The next few days were long and difficult to get through. It was the middle of June, and a heat wave had just arrived. Our schools had only just let out for the summer few days ago, but already the summer season was in full swing. I loved the laziness of summer, loved the sickly sweet smell of my mom’s homemade lemonade, the feeling of damp cloth on my back as little beads of sweat formed a loose glue between my shirt and my skin. Year after year it was always the same thing, every summer, the same boredom, the same freedom, and the same experiences that somehow brought new memories with new years.
On the first Wednesday of summer, I woke up earlier than usual, drenched in sweat, a nightmare that was more like a flashback of The Incident scaring me into consciousness. My cotton shorts and tie-dyed t-shirt hung limply on my body, and strands of hair that had escaped my ponytail clung to my face. I stifled a scream and tried to catch my breath. One, two, three, four, I counted, trying to make my breaths come evenly. I couldn’t do this again, wouldn’t allow this disaster to become the center of my life once more. It had seemed as though I was getting better, beginning to heal, even my therapist had thought so, and for about five months I had only been going in for bimonthly check-ins. Apparently I was wrong. The nightmares, the breakdowns, it was all coming back, all of it.
Deftly, I rolled over, tangled in the bed sheet, and squinted at the clock on my bedside table, before giving up and rolling over completely in order to reach my glasses. It was 7:14 in the morning, much too early to be awake when I wasn’t forced to be. My breathing was still unstable, and my heart continued to race. I knew it would be a complete lost cause to fall asleep again, so I mustered my energy, and swung my legs over the side of the bed, sitting up and untangling my body from the bedding. I sat there, perched on the edge of the mattress, for a few moments, allowing my heartbeat to slow down a little, and with it my breathing steadied.
Deciding that there was no point in wasting the time I spent awake, no matter how early it was, I collected my towel and bathrobe and walked into the purple themed bathroom that Taylor and I had shared until she left for college. The temperature outside must have already been up to the mid to upper ninety’s, and it would only get worse as the day wore on. My family had the windows in our house closed, though, because we didn’t want the air conditioning to have to work harder than it already was, but still the rooms were hot and the air seemed almost too thick to breathe in.
When I stepped into the shower, I let the cool water pelt down onto my bare back for a while, before beginning to actually clean myself. It was unusual for me to keep the water in the shower below scalding, but it was much too hot out to even consider anything above chilly.
Once I was showered with my teeth brushed and contacts in, I wrapped my towel under my arms, and allowed my wet hair to lay down my back as I darted into my bedroom to get dressed. It was around 8:00 when I was dressed in Bermuda shorts and an old camp T-shirt with my hair wrapped in my towel.
“Eva?” My mom called from downstairs. She must have gone into the kitchen to make herself a cup of coffee before getting ready for her day.
“Yeah, Mom?”
“Did you turn the air conditioning off?”
“No, of course not,” I said incredulously. I glanced back at the thermometer stuck to my bedroom window; it showed one hundred and eight degrees already.
“Hmm…”
“Why? Is it off?”
“Well, yes and no. The thermostat says that it’s on and programmed correctly, but it doesn’t seem to be working. Maybe the unit has finally seen the last of its days.” She suggested. No. No, no, no, I thought, this is not happening. My dad was getting back from Ohio in two days, and I knew that my mom would wait until he was home to call anyone to fix the AC. I groaned.
“Now, Eva. I know it’s hot out, but maybe it’ll be good for you. Marissa, Dana, and you can spend the day outside for once, the breeze will be better in the yard then in here, and the fresh air is healthy.”
“If we don’t die from the heat first,” I muttered under my breath before walking back upstairs to text Marissa and Dana and warn them about the AC. Marissa’s dad had died when she was only a year old, and her mom had to work long hours to support the two of them. Ms. Davenport, Marissa’s mom, was worried that if Marissa was home alone all summer she would get involved in bad things, so my mom had offered for Marissa to hang out at our house during the day, so it wasn’t like we could hang out there until the AC was fixed. Dana was the oldest child of six, and her house was chaos all the time with the four year old triplets screaming and the eleven year old twins’ attitudes growing by the minute. We loved the hectic environment of the Rani’s home, but it was too crazy to spend an extended amount of time there.
sorry, guys, but it looks like we’re going 2 b forced 2 spend the rest of the week in the heat I warned.
