The Summer of Broken Things

by Margaret Peterson Haddix

  After lunch, Mrs. Armisted wants to take us shopping. We go into ALE-HOP, a European chain that has a life-size cow in the front of every store. Avery rolls her eyes but starts methodically pulling out clothes to try on. Mrs. Armisted works just as quickly, and when Avery heads back to the fitting room, Mrs. Armisted hands her pile of clothes to me.

  “These will look good on you,” she says.

  I look at the price tags.

  “No, no, I already have too much to fit back into my suitcase, going home,” I say.

  “We can buy new suitcases, too,” Mrs. Armisted says. “Please. It’s the least I can do after everything your mother did for us. And everything you did for Avery and David.”

  “Come on, it makes Mom happy to buy clothes for people,” Avery says, a wicked twinkle in her eye.

  The thing is, the clothes actually do look good on me. They aren’t anything that I’d wear back in Crawfordsville—one’s a red shirt with an uneven hemline; one’s a purple dress with little cutouts on the sleeves.

  But maybe I would wear them back in Crawfordsville, I think. Maybe I’ll just be that girl who looks different—I look different, anyway. Why not look different and feel good about it?

  Who knows? Maybe it will end up being Stephanie Purley who’s jealous of me.

  Even if she makes fun of me, I still like these clothes.

  By the end of the afternoon, we’re weighed down with shopping bags.

  Avery goes to hang out with her dad for a little bit while I call Mom one last time. All she wants to talk about is meeting me at the Columbus airport tomorrow night: “Your grandparents have invited everyone they know, so it might be kind of a big crowd,” she apologizes.

  I picture how Avery and her parents will see all the gray-haired people: the women with their tightly curled beauty-parlor perms, the men with their sagging pants held up by frayed belts and suspenders. The Armisteds will see that I don’t have any friends in Crawfordsville under the age of seventy.

  Or will they just see that I have a lot of people who love me?

  Avery and I leave early for the last event of the day, our last official event in Spain: dinner with our Spanish class. Everybody else has two more weeks before their official good-bye dinner, but Dragomir argued in class on Friday that we needed a big send-off as well.

  We get to the restaurant, and even Señora Gomez is there.

  “We will miss you both,” she says solemnly, after she air-kisses us. It takes me a minute to realize she’s actually spoken in English. Her “miss” sounds like “mees,” and everything is so heavily accented, I would have understood her better in Spanish.

  “Wait—you actually know English?” Avery asks in surprise.

  Señora Gomez raises an eyebrow and switches back to Spanish.

  “I have been teaching Spanish to Británicos and Estadounidenses for years,” she says. “You think I did not pick up something? But in class, it is better for you to think I only understand in Spanish. So you have to learn it to communicate. And I learned English too late in life to avoid having an accent. Would you pay attention to me if I sounded so stupid all the time?”

  “But—that’s how we always sound in Spanish,” I complain.

  “Ah, but you are learning,” Señora Gomez says. “You have gotten so much better this summer. You will be fluent soon.”

  I guess I have understood every word she just spoke.

  I think about the pathetic Spanish program back at Crawfordsville High School. I won’t be fluent in Spanish soon. I’ll be forgetting everything I know.

  But Señora Gomez has given me an idea.

  I sit down beside Avery, and across from Dragomir and Andrei.

  “I’ve mostly just heard you speak Spanish and English,” I tell the boys, in Spanish. “And muttering things that are probably curse words in Bulgarian. Let me hear what you really sound like. Speak a whole sentence in Bulgarian. Or two or three.”

  The boys look guiltily at each other when I accuse them of cursing. But then Andrei begins. The Bulgarian words flow out smoothly, and for the first time I realize what a deep, beautiful voice he has when he’s not joking around.

  Then Dragomir takes over, and his Bulgarian sounds joyous, like he’s constantly on the verge of laughter.

  “Okay, now tell us what you both said,” Avery demands.

  Both boys grin and shake their heads.

