was solo skating—no fault, no glory. His wheels touched down with a clatter.

  He charged to the top of one of the side walls near the deep end and cleared it. “And the Mighty Ant totally airs the pool!” The board hovered above the wall. In that breath-held millisecond, he 180ed and jammed the wheels back down with both feet.

  After executing a sweeping turn at the shallow end, he was plunging toward the deep end when a voice yelled, “Hey! Mighty Ant! This is a pool, not a skate park.”

  He whipped his head around. Standing on the edge at the shallow end was a lanky long-haired girl with one hand on her hip, a cell phone in the other.

  “Who the h—” The rest of the sentence was smacked out of him. He slid down the wall. Sprawled on his back, he listened to the tick, tick of the wheels on the flipped skateboard. He was trying to get the double-image of the girl to focus into a single person when she leapt off the wall.

  Maybe he was hallucinating—a side effect of the crash—because she didn’t jump like a normal person. Even for a girl. This girl hovered, her ghost-blonde hair floating around her head, her iridescent phone catching the light like a laser sword. He closed his eyes.

  He didn’t hear her land. He didn’t hear anything. He had definitely made her up.

  “Ohmygosh!” someone whispered.

  He opened his eyes and gasped. His breath riffled her long hair. It brushed his cheek. He’d never seen hair that color. Dazed, he almost reached up and touched it.

  She pulled her hair back with one hand and watched him intently. “Are you okay?” When he didn’t answer, she punched a button on her cell phone.

  “What’re you doing?” he moaned.

  “Calling 911.”

  “No, don’t!” He flailed an arm and the cell phone skated across the pool floor. “My mom’ll kill me.”

  “Okay … so … you get hurt … I call 911 … and your mom kills you?” She crawled after the phone. “That makes sense!”

  “Trust me, it does.” He pushed himself up and leaned against the wall of the pool.

  She sat down cross-legged at a safe distance and studied him.

  He wasn’t used to being looked at by a girl, and this one was really looking him over. “Do you have to be so … yellow?” he asked. In the bright sunlight her yellow shirt and shorts were almost blinding.

  She fingered the hem of her T-shirt. “The outfit? Not my choice. Mother bought it. Everything’s in boxes and I can’t find any of my real clothes.” She leveled her gaze on him again. “Where are your helmet and kneepads?”

  “Don’t have any.” Suddenly the yellow of her outfit and the colors of everything around her looked runny, like an ice pop melting on a hot sidewalk. He rested his forehead on his bent knees.

  Hearing a quiet tap-tap, he looked up. The girl was typing something on the phone’s keypad—but there were way too many numbers for it to be 911. “Who are you calling?”

  “Not calling. Texting.” Her thumbs never slowed as they punched the tiny keys. Then the tapping stopped. “How’d you get the black eye?”

  “Black eye? Oh.” The shiner Rapp had given him had ripened. The dull purple was surrounded by a sick greenish yellow. “A fight.”

  She leaned toward him. “A fight? You mean, like, a real fight? Did you win?”

  “Close enough.” He wasn’t about to say, “The other guy pulverized me.”

  She turned the phone toward him and clicked.

  “Wait … did you just take my picture?”

  “Yup”—he heard another small click—“and sent it.”

  He had to get out of here, but he felt too woozy.

  With a jingle of little bells, a message came back. The girl read it and her cheeks turned pink.

  “What?”

  She slumped forward so her face was hidden by her hair. “My friend Izzy thinks you’re cute. BFN,” she said, typing the letters. She slid the cell into the pocket of her shorts and stretched her legs out in front of her. Her thighs were skinny; her shorts ballooned around them. But she had muscles, like she ran or something.

  “Did you sneak over here from Lorelei or Colonial Park?” she asked.

  Socko was just putting it together—she thought he came from one of the other subdivisions—when she answered her own question.

  “No. You’re not from around here.”

  “I live here,” he said. He could hear the attitude in his voice, like he was imitating Rapp, but he guessed he needed a little attitude to talk to a girl. “What are you doing here? You’re in my territory.”