huh? They both replied, almost at the exact same moment.
the AC broke. its even hotter inside than outside :(
no big. just left the house. b there in 2. Dana replied first. The three of us all lived in the same neighborhood, though Marissa lived at the opposite end that Dana and I did.
whatevr. but no making fun of my frizzball hair. Marissa said, and I could almost hear her laughter.
kk. cya soon! Dana would probably be here before the message had even sent, but I hated not replying to people.
riss, we all get frizzball hair in this weather. rmbr last yr? it wasnt even this bad then. I said.
yeayeayea. suree. trying to find matching flip-flops, then i’ll head up.
just wear 2 different colors. none of us care.
fine. i’m leaving now.
good! don’t try to take that shortcut again! Last summer Marissa had tried to cut through some wooded areas in our neighborhood to get to my house faster, but ended up with nothing but scrapes and a bad case of poison ivy. Dana and I won’t ever let her forget it.
I unwrapped the towel from my head, my still damp hair falling around my face. I didn’t even bother putting shoes on when the doorbell rang, knowing that I would take them off once we were outside anyway. Dana stepped into the house, and made a gagging noise.
“Could this air be any thicker?”
“Ugh, I know, right? My hair is never going to finish drying in this humidity.” I complained, not really caring what I looked like, but there was enough moisture in the air surrounding me, I didn’t need any more of it, thank you very much.
Dana kicked her shoes into the mudroom, and the two of us walked outside and into the garden shed, in search of an outdoor blanket to sit on. In the middle of us trying to climb up the various objects in the shed to reach the top shelf Marissa walked in and began laughing, causing me to whip my head around. I accidentally fell into Dana, and as the two of us struggled to regain our balances on precarious perches, someone grabbed the edge of something on the top shelf as both of us fell onto the ground, an avalanche of various seasonal object cascading down upon us. Snow sleds, plastic sand toys, a portable lawn chair, and an assortment of other objects completely buried us, the blanket that we were trying to find drifting down to sit on top of the pile.
Marissa stood by the door laughing hysterically before beginning to save Dana and me from the dangerous pile of shed objects. It took the three of us about two hours to put everything that had fallen back into its rightful place.
It wasn’t until we had spread the blue picnic blanket out in the back yard underneath a big oak tree that I noticed the gash on my knee. My left calf had dried blood all over it, though the cut didn’t appear to be bleeding anymore.
“Um…guys?” My voice squeaked as I looked back and forth between my friends and my knee. How had I not noticed such a large cut before? I guess I must have thought it was sweat running down my leg, not blood, which was a logical thing to think.
“Eva!” Dana said, before springing into action. She was always the one that knew what to do, always the one who could think clearly in every situation. I couldn’t stand the sight of blood, my own especially, ever since I was a little kid, and I froze up at the sight of it. Marissa and Dana pulled me towards the door to my house, and sat me down at a chair in the kitchen. As Marissa was pulling a box of band-aids out of the medicine cabinet along with a tube of antibiotic ointment, Dana was putting soap and water on a paper towel to clean my knee.
“Eva Marie Rodgers! What happened?” My mom asked when she walked in from the kitchen, taking the paper towel from Dana’s hand and continuing to clean the cut.
Dana launched into the story, starting from when we were looking for the blanket, ending where I discovered the wound. My mom just shook her head at us, laughing quietly before putting about three times as much antibiotic ointment as was needed on my knee and covering it with a band-aid.
“Well, I guess you girls have always been kind of crazy. Let’s just not go anywhere beyond cut knees, deal?” My mom said.
“Definitely!” Marissa answered with a smile, before pulling me and Dana back outside.
The three of us spent the rest of the day laying on the blue blanket outside, and when the sun changed sides in the sky, and we were no longer in the shade, we had actually fallen asleep, exhausted from our shed endeavors and the heat. Dana and Marissa each had lobster red skin, whereas mine was just slightly darker than before. I guess it was one of the blessings that I had received when I was born, I had never burned in my life.
We also all woke up with the frizziest hair that I have ever seen. It was worse than any other summers before, and we all laughed at the odd directions of our hair. Ah, how I love the laziness of summer time.
After dinner with my mom Dana and Marissa each went home for the rest of the night, though I’m not sure what they did for the hours of the night, because I know that I certainly wasn’t able to sleep.
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