  “Some things don’t translate,” Andrei says, in Spanish.

  “You just pledged your undying love to Kayla, didn’t you?” Avery asks.

  Both boys blush, and I complain, “Avery!”

  Dragomir switches back to Spanish too.

  “Okay, I will translate part of what I said,” he tells us. “It is that when we leave tonight, we will not say adios. It will just be hasta luego. Because we will meet again later. And it will be soon. I will go to los Estados Unidos to see you, or you will visit me in Bulgaria. Or we will meet again in Spain. But we will not say good-bye.”

  He’s watching my face, and I have to look down at my menu to hide the fact that now I’m blushing.

  None of those things are actually going to happen, I tell myself. Probably when I’m an old lady in a nursing home, I’ll repeat again and again Oh yes, when I was a teenager I had two boys named Dragomir and Andrei fighting over me. But then I had to leave Spain early, so I never really got to fall in love with either of them.

  But there it is again, me giving up on something I might want. It’s years and years and years before I’ll be an old lady in a nursing home. I could become fluent in Spanish between now and then. I could go to Bulgaria.

  I have all sorts of choices. Ideas start to bloom in my head, as if they’ve been growing there all day and I never noticed: If I can talk Mom into going to the community college for a nursing degree, maybe I can take Spanish classes there too, instead of at Crawfordsville High School. A few of the really smart kids do that, and the guidance counselors are always saying more of us should take advantage of that—it’s free! But it never felt like they were talking to me.

  Now, though, if I take more and better Spanish classes, then maybe after I’m done with high school I can get a scholarship and study Spanish in college. Maybe there are even scholarships that would let me travel. And then maybe I could be a translator.

  Maybe even at a hospital.

  Or a nursing home.

  “I’m definitely coming back to Spain someday,” I hear myself tell Dragomir and Andrei. “Want to meet up back here in Madrid?”

  “Next summer?” Andrei says eagerly.

  It’s crazy, but that doesn’t mean it’s impossible.

  “¿Por qué no?” I say, and I feel like I’m answering about a whole lot more than another trip to Spain.

  Why not?

  Avery: How It Ends/How It Begins

  Kayla’s had a much better summer in Spain than I have, I think, watching her laugh and—let’s be honest, flirt—with Dragomir and Andrei. Tears sting at my eyes. I’m almost as bad as Mom, that I can cry now at the drop of a hat.

  It’s not that I’m jealous. I’m not interested in Dragomir or Andrei, even though they’re both funny and sweet. And now that I know them better, I forget that Dragomir has acne or that Andrei is so skinny he might want to try folding himself into an envelope and mailing himself to the United States, if he really wants to go there.

  But Kayla got all the excitement and the guys falling in love with her.

  I got stupid family drama and my parents planning a divorce and my dad almost dying.

  It’s funny how the whole thing about my parents using a gestational carrier to have me doesn’t seem like such a big deal now. I still feel a little weird about it, but so what? I feel weird about pretty much everything right now.

  If Mom and Dad really do get divorced, will I ever get to the point where it seems like that isn’t a big deal? I wonder. Will it ever not bother me that Daddy had a heart attack and almost died?

  The paella comes, in big r
ound skillets that the waitress leaves in the middle of the table. Kayla and I are sharing a seafood one—marisco—and the shrimp on top are still in their shells, with antennae waving and beady eyes peering up at us. Kayla and I both shrug and start pulling off the shells.

  I want someone to notice how much self-control I have, that I’m not jumping back and screaming in horror, I think.

  But I guess everyone else is used to shrimp served that way.

  Hugh and Susan walk over to our end of the table, and Susan says (in Spanish, of course, because it’s Susan), “Look us up if you’re ever in London,” and Hugh gazes into my eyes and says, “Especially if it’s four or five years from now.”

  Okay, that was kind of cool. That was one good thing that happened in Spain.

  One.

  Then the meal is ending, and people are starting to leave, and Dragomir leans across the table and tells me, “I have decided to give you a farewell gift. A farewell fútbol gift.”

