Free The Summer We Came to Life by Deborah Cloyed Page A

above her head, pushing hard to make it up the hill around the edge of the mulch. She made it to the top and then she spotted me. She waved and rolled her eyes like, can you believe this? But she was visibly proud of herself, I could tell. She made a big show ofvrooming the lawn mower fast across the grass. I smiled and she smiled back, not watching where she was going.
    I don’t know when it happened, but suddenly Mina’s face turned from a happy clown into a Stephen King clown, like smearing on ghoulish face paint in a dirty backstage mirror. In slow motion, I watched her look down at her legs in horror, and shove the mower away from her with all her strength. The shut-off motor produced an abrupt silence in which I struggled to get a grip on what had happened. I ran to Mina, trying to figure out the blood on her legs, the frantic grabbing at her shins, trying to understand why she was sobbing hysterically. I thought she’d mowed her feet off. When I made it up the hill, I looked at her hands as she held them out to me.
    Now, I could make out the wriggling balls of flesh and blood. I looked at Mina’s face, before scanning her entire body, still thinking emergency room. Mina shook her head, unable to choke out words through her tears, and dumped the contents of her hands into mine. When I realized that the warm lumps sinking into my palms were pieces of baby rabbits, I threw them to the ground and vomited. Mina ran off.
    I waited for the nausea to subside enough for me to stand, then I went inside. Mina wouldn’t let me in the bathroom, so I methodically washed my hands in the kitchen sink, drying them each time before deciding to wash them again.
    The whole time, I could hear her crying over the sound of the faucet.
    Her father came into the kitchen, looking panicked, and caught me standing there. “What happened?”
    â€œMina killed some bunnies. With the lawnmower.” He put his ear to the bathroom door. For the second time in all my life, I could see the raw emotions Mina’s father normally concealed with blanket anger. “I think she’ll be okay,” I said to him.
    He waited a long time before he looked at me and nodded. When he disappeared again, I sat on the floor against the bathroom door so Mina would know I was there.
    When I finally heard the doorknob turn, I didn’t have time to stand before she was there looking down at me. She smiled crookedly, her face a big red puffer fish. “We’re having a funeral. Go call Isabel and Kendra. We’ll bury the bunnies under the maple tree.”

CHAPTER
13
    BY THE TIME ISABEL AND I MADE IT OUT TO THE porch, the salad they’d saved for us was wilting. Even if they hadn’t heard us, anybody could see I’d been crying my eyes out.
    Isabel sat down next to Jesse, but I walked to the railing to look into the palm tree grove and the blackness beyond that must be the ocean. I breathed in the musty, salty night air. It was soothing—the sound of the ocean mixing with the hushed conversations behind me. Jesse had Isabel laughing quietly. I wasn’t quite ready yet, though, because I was still living in the echoes of a summer tragedy.
    And I wanted to mull over Mina’s words Isabel read me from her journal. Why had I failed her? She left it to me to make her immortal. My journal was filled with notes Mina made about meditation, and things like white noise recording, often whole passages copied from books. She obviously hadn’t put any of that in Isabel’s journal. She picked me to do it. Ask Samantha, she’d told Isabel. Maybe she’d pickedme because she thought I was the only one crazy enough to believe in it, but still she’d picked me . I thought of the physics tomes I’d shelved, the meditation sessions I’d attempted before leaving for Paris, and how I’d since abandoned my promise. I thought of the maple leaves. I was an asshole. I’d been reading Mina’s