Summerlost Read Free Page A

feel quiet but small enoughthat it didn’t feel creepy. A waterfall and a couple of sculptures were hidden among the trees. And outside of the forest was a grassy quad where my mom used to play Ultimate Frisbee when she was a teenager.
    Nerd-on-a-Bike turned into the forest and rode down the squiggly sidewalks under the trees.
    He rode past the quad.
    He rode toward the middle of campus to the theater, which looked like it got picked up out of old England and set right down in Utah. And then I realized where he was going.
    The Summerlost Festival.
    Of course.
    I should have known.
    The Summerlost Festival in Iron Creek was the third-biggest Shakespearean festival west of the Mississippi River. It happened every year on the college campus during the summertime. A big billboard told you all about it as you came into town:
    LOSE YOURSELF IN SUMMER AND GO BACK IN TIME AT THE SUMMERLOST FESTI VAL
    The Greenshow they did out on the lawn before the plays was fun and also scary because they sometimes pulled people out of the audience to be part of it, and there were always crazyprops. One time they had my dad get up to be a prince in a skit. He had on tan shorts and a blue polo shirt like he usually did when he was on vacation. The actors in their tights and peasant dresses surrounded him. He had to wear huge wooden shoes and stomp around on the tiny stage on a quest to rescue one of the actors, who had been cast into a deep sleep by a witch’s spell. My dad had to pretend to kiss her. His face went so red. “My prince!” the princess exclaimed to my dad when she woke up.
    My mother could not breathe, she was laughing so hard. When Dad sat down, he shook his head. I knew he’d hated it, but he’d been a good sport. Mom hugged him and I felt proud of him even though it had been sort of awful to watch.
    Another time, a few years later, we came to see the show and Ben was having one of his hard days and couldn’t stop screaming and yelling. Finally my mom took Ben away to the grassy quad and he rolled down the hill over and over, like a puppy. When he came back, happy and big-eyed and sweaty, he even sat on my lap in a kind of curly way like a puppy would have, but he was a boy.
    My brother was a boy and now he’s not anything.

8.
    â€œHello,” someone said, and I looked up. Nerd-on-a-Bike. He’d caught me. My face must have looked funny thinking about Ben because the boy’s face changed. He’d looked as if he was going to say something to me, like he’d had all the words ready to go, and then he said something else instead.
    â€œYou live on my street,” he said. He had dark hair and freckles. I expected his eyes to be brown, but they were hazel. “In the Wainwrights’ old house.”
    â€œYeah,” I said.
    â€œI was going to ask why you were following me.”
    â€œI wanted to see where you were going dressed like that,” I told him. “I should have realized. The festival. Do you work here?”
    â€œYeah.”
    â€œHow old are you?”
    â€œTwelve.”
    So I could work too. The thought seemed to come out of nowhere. I didn’t know I wanted a job. I didn’t know
what
I wanted, except to go back to how things used to be, and thatcould never happen, but I wanted it so bad that it didn’t leave room to want much else.
    â€œAre they hiring?” I asked.
    â€œWe can find out,” he said. “What’s your name?”
    â€œCedar Lee,” I said.
    â€œThat sounds like a movie-star name.”
    I almost said,
It’s not. It’s a tree name because my dad grew up in the Pacific Northwest and there was this huge old cedar tree in his yard and for some reason he thought that would be a great name for his first kid, boy or girl, and my mom liked it too, and he always joked that’s how he knew he’d found the right person.
They fought sometimes but they were super in love, my parents. You could tell that