  I can’t help myself. I gasp.

  “You’re going to tell me the Bulgarian secret?” I squeal. “The way you could almost always steal the ball from me?”

  He nods solemnly.

  “Well, sort of,” he qualifies. “I think it would be disloyal to my country if I just told. But if you look up Bulgarian folk dances online, there is one in particular . . . You will recognize the footwork. And if you practice that—that is the Bulgarian secret.”

  “You’re pulling my leg,” I say. Even though, let’s face it, that’s not actually an expression in Spanish. I try again with the correct phrase, which sounds like it’s about hair: “Me estás tomando el pelo.”

  “No, no,” Dragomir says. He holds up his right hand. “Bulgarian honor.”

  He still might be pranking me, but it’s worth a try.

  It will drive Shannon and Lauren crazy if I’ve learned better soccer skills in Spain than they learned at soccer camp.

  So I guess that’s another thing that was good about this summer in Spain.

  Kayla’s hugging everyone good-bye, so I do too. The other kids and Señora Gomez head for the Metro, which is just a block away.

  “Your mom said we should call a cab when we’re done,” Kayla says. “But I kind of forgot, and—”

  “And it’s not that far and lots of people are out walking around,” I say. “It’s perfectly safe.”

  We turn toward Puerta del Sol, because it’s an easy landmark in the maze of twisty streets. Our progress is slow, because it’s like there’s one huge street party going on around us.

  “It’s ten thirty at night, and there are more people out than I’ve ever seen during the day,” Kayla marvels. “And, look, there are little kids having dinner at that restaurant over there. . . .”

  “And it’s a Sunday night!” I agree. “I guess this is what Dad was talking about when he said Spain always stays up too late.”

  “And we missed it all,” Kayla says wistfully. “Until tonight.”

  I think about how I lied to Shannon and Lauren when I didn’t want to text them, and I said I was grounded for sneaking out to dance clubs.

  “We should have been sneaking out every night,” I tell Kayla. “Or—now! Maybe we could . . .”

  Kayla shoots me a sideways look and I shrug.

  “Okay, not tonight,” I say. Not with my parents already falling apart. Not when I feel like I’m the only glue holding either of them together.

  “If I can make it back to Spain someday, you can too,” Kayla says firmly. “And then you can see and do everything we missed this time around.”

  I step on a manhole cover, which rocks under my feet. Kayla points at the word stamped in the metal: BOMBEROS.

  “Did I ever tell you the first time I saw that, I thought it had to do with bombs or bomb squads?” she asks. “When, really, bomberos are just ordinary firefighters? There was so much I didn’t understand at the beginning of the summer! So much I was afraid of that really wasn’t scary at all!”

  So much I should have been afraid of, that I didn’t even know was coming. . . , I think.

  A burst of laughter sails up from one of the tables of the sidewalk café we’re walking past. It’s a bunch of middle-aged people; what do they have to be so happy about? They’re old enough they probably lived here when Spain had a dictatorship. Their economy sucks. And they don’t even have dryers in their apartments.

  But they’re still laughing. They’re still happy.

  My phone buzzes, and I almost don’t look at it because I’m sure it’s going to be Mom fretting about why Kayla and I aren’t back yet.

  But if it’s something about Dad . . .

  I pull out my phone, and the text isn’t from Mom or Dad. It’s from Lauren.

  Shannon and I just decided, she wrote. We’re not playing soccer anymore.

  “What?” I say out loud.

  I send Lauren a bunch of question marks. Her reply comes quickly: We’re sick of soccer after camp this summer. We saw the practice schedule for the fall—too intense. And our moms are making us take hard classes. We want to have fun in h.s.

  I show Kayla my phone. My hands are shaking.

  “They can’t do this to me,” I say. “You saw how I was this summer. I need soccer.”

  “Just because they’re quitting, that doesn’t mean you have to too,” Kayla says.

  “They’re my best friends!” I protest.

