Free Second Chance Summer by Morgan Matson

was just grateful that she’d run into him before his sons had a chance to report back about my getting lost in the woods. “In the dairy aisle. He said they’re living next door to us now.”
    “Oh,” I said. “How about that.” I could feel my cheeks getting hotter, and I opened the fridge and stuck my head in, trying to pretend I was looking for something essential.
    “You’ll have to go say hi to Henry,” my mother continued, as I concentrated on making sure the expiration dates on the containers of milk were all facing out.
    There is only so long you can stand with your head in a refrigerator, and I had just reached that point. Plus, my ears were staring to get cold. “Mmm,” I said, closing the door and leaning my back against it.
    “And I suppose I should go and say hello to Ellen,” my mother continued. She sounded distinctly less excited about this thought, and I didn’t blame her. Henry’s mother had never seemed to like kids very much unless we were quiet and out of the way. While we had always dashed full-out into my house, sometimes mid-watergun fight,when we reached Henry’s door, we immediately settled down and got quiet, without even talking about it. Theirs was not a house you ever made blanket forts in. And without my mother saying anything outright, I had always gotten the sense she really hadn’t liked Mrs. Crosby very much.
    I pulled an apple from one of the bags on the counter, and my mother took it from me, washed it quickly, patted it dry, and then handed it back. “You and Henry used to be so close,” she said.
    I glanced through the kitchen window to the Crosbys’ house, mostly so my mother wouldn’t be able to see my expression. “I guess,” I said. “But that was a long time ago, Mom.”
    She started to fold up the bags, and I could have helped, but instead, I leaned against the kitchen counter and started to eat my apple. “Have you called Lucy yet?” she asked.
    I bit down hard on my apple, wondering why my mother always assumed she knew what was best for me. Why didn’t she just ask me if I wanted to call Lucy, for example? Which I absolutely didn’t, by the way. “No,” I said, trying to stop myself from rolling my eyes. “And I don’t think I’m going to.”
    She gave me a look that told me plainly that she thought this was a mistake as she put the paper bags away where we’d always kept them, under the sink. “Your childhood friends are the ones you should hang on to. They know you in a way that nobody else does.”
    After this morning’s encounter with Henry, I wasn’t convincedthis was a good thing. I watched as my mother crossed to the fridge with the summer calendar. The Lake Phoenix association made them every year, and one had been on the fridge up here for every summer that I could remember. They were designed to hang vertically, so that you could see all three months of the summer at once, each month flanked with pictures of smiling kids on sailboats, happy couples relaxing by the lake, and seniors taking in a sunrise. My mom attached it to the fridge with the mismatched magnets we’d always had and that I was suddenly glad the Murphys hadn’t taken, and I leaned closer to look at it, at all those empty squares that represented the days of summer ahead.
    This calendar had always been a way, especially this early in the season, to revel in how much time was still left in the summer. In years past, the summer had just seemed to stretch forever, so that by the time August rolled around, I’d had my fill of s’mores and popsicles and mosquito bites, and was actually looking forward to fall—to cooler weather and wearing tights and Halloween and Christmas.
    But as I stared at it now, and started to do the math, I got a panicky feeling in my chest, one that made it harder to breathe. On my birthday, three weeks ago, the doctors had told my dad that he had four months. Maybe more… but maybe less. And three weeks of those months had already passed.