That Summer by Sarah Dessen EPUB & PDF – eBook Details Online
- Author: Sarah Dessen
- Language: English
- Formats: PDF / EPUB
- Status: Available For Free Download
- Series: None
- Price: Free
- File Size: 2 MB
It’s funny how one summer can change everything. It must be something
about the heat and the smell of chlorine, fresh-cut grass and honeysuckle,
asphalt sizzling after late-day thunderstorms, the steam rising while
everything drips around it. Something about long, lazy days and whirring
air conditioners and bright plastic flip-flops from the drugstore thwacking
down the street.
Something about fall being so close, another year,
another Christmas, another beginning. So much in one summer, stirring
up like the storms that crest at the end of each day, blowing out all the
heat and dirt to leave everything gasping and cool. Everyone can reach
back to one summer and lay a finger to it, finding the exact point when
everything changed. That summer was mine.
The day my father got remarried, my mother was up at six A.M. defrosting
the refrigerator. I woke to the sound of her hacking away and the occasional
thud as a huge slab of ice crashed. My mother was an erratic defroster. When
I came down into the kitchen, she was poised in front of the open freezer,
wielding the ice pick, Barry Manilow crooning out at her from the tape player
she kept on the kitchen table. Around Barry’s voice, stacked in dripping piles,
were all of our perishables, sweating in the heat of another summer morning.
“Oh, good morning, Haven.” She turned when she saw me, wiping her
brow with the ice pick still in hand, making my heart jump as I imagined it
slipping just a bit and taking out her eye. I knew that nervous feeling so well,
even at fifteen, that spilling uncontrollability that my mother brought out in
me. It was as if I was attached to her with a tether, her every movement
yanking at me, my own hands reaching to shield her from the dangers of her
waving arms.
“Good morning.” I pulled out a chair and sat down next to a stack of
packaged chicken. “Are you okay?”
“Me?” She was back on the job now, scraping. “I’m fine. Are you
hungry?”
“Not really.” I pulled my legs up to my chest, pressing hard to fold myself
into the smallest size possible. It seemed like every morning I woke up taller,
my skin having stretched in the night while I slept. I had dreams of not being
able to fit through doors, of becoming gigantic, towering over people and
buildings like a monster, causing terror in the streets. I’d put on four inches
since April, and showed no signs of letting up.
I was already five-eleven,
with only a few more little lines on the measuring stick before six feet.
“Haven.” My mother looked at me. “Please don’t sit that way. It’s not
good for you and it makes me nervous.” She stood there staring at me until I
let my legs drop. “That’s better.” Scrape, scrape. Barry sang on, about New
England.
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