The First Magnificent Summer - Softcover

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

R.L. Toalson grew up running wild through corn rows and cow-grazing fields and recording true and wildly exaggerated false tales to entertain her friends, family members, and anyone who would listen. She still runs (literally) wild through the streets of her city and spends most of her days recording true (if a little exaggerated) and false tales to entertain anyone who will listen. She lives in San Antonio, Texas, with her one brilliant husband, six delightful children, and two arrogant cats. She’s the author of The Colors of the Rain, which won the Arnold Adoff Poetry Honor Award for New Voices in 2020; The Woods, which received a starred review from Booklist; and the highly acclaimed The First Magnificent Summer. Visit her at RachelToalson.com.

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July 15, 7:39 p.m.

July 15, 7:39 p.m.

That clock on Memaw’s wall must have magnets made for my eyes, because I couldn’t stop looking at the swirling black hands and Roman numeral notches. Six o’clock. Six thirty. Seven o’clock.

Two hours since Mom dropped us off. Two and a half. Three.

More than enough time. She was supposed to call when she got home, so… why hadn’t she called?

My chest burned like the grass fire Jack accidentally started in Memaw’s backyard last summer, and rubbing it didn’t make it feel any less fiery. (We managed to get the grass fire out before Mom and Memaw got home, thank goodness. But the soles of our shoes were never the same after that.) My leg vibrated under the table, unusual for me. I am a Stillness Queen. I can be still as stagnant water, as a hammock on a windless day, as the suffocating air every time Coach Finley makes us run to the T (my least favorite thing to do when school’s in session).

Must be my nerves. Or maybe the quiet at the table. Or all the thoughts piling up around me.

I’m not supposed to open my journal at supper, but tonight I did, just to have a place for all the nervous energy to go.

“You don’t want your spaghetti?” Memaw nodded toward my bowl, which I hadn’t really touched. Another thing that’s unlike me: not eating Memaw’s spaghetti. It’s the perfect blend of salt and tang, better even than Mom’s homemade sauce. Mom says Memaw salts everything to death. I guess I like everything salted to death, then.

I didn’t answer Memaw, but she kept right on talking, like maybe she was as nervous as I was. Am I nervous? I haven’t reached a definitive conclusion yet, but I think yes, maybe I am, yeah, probably.

“Nerves, is it?” Memaw glanced at Jack. His brown eyes studied the table. His mud-colored hair curled around his ears like it does every summer. Mom doesn’t waste money on haircuts when we’re on break. I know why that’s important, but I have to admit, it makes Jack look a little like a shaggy dog.

Maggie pushed her orange bowl forward, and the bottom of it scraped the wood in a way that made me wince. (A nails on chalkboard kind of sound.) “I finished mine,” she said.

“Want some more?” Memaw said. Her eyes gleamed. I think Memaw gets a lot of joy out of feeding people. Or maybe it’s just making people happy in any way she can. Mom says she spoils us, coming to visit with bags full of kettle-cooked chips and cream horns and new crossword puzzles for Jack and composition books for me and coloring books for Maggie. I just think she’s the best grandma ever. (And I have four of them.)

Maggie nodded. “Yes please?” Her words arched up like she was asking a question.

“Maybe Tori will let you have hers.” Memaw eyed me with that one raised eyebrow, her dark eyes blinking questions.

I shook my head and stuffed a forkful of the salty spaghetti in my mouth. “Not sharing,” I said around the noodles. The salt was divine. A burst of intense flavor hit my tongue, and it made me wonder why I’d waited so long to eat.

Jack stuffed a bite in his mouth too.

Memaw said, “You bring all your notebooks with you, Tori?”

Do I ever go anywhere without my notebooks? I didn’t ask this question out loud because (1) it’s not exactly polite, and (2) Memaw already knows the answer. She’s the biggest supporter of my budding writing career, and without her I might not have volumes and volumes of my own stories and diaries. (I prefer to call them journals; people—Jack and Maggie—like to steal juicy diaries, but no one’s interested in boring journals.)

I also didn’t tell Memaw that I’ve decided to go by Victoria this summer. I’ve been Tori for twelve years of my life, and I’m ready for a change. A more grown-up name. Something to prove I’m not a little girl anymore. I’m still in a training bra, while all my friends have become women and moved up to the regular bra section, but at least I will have a new name. I mean, it’s an old name given twelve years ago, but it’s new for me. And grown-up. And womanly.

It’s not a conversation for the supper table, so I let it go.

“All two of them,” I said instead.

Memaw blinked at me like she’d forgotten her question. I do this all the time—I get tangled in my head and let a question sit way too long without an answer, and then the person forgets what they even asked. I was about to remind her she’d asked if I’d brought all my journals when she said, “Only two?” Her black eyebrows shot up even farther. “That enough for a whole thirty days?” She seemed to be saying something more underneath the words. Something like Thirty days with your father? Thirty days away from home? Thirty days of no routines and unpredictability and anxiety-inducing newness?

I try exceptionally hard to hide my weirdness from the world. (Mom says I’m quirky, not weird, but she’s my mom. She’s supposed to think I’m ordinary. Brilliant, but ordinary.) But Memaw is like one of those thermometers you wish you didn’t have in Texas, the ones that you can’t help but notice as you’re walking out the gym door for another run to the stop sign a whole sweaty one-point-six miles away from the school, the ones that practically shout, “It’s one hundred one degrees out here, get back inside, you moron!”

She always sees right through me to the temperature inside. Sometimes it’s kind of a relief. It’s exhausting putting on a show all the time. Pretending you’re perfectly fine when you’re not.

Sometimes, though, it’s a great big pain.

“I brought some books to read too.” My voice sounded a little squeaky, like even I didn’t believe I’d brought enough simple pleasures to distract me from less-than-ideal circumstances.

Okay, so I like routine and predictability and things that are old, not things that are new. And maybe I have a teensy little problem with anxiety that’s hardly worth mentioning.

I shrugged, because, well, words are hard, and so is the truth.

Memaw stood up and disappeared into her room. Jack shot me a Look, but I couldn’t decode it. I can’t read many of Jack’s Looks anymore, not like I used to. Middle school changed things for us in a weird and sometimes annoying way, but I don’t like to think about that. So I don’t. I let him have his football friends and band buddies and lunchroom chewing chums and leave him well enough alone, like he told me to do on my first day of sixth grade, when he was a big seventh grader on campus and I mistakenly thought that didn’t mean anything special.

Memaw reappeared and plopped down a pile of composition books. “That enough?” she said. I spread them out. Two purple ones (Memaw’s favorite color), one turquoise one (my favorite color), and three yellow ones (no one’s favorite color but bright and hopeful all the same). Six notebooks for thirty days, not counting the two I brought.

“Yeah. Sure,” I said. “Thanks.”

I wondered, briefly, how she’d found the composition books so fast. Her room...