The Hidden Summer by Gin Phillips

walked up these stairs more recently than I thought. I see the same signs we saw in the aquarium and on the crape myrtle. Only this time it’s not painted—it’s a chalk drawing. A pale green arrow, lavender circles, and sky-blue dashes. We stop and stare at it, and Lydia runs her finger over the arrow. The tip of her finger comes away green.
    “Nell, wouldn’t chalk wash off when it rains?” asks Lydia.
    “Yeah,” I say. “I think.”
    “And it rained last Friday, right? So somebody drew this since then?”
    “Or maybe it’s a special kind of chalk,” I say, not believing it, but not wanting Lydia to start kickboxing again. “A kind that lasts for years.”
    “Right,” she says. “Sure.”
    I do not want anyone else to be here. I want this to be our own private kingdom. So I block out the Coke can and the chalk signs and refuse to think about them anymore. My mind is very good at blocking out unpleasant things.

    When I get home that afternoon, Mom is sitting on the back patio—a little concrete square, but “patio” sounds better—in her light blue lounge chair. She’s got one knee bent, and she’s hunched over her toes with a bottle of nail polish in one hand.
    “Bring out the other chair,” she says. “I’ll do yours, too.”
    Lying in the sun is one of the things my mother really likes to do. Painting her nails while the sun beats down on her is maybe her favorite thing in the world. I don’t particularly like to sit in the sun—it’s too hot—and I don’t really care about doing my nails.
    “That sounds fun,” I say, and go to pull the other chair from under the stairway.
    If I didn’t say that—if I said something like, “I don’t really feel like it”—she’d say, “Okay.” But the way she’d say it, clipped and pinched, would make it obvious that it’s not okay. That I’ve hurt her feelings. Mom can be very sensitive when it comes to getting her feelings hurt. Lionel uses that word about her a lot, and he says it in a sort of complimentary way, like artists are sensitive and geniuses are sensitive.
    “Left foot first,” Mom says, when I have my chair arranged. I stick my ankle toward her, and she props my foot on her knee.
    “Relax,” she says. “Lie down.”
    There’s a part of me that would like to tell her about my day. I’d like to try to explain how the sky looked like a blue ceiling over the stone walls and how some of the birds’ nests had little bits of colored cloth and string—red, yellow, and even a flash of purple—woven into them. I’d like to tell her what it’s like to roll down a hill so fast that I can’t feel my arms and legs anymore. I have these impulses occasionally—the need to talk and talk until she finally understands me. The need to describe what’s inside my head and hope that if I get the words right, she’ll finally know me and like me and really
see
me. I don’t say anything, though. Partly that’s because I know if I confess about the golf course, I’ll probably never get to set foot there again.
    But the bigger reason is that if half of me wants to tell Mom about what I’ve found, the other half of me wants to never mention a word about anything I’ve seen in the last week. That part of me feels like I should put every single sight and sound and memory into a box, dig a hole, and make sure no one can ever touch any of it. Because it’s mine.
    I hand over a lot of things when I’m home. Mom tells me she doesn’t like a shirt I want to buy, and I hand it over. Not the shirt itself, but my wish for that shirt. I want to watch one television show and she wants to watch another one—I hand that over, too. It’s easier that way. I even hand over my toenails when she asks. But I think sometimes you need to put a thing in a box—even if the box is inside your head—and store it away for yourself.
    When our toenails are done, Mom lies down, and it’s quiet for a while. She hums under her breath a little.
    “Did you have