Free Farewell Summer by Ray Bradbury Page A

candles. Fourteen years to be snuffed out and a goal set toward one more as good or better. Lisabell seemed happy. She was floating down the great river of Time and enjoying the trip, blissful with her journeying. The happiness of the insane was in her eye and hand.
    She exhaled a great breath, the smell of a summer apple.
    The candles snuffed out.
    The boys and girls crowded to the cake as Lisabell picked up a great silver knife. The sun glinted off its edge in flashes that seared the eyes. She cut the cake and pushed the slice with the knife and slipped it onto a plate. This plate she picked up and held with two hands. The cake was white and soft and sweet-looking. Everyone stared at it. Old man Quartermain grinned like an idiot. Bleak smiled sadly.
    â€˜Who shall I give the first piece to?’ Lisabell cried.
    She deliberated so long it seemed she must be putting a part of herself into the soft color and spun sugar of the frosting.
    She took two slow steps forward. She was not smiling now. Her face was gravely serious. She held out the cake upon the plate and handed it to Douglas.
    She stood before Doug and moved her face so close to his that he could feel her breath on his cheeks.
    Douglas, startled, jumped back.
    Shocked, Lisabell opened her eyes as she cried softly a word he could not at first hear.
    â€˜Coward,’ she cried. ‘And not only that,’ she added. ‘Scaredy-cat!’
    â€˜Don’t listen, Doug,’ said Tom.
    â€˜Yeah, you don’t have to take that,’ said Charlie.
    Douglas moved back another step, blinking.
    Douglas held the plate in his hands and the children stood around him. He did not see Quartermain wink at Bleak and jab him with his elbow. He saw only Lisabell’s face. It was a face with snow in it, with cherries, and water and grass, and it was a face like this late afternoon. It was a face that looked into him. He felt as if, somehow, she had touched him, here, there, upon the eyelids, the ears, the nose. He shivered. He took a bite of cake.
    â€˜Well,’ said Lisabell. ‘Got nothing to say? If you’re scared down here, I bet you’re even more scared up there.’ She pointed upward, toward the far edge of theravine. ‘Tonight,’ she said, ‘we’re all going to be there. I bet you won’t even show up.’
    Doug looked from her up to the top of the ravine and there stood the haunted house where, in the daytime, the boys sometimes gathered, but where they never dared to go at night.
    â€˜Well,’ said Lisabell. ‘What are you waiting for? Will you be there or not?’
    â€˜Doug,’ said Tom. ‘You don’t have to take that. Give her what for, Doug.’
    Doug looked from Lisabell’s face up to the heights of the ravine and again to the haunted house.
    The cake melted in Douglas’s mouth. Between looking at the house and trying to decide, with the cake in his mouth, sugar melting on his tongue, he didn’t know what to do. His heart was beating wildly and his face was a confusion of blood.
    â€˜I’ll …’ he blurted.
    â€˜You’ll what?’ taunted Lisabell.
    â€˜â€¦ be there,’ he said.
    â€˜Thatta boy, Doug,’ said Tom.
    â€˜Don’t let her fool you,’ said Bo.
    But Doug turned away from his friends.
    Suddenly a memory came to him. Years ago, he had killed a butterfly on a bush, smashing it with a stick, for no reason at all, other than it seemed like the thing to do. Glancing up, he had seen his grandfather, like a framed picture, startled, on the porch above him.Douglas dropped the stick and picked up the shattered flakes of butterfly, the bright pieces of sun and grass. He tried to fit it back together again and breathe a spell of life into it. But at last, crying, he said, ‘I’m sorry.’
    And then Grandpa had spoken, saying, ‘Remember, always, everything moves.’ Thinking of the butterfly, he was reminded of