  “Your territory?” Her eyes flitted from his cropped hair to the shiner to his T-shirt. “Are you in a gang or something?”

  He could tell that through the strands of hair that hung over her face she was reading the message on his T-shirt. He popped himself on the chest with an open palm. “You looking at this?”

  She flinched, then flipped her hair out of her face with a quick turn of her head and came right back at him with some attitude of her own. “As a matter of fact, yeah. Don’t look at me like that! You’re the one wearing a shirt that says, ‘Not a Suspect, I Just Fit the Description.’” He laughed, but stopped fast. After his recent series of lost fights and crash landings, laughing hurt.

  She raised one invisible eyebrow. “And that was funny because …?”

  “Long story.” He had chosen the shirt out of the Help Yourself closet at St. Ignatius—the nuns had been okay with the message. “I like my shirt better than yours.”

  “Me too,” she admitted. “Do you really live here?”

  “Yeah, really. Whoa!” He put both palms down on the cement. The world was spinning left. “Excuse me while I pass out.” He dropped his forehead to his knees again.

  Feeling her breath on the back of his neck, he turned his head slightly. She was right up in his face again.

  “Show me your pupils,” she demanded.

  He closed his eyes down to a slit. “Why?”

  “Open them! I’ve had first-aid training.”

  Whoop-dee-doo, he thought. But he opened his eyes.

  Her eyes scanned back and forth. He had never looked at a girl’s eyes this close-up before. Hers were a freaky pale blue with long white eyelashes, which were freaky too—but pretty. And she smelled nice. He hoped she wasn’t breathing in, because his own smell was a whole different story.

  “Your pupils are the same size,” she decided. “No concussion.”

  Then why did he feel so dizzy? He propped his elbows on his knees and rested his chin in his hands.

  “Ohmygosh!” She pointed at his arm. “You’re bleeding.”

  He looked down and thought he’d pass out for real. The back of his right arm was ground burger. He hadn’t even felt it—maybe he was in shock. “It’s no big deal,” he said. “Don’t sweat it.”

  “No. Seriously. You’re majorly bleeding!”

  “You think this is bad? This is a nada. I saw a guy get shot once.”

  The girl’s eyes opened wide. “Where?”

  “Next to the Dumpster behind my building.”

  Her eyes crossed. “I mean, in what part of his anatomy?”

  “Heart. He was shot through the heart. Point-blank.”

  She slapped her hands over her own heart. “Did he die?”

  “What part of ‘through the heart’ did you not get?”

  Her pupils large, she stared into his eyes for a long moment. “What did it look like?” she breathed.

  “Blood everywhere.” It still made him sick to his stomach. “The shooter must’ve run through it. A trail of bloody footprints disappeared around the corner.”

  “I thought you
said you saw the shooting.”

  “Sorry, guess I just missed it!” Why was she getting all technical? “The dead guy’s name was Frankie. He lived in 3F.”

  “How terrible!”

  “Being dead, or living in 3F?”

  “Being dead, of course.” She acted all sad about poor dead Frankie, but for her it was like one of Mr. Marvin’s newspaper headlines. For him Frankie lying there in his own blood was real—he still had nightmares about it.

  Why were they still talking? His arm was bleeding, his head was throbbing, she was weird. It was time to split.

  “What’s your name?” The girl leaned back on her arms, stretching her legs out again. When the toe of one sneaker touched his calf, she pulled back fast and wrapped her arms around her shins. “Unless it really is ‘the Mighty Ant.’” Holding up both hands, she wiggled her index and middle fingers, making air quotes. “I saw your little attempt at graffiti.”

  “You spend a lot of time in drainpipes?” he asked, trying to cover his surprise.

  “Apparently not as much as you do.” She scratched an ankle. “Actually that was a lifetime first for me.”

  “Why are you checking out drainpipes all of a sudden?”

