Bummer Summer
This is installment #15 in my several-part series, Shit I Wrote a While Ago. This story is the last McCaig from 4th grade, and I believe it to have been largely inspired by the 10 Kids, No Pets books that I was so fond of reading at the time. From 1996.
Bummer Summer
Chapter 1: School’s Out
Jamie Haspen looked out her window at the bees buzzing in the flowers. And the deer ticks in the bushes, the ants in the dirt, and the butterflies on the kickball field. Also the widow spider on the ceiling.
“Jamie?”
“What?” she screamed.
The class giggled.
“Jamie, have you been paying attention?” Ms. Clark, her math teacher, asked.
“No,” Jamie admitted.
“Well, does anyone else know the answer?”
Audrey Duback, who sat in the very middle of the first row, where she was most likely to be seen, raised her hand.
“Audrey?” Ms. Clark called.
“The answer,” she said, shooting Jamie a smirk, “is 42.”
“Very good, Audrey,” Ms. Clark said.
Then the bell rang and the students poured out of the class and onto the sidewalk. Jamie ran to meet her friends, Jeni, Maggie, Bryon, Sam, and Camri.
“I love May,” Maggie said dreamily. “All the flowers.”
“And bugs,” Jamie buttered.
“And swimming,” said Camri.
“And bugs.”
“The end of school,” Jeni continued.
“Bugs…”
“Nature hikes,” Sam said.
“Bugs.”
“Ice cream,” Bryon pointed out.
“Bu-” Jamie began. “Ice cream?”
“Yeah…”
“But most of all… NO SCHOOL!!!” Jeni cheered.
And bugs…
Chapter 2: Margaret and the Flower War
Maggie loved flowers. She really did. They were magic, like little jewels. No one else did. If Maggie would say, “Look how beautiful those tulips are!” Camri would shrug, Jeni would smile - sort of, and Jamie would run away screaming, “More bugs!” She was obsessed with bugs.
But all those things were pushed out of Maggie’s head when she learned the awful news: Someone was going to clear out the gardens for a shopping mall! This is an outrage, Maggie thought.
“Guys!” she yelled, running out of the school.
“What?” Jeni asked. “Are we going to have to stay in school longer?”
“No!” Maggie yelled. “It’s the flowers! The chemical plant is going to tear down the gardens to build a shopping mall!” [ed. note: Oh my God, that is so exactly how a child would imagine the acting force behind this scenario.]
“That’s nice,” Camri said. She hadn’t even looked up from the music magazine she was reading.
“Yeah,” Jamie added. “Less bugs.” She scratched her arms. Two red mosquito bites were swelling.
“You know, that’ll make them swell worse,” Sam told Jamie, as if reading her mind.
“Well, if no one’s gonna help me, I’ll just have to do it myself!”
“OK.” No one seemed to care.
Maggie got right to work. She made signs that said: Save the Flowers! and Flowers are living, too! Then she stuck them in the gardens. A big construction guy came and pulled them out.
“Go away, kid,” he bellowed.
“No!” Maggie yelled. “These flowers were planted here to stay here! If you take the flowers, you have to take me!”
It wasn’t until later that she realized what her dreaded words would mean.
Chapter 3: Cameron and the Bad Joke
Camri liked mostly everything about spring. Except for cleaning. Every spring, her mom would totally clean out the house. Then they would have a huge garage sale. Somehow, every winter they managed to accumulate about a million things.
Sam liked to play jokes. He had played a few on Camri already. His mom would just say, “Now Sammy, be nice to your sister.” That was the problem about their mom: She would never punish Sam. Their family didn’t believe in grounding.
One day Camri was pulling loose nails out of boards in the treehouse. Sam had an idea. He pulled nail out of one of the boards. He knew Camri was listening to a baseball game on headphones. When she pulled out the nail, she would fall through the hole into the flowerbed under the tree.
Well, it didn’t quite work out that way. Camri pulled the nail, all right, but then she fell, twisting her leg on the way down. When she did hit the ground, her leg hit the bricks lining the flower bed.
“Owww,” she moaned. Then she saw Sam holding a hammer and nail. She tried to get up to run after him, but her leg wouldn’t support her.
“MOOOOOOM!!!!” she screamed.
Her mom ran out. Camri was rushed to the hospital, and Sam was grounded for the rest of the summer. On the way to the hospital, even though she was in pain, Camri was smiling.
Chapter 4: Jennifer and the End of Summer
Jeni was totally depressed by the end of summer. It was almost over. But a lot of interesting things had happened: Camri broke her leg, Maggie slept in a garden for two months, Sam finally got grounded, Jamie’s obsession with bugs got worse. She had Lyme disease, got stung a total of 64 times, got 72 mosquito bites, and had head lice for 6 weeks. [ed. note: Is Jamie… homeless?] Pretty rotten. Now sumer was almost over. Jeni had gone to the beach, but that was it. Not at all what she’d expected. Oh, well.
The End
This was an exercise in telling a story from the points of views of several different characters. I remember very vividly my plan to tell this story of four kids’ summers, four different ways. Obviously that didn’t translate at all, since I got too lazy to actually plan stories for all the kids, or to flesh out what few stories I did plan. Man, who allows a child to sleep in a garden for two months? A garden also, apparently, populated by construction workers and evil chemical plant employees? C-
