Summerlost by Ally Condie
ACT I
1.
Our new house had a blue door. The rest of the house was painted white and shingled gray.
“Isn’t it beautiful?” my mother asked.
She climbed out of the car first and then my younger brother, Miles, and then me.
“Don’t you think this is the perfect place to end the summer?” Mom wanted to know.
We were spending the rest of the summer in Iron Creek, a small town in a high desert, the kind with pine trees and snow in the winter. It got hot in the day and cold at night. When a thunderstorm, all black and gray and blue, did come rolling in, you could see it a mile away.
I knew that stars would come out and rain would fall and that the days would be hot and long. I knew I’d make sandwiches for Miles and wash dishes with my mom. I knew I would do all of that and summer would be the same and never the same.
Last summer we had a dad and a brother and then they were gone.
We did not see it coming.
2.
One of the things Miles and I whisper-worried about at night was that our mom could fall in love again.
It didn’t seem like it would happen because she’d loved my father so much, but we had learned from the accident that anything could happen. Anything bad, anyway.
Mom didn’t end up falling in love with a person, but she did fall in love with a house. We were in Iron Creek in June, visiting our grandparents—my mom’s parents—when she saw the FOR SALE sign while she was out for a drive. She came home and whispered to Gram and Papa, and then they went with her to see the house while Miles and I stayed with our uncle Nick and his wife. Two weeks later, Mom used some of the money from when my dad died, the life insurance money, to buy the house. Since she’s a teacher and didn’t have to go back to work until the end of August, she decided we would spend the rest of the summer in Iron Creek and all the summers after that. She planned to rent out the house to college students during the school year. We weren’t really rich enough to have two houses.
“It will be good for us to be around family more,” she said. “Next summer we can stay for the whole time.”
We didn’t fight her about it. We liked our grandparents. We liked our uncle and our aunt. They had known our dad and our brother Ben. They had some of the same memories we did. Sometimes they even brought things up, like, “Remember when your dad went out in the kayak at Aspen Lake and he flipped over and we had to save him in our paddleboat?” and we would all start laughing because we had the same picture in our minds, my dad with his sunglasses dangling from one ear and his hair all wet. And they knew that Ben’s favorite kind of ice cream wasn’t ice cream at all, it was rainbow sherbet, and he always ate green first, and so when I saw it in my grandma’s freezer once and I started crying they didn’t even ask why and I think I saw my uncle Nick, my mom’s brother, crying too.
“Well,” Mom said, “let’s go inside and choose rooms before we start unpacking.”
“Me first!” said Miles.
They went in the house and I sat down on the steps.
The wind came through the trees, which were very old and very tall. I heard an ice-cream truck a few streets over, and kids playing in other yards.
And then a boy rode past on a bike. The boy wore old clothes. Not worn-out old, old-fashioned. He was dressed like a peasant. He had on a ruffly blouse and pants that ended right under his knees and a hat with a feather and he was my age. He didn’t glance over at me. He looked happy.
Sad, I thought. That’s so sad. He’s weird and he doesn’t even know it.
Actually, it’s better not to know it. My brother Ben was different and he knew.
The trees sounded loud as a waterfall above me. “We’re so lucky,” Mom kept telling us when she bought the house. “The trees on the property have been there for fifty years. They’re beautiful. Not many like them in the whole town.”
I think she noticed the trees because my dad always loved trees.
We bought the house from a family who had lived in Iron Creek for generations, the Wainwrights. The kids had all moved away but one of them came back to sell the house when his mother died. He didn’t want to live in it, but he was also kind of weird about selling it. When he ran into my mother at the realtor’s office, he told her, “It will always be the Wainwright home.”
My mother said she nodded at him like she agreed but she didn’t waste any time having the velvety green carpet torn up and the hardwood floors underneath sanded and varnished.
“I want the heart and the bones to stay the same,” she said. “Anything else, we can change. We live here now.”
She also had the front door painted blue.
I heard that blue front door open behind me and Mom came out. “Hey, Cedar,” she said.
“Hey.”