  She looked away. “It’s not the best time to hang around my so-called new home. So, what is your name?”

  “Socko,” he said. “Socko Starr.”

  “Are you joking?”

  “Sure. I go around making up crazy fake names for myself all the time—of course I’m not joking!”

  She blinked her white lashes. “Your parents named you Socko?”

  “Parent. My mom named me Socrates.”

  Her pale eyebrows pinched together. “You mean like the ancient Greek philosopher?”

  “Pretty much.” He didn’t want to act impressed, but she was the first kid he’d ever met who knew about ancient Greek philosophers.

  “‘To find yourself, think for yourself!’” she proclaimed.

  “Say what?”

  “That’s a quote from Socrates.”

  “Oh.” He’d never thought of Socrates as someone who had quotes. He’d never thought of him as anything but dead.

  She held out a hand like they hadn’t been talking for a good ten minutes. “Livvy Holmes.”

  He didn’t want to touch her hand. His was sweaty. “Your parents named you Livvy?”

  “Olivia. But no one but Mother uses that name. Call me Livvy.” Her hand was still sticking out.

  “Livvy?” He swiped his palm on his shorts really quick, then shook. “Where I come from the name Livvy would sound just about as snotty as O-livia,” he said.

  “I thought you said you’re from here.”

  “I live here, but I’m not from here.”

  “Where are you from?”

  “The city.”

  “Which part?”

  “The part where guys get shot through the heart.”

  “You mean … it was, like, seriously dangerous?”

  “You know, drugs, gangs, drive-by shootings. It’s pretty scenic.”

  Did he just imagine it, or did she look excited? “Where are you from?” he asked.

  “The Heights.” She raised her eyebrows, like “the Heights” should mean something to him. When he didn’t respond, she shrugged. “It’s not, you know, scenic like where you’re from, but I thought it was pretty perfect. Actually, it’s the only place I’ve ever lived. We had a tennis court in the yard, and Isabella Kennedy next door.”

  “Who’s Isabella Kennedy?”

  “Izzy.” She tapped the pocket with the cell phone in it. “My best friend since before we were born. Our mothers did Lamaze together.”

  He had no idea how you “did Lamaze,” but he thought it must be nice having your best friend in your pocket.

  “Izzy and I talked it over and we agreed that moving is not going to change our relationship.”

  “Yeah … and how’s that working out for you?” he asked. “I haven’t talked to my best friend since I moved.”

  A blue cell phone appeared in his face. “Call him.”

  He almost reached for it, then remembered. “Can’t. His phone’s disconnected.”

  She gave him a sympathetic frown. “Did his parents revoke his phone privileges?”

  Socko snorted. “Yeah … something like that.” The wall of the pool felt warm against his nearly bare scalp. He stared up at a cloud and wished he hadn’t snorted. “Why’d you move here if your old neighborhood was so perfect?”

  Livvy roped her arms around her knees again. “Moon Ridge is my dad’s project. You know, Holmes Homes?”

  “Sure.” How could he not know? It was on all the signs.

  “My father built lots of the subdivisions around here. But he was always the contractor. This one is all his. I get that he wants to live and breathe the place 24/7, but they didn’t even warn me! One day a couple of weeks ago my parents were like, ‘Surprise! We’re moving!’” She sighed. “I guess you like it. It’s safe and you have your own personal skate park.”

  “I hate it here.” Socko checked his arm. The scrape was doing something less than gush—but definitely more than ooze. Blood speckled the floor of the pool. He pressed his elbow into his damp T-shirt and stood. “Nice talking, but I’m outta here.” Socko tucked his skateboard under his uninjured arm; he figured he’d better walk it. He still felt kind of dizzy.

  He made it as far as the corner of the building before she came trotting after him. “I’ll go with you. You don’t look too steady.”

  Neither of them said anything for a while. Every now and then Socko shot a glance at her. She was a good head shorter than he was, but still tall for a girl.

  “So, do you live with just your mom?” she asked.