  Kayla takes my phone from me. She types: It will make me sad not to have you on the team with me. But I’m still playing. Then she hands the phone back to me and asks, “Well?”

  I hit send. And it’s strange: My hands are perfectly steady now.

  A minute later, I get Lauren’s reply: Oh. Maybe we will play, after all. We’d miss you if you were always away at soccer practice.

  “Sometimes, they’re not actually very good friends,” I admit to Kayla.

  “Nobody’s perfect,” Kayla says.

  We’re in Puerta del Sol now, which feels like party central. A group of guys wearing fraternity T-shirts are daring each other to wade in one of the fountains.

  “Am I the only person who ever went on a Spanish vacation and had a miserable time?” I grumble.

  “Hel-lo?” Kayla says. She wiggles her eyebrows up and down at me.

  “Oh. I kind of meant both of us,” I say. “And you had more fun. Anyway, you get to go home, and you get your normal life back. For me, it’s . . . What am I going to do when I get home?”

  “You’ll be the greatest . . . wait, what position do you play in soccer?”

  “Midfielder.”

  “You’ll be the greatest midfielder your high school has ever seen,” Kayla says. She holds her hands near my face, like she’s showing off my reflected glory. “Ta-da!”

  I shove her hands away.

  “I mean with my parents,” I mutter.

  “They’re getting better,” Kayla says. We’re passing out of the plaza now, and she waits until we’ve turned down a quieter street before she goes on. “You’ve done okay with them the past few weeks.”

  “Because you helped,” I say, and I embarrass myself by choking on the last word. “You let me complain all I wanted. I could tell you anything, and you didn’t get mad at me—”

  “Oh yes, I did!” Kayla protests. “I was mad at you practically the whole summer!”

  “Well, I was mad at you a lot too!”

  We’re glaring at each other, almost nose to nose, and then I start giggling.

  “This is how Lauren and her sister always sound,” I say.

  “We’re not sisters,” Kayla says, and it feels like she’s shut a door between us.

  We’re close enough to our apartment now that we can hear the music coming from the eighties nightclub. It’s that “Don’t You Want Me, Baby” song again—are they trying to make me cry?

  I think about how Dad said he’d always hoped Kayla and I could grow up feeling like cousins, and it makes me sad. I don’t have any cousins, and Kayla doesn’t either
.

  But I know plenty of kids who barely even know their cousins. Or the cousins are on the other side of the country or even the world—in Los Angeles or Seattle, Pakistan or India or Japan—and they’ve only met them once or twice in their lives.

  “I know we’re not sisters,” I tell Kayla. “And I know you’ve got the whole town of Crawfordsville waiting for you to get home. You don’t need anyone else.”

  “I am going to be busy when I get home,” Kayla says, almost snippily. “But I’m not going back to my normal life. I’m going to get as serious about Spanish as Susan is. Because I want to be a translator someday.”

  She sounds so sure of herself. She knows what she wants.

  And it feels like that’s all she needs to get what she wants.

  “That’s nice,” I say. “You have your whole life figured out.”

  We’re walking into shadows now, and I can feel the darkness creeping into me.

  Kayla reaches over and grabs my shoulders.

  “See what you just did?” she says, shaking me. “You don’t even care. If we were really sisters, you’d be happy for me, too. You’d listen when I told you what I was excited or hopeful or sad or worried about, just as much as I listen when you tell me.”

  “I listened,” I say. “I just . . . have too many problems of my own.”

  “It’s like you’re still going around yelling, ‘Kayla Butts is not my sister,’ ” she says.

  “I never . . . ,” I begin. I look over, and Kayla is holding herself so stiffly. I start over again. “Oh. Are you still mad about that?”

  “That night we found out everything. You said, ‘Is Kayla Butts my sister?’ like it would be the worst thing ever. And now we’re about to leave Spain, and . . .”

  Is Kayla really going to start crying over something I said so long ago?

  “I was upset! I didn’t even know you then!” I protest. “I didn’t know what I was saying!”