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It's summer.
The sun's beating down a friendly, not-too-armpit-sweaty temperature, Mr. Tastee is back in the neighborhood to hand out Blue Tornado bars, and cannonball training at the Wellsville community pool is in full swing.
In short? Perfection.
Pete Wrigley lives for the summer:
lounging in the ocean on gold inflatable innertubes shaped like the twelve signs of the Chinese Zodiac,
trying all thirty-nine flavors of crushed ice, including Arbuckle Avalanche, at Captain Scrummy's House of