  “And my great-grandfather. I only met him a few days ago. We took him in trade for the house.”

  She stopped. “Excuse me?”

  “We take care of him until he kicks and the house is ours.”

  “That’s cold!”

  “Don’t look at me! It was his idea, not ours.”

  “What about your dad?”

  “Never met the guy,” Socko said. “Listen, you don’t have to walk me. I’m fine.”

  She let him get ahead of her, but he could tell she was still there. He could hear her footsteps.

  “What grade are you going into?” she called.

  “Seventh.”

  “Seventh? Really?”

  He turned to her and walked backwards a few steps. “I repeated second.” Great, now she thought he was stupid. “You?”

  “Eighth.”

  He made a right on Tranquility Way, thinking he’d lose her. She made the turn too, just a few steps behind him.

  “I’m not following you,” she called to him. “Your house is across the street from mine.”

  “How do you know that? There are, like, a gazillion houses here.”

  “My father built the gazillion houses, remember? I know exactly how many have sold.”

  Socko looked back. She held up one finger, and then pointed it at him.

  Oh man. So there really was nobody wandering around this neighborhood but him. Him and an albino-blonde girl who talked too much. He pointed at the basketball hoop. “You have a brother?”

  “No. Girls can play basketball. Dad and I play sometimes—but not that often. He’s always busy.”

  He almost offered to shoot hoops with her—that fall was affecting him worse than he thought. “Gotta go.” He jogged up his driveway.

  He looked back when he reached his front door and saw the dark car turn onto Tranquility Way. Livvy wiggled her fingers at it as it passed.

  The girl had no street sense. None at all. She’d probably never needed any in “the Heights,” but she wouldn’t last half an hour in his old neighborhood—and this one wasn’t as safe as she thought, even if her daddy did own it.

  “It’s not my job to wise her up,” he mumbled. But before opening his front door, he leaned his back against i
t and watched her jog up her driveway. He didn’t even notice when he dripped blood on Delia’s brand-new beige carpet.

  “Who’s the dame?” rasped the General. He was parked, as always, at the front window, an unopened book in his lap.

  “Livvy Holmes.”

  “Aw, Sacko.” The lone eye glared at Socko’s bloody elbow. “Don’t tell me you can’t even take a girl!”

  “Skateboard accident!” He blew past the old man and into the kitchen. As he held his elbow under the running tap, he heard the click of wheels.

  When he turned, the General sat in his wheelchair in the kitchen doorway. “Cute girl.”

  “I guess.” Socko pressed a paper towel against the wound.

  “You guess? How old are you, Sacko?”

  “Thirteen.”

  “Thirteen, sir. I was thirteen when I had my first serious encounter with Mary O’Malley—she caught me cribbing answers off her in math class.”

  “She fell for you because you were cheating?”

  “Fell for me? She turned me in! I got detention for two weeks. That Mary O’Malley was a real spitfire, and it wasn’t just her flaming red hair!”

  Socko touched his bristly scalp with wet fingers. He had always wondered about his red hair.

  The General cocked his head. “You have her hair, all right. Not just the color either. Her hair was thick like yours. Thick and curly.” The old man’s thin lips twisted in a crooked smile. “Glad you let me cut it. Your hairdo was beginning to look exactly like hers. Word of advice, Sacko. When you decide to get interested in girls of the opposite sex—”

  Socko glared at the old man. It wasn’t like he hadn’t noticed girls. Although he’d never talked to her, he had watched Maya Barrios all last year.

  “Anyhoo, when you get interested in girls, look for a fiery one, one who can dish it out. Fifty-four years is a long time to spend with a limp noodle.”

  20

  I JUST FIT THE DESCRIPTION

  Delia flung her bags down on the kitchen table and grasped Socko’s chin with one hand. “Look at you!”

  He tried to pull away. “Come on, Mom! It’s only a haircut.”

  She turned his face back and forth, examining the whitewalls the General had shaved above his ears and the brush cut on top. “A Tarantula haircut!” She let go in disgust.