Jamie Sumner - The Summer of June

Author of Roll With It

Jamie Sumner

The Summer of June

One Kids Trash

Roll with It

Tune It Out

ATHENEUM BOOKS FOR YOUNG READERS

An imprint of Simon & Schuster Childrens Publishing Division

1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, New York 10020

www.SimonandSchuster.com

This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the authors imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Text 2022 by Jamie Sumner

Jacket illustration 2022 by Elysia Case

Jacket design by Karyn Lee 2022 by Simon & Schuster, Inc.

All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.

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Interior design by Karyn Lee

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Sumner, Jamie, author.

Title: The summer of June / Jamie Sumner.

Description: First edition. | New York : Atheneum Books for Young Readers, [2022] | Audience: Ages 10 and Up. | Summary: Eleven-year-old June is determined to beat her anxiety and become the lion she knows she is, instead of the mouse everyone sees, and with the help of Homer Juarez, the poetry-reciting soccer star, she starts a secret library garden and hatches a plan to make her dreams come true.

Identifiers: LCCN 2021036500 | ISBN 9781534486027 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781534486041 (ebook)

Subjects: CYAC: Anxiety disordersFiction. | Mothers and daughtersFiction. | FriendshipFiction. | GardeningFiction.

Classification: LCC PZ7.1.S8545 Su 2022 | DDC [Fic]dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021036500

For my mom

my first and best librarian

But there is a third thing you must do

you must do something to make the world more beautiful.

BARBARA COONEY, Miss Rumphius

1 Behold

I AM A WONDER TO behold.

At least, thats what Mom said when she saw the clumps of hair on the bathroom floor. She took one look at my bald head and my bare feet itching under all that shed weight and announced, Junebug, you are a wonder to behold. And then she pried the pink Bic razor from my fingers and took it to her own head. Thats the thing about Mom. She is a woman of action.

Her dark waves fell and mixed with my blond ones, and altogether we made an unruly mess. But it was a mess on the floor and not on our heads, so that was that.

She was not a wonder to behold. Honestly.

All that hair had been hiding bumps and divots and a scalp so white it was almost gray. She scratched at it with her glittery purple nails, exploring the whole craggy moonscape.

Mom, you look sensational, I said, our brown eyes hooking on each other in the mirror. It was not true. Sometimes you have to tell a little lie to call a bigger truth into being. This summer I am summoning all our truths.

Truth #1: I will not be the girl who pulls out her own hair because shes running from the anxious thoughts in her head.

Truth #2: Mom and I will own our power as fierce, independent females.

Just because her boyfriend, Keith, dumped her last week does not mean Mom has to turn into the lonesome librarian. He wasnt even supposed to be her boyfriend in the first place. He stopped by to try to sell us insurance and stayed three years! We can be happy without him. Together. On our own.

Heres Truth #3 (the secret truth): I am tired of being the nervous mouse girl who is scared all the time and runs from everything. And Im sick of waiting for the right things to happen. This summer, I am going to be a lion. And I will make happily ever after come to me.

Ten minutes later:

I stand in front of my dresser mirror and stare at my melon, as Mom calls it. I hate my hair. Mom lied. I am no wonder. I look like a visitor from another planet. I feel like that all the time, but now my outsides match my insides and Im not okay with it. I turn my head left and then right, but the views no better. Im no lion. I am a pale white thing in a pale white room. I turn away from the mirror before I have to watch myself cry.

My head itches to be itched, but I tuck my fingers into my palms. Thats what got me in trouble in the first place. First the itch starts on the inside, from all the prickly thoughts, and then it spreads outside like a creeping vine until I can feel it all over me, like poison ivy. So I scratch. But once I start, I cant stop. And then the scratching isnt enough. So I pull. I yank and yank until, with a tiny satisfying ping of pain, a hair or five come away. For a sweet second, Im numb. The worries go quiet. I can stop rocking in place. I can be still, inside and out.

What nobody gets is that hair-pulling is satisfying with a capital S. Each strand is a pull-chain in the tub. Yank on it and a little of the worry leaks out. It keeps me from overflowing or it did. I knock on my bare head with my fist, once, gently, like Im knocking on a door. Hello, anybody home? This was a colossal mistake. Why did I think that because my hair is gone the itchy worry would be too? What am I going to do when it starts and Ive got nothing to use to stop it? Can you drown in your own thoughts?

I pace, following the swirls in the grain of the wood floor, back and forth, back and forth. There is a patch of morning light in the shape of a diamond. I stop. Crouch. Stick my hand over it so the diamond is on my palm. It is warm as a hug. I wish I could carry it with me, that warm patch of light.

Junebug, you better be dressed and on the curb in two minutes! Mom yells from the kitchen just as the toaster oven dings. I can smell the cinnamon and butter from here. Mom makes an excellent croissant French toast, which most of the time we eat in plastic bags filled with syrup in the car. We are always late. Its the most dependable thing about us.

When I settle onto the cracked leather of Thelmas interior, the tag from my T-shirt slides up, touching a spot on my neck I did not know existed. I flinch. I did not anticipate the tag issue. Without my hair in the way, it is a lightning rod, a buzzer to my senses like that game Operation, where you have to pull out the organs with tiny tweezers. I tug at my collar while Thelma coughs and rumbles and sighs. When Mom curses her whole existence, Thelma finally vrooms to life. Thelmas our Ford. She used to be red, we think, but now shes mostly rustthe color of a rotten orange. But we love her. Seven years ago, she got us all the way from New Orleans to Nashville. Thelma is the means of all our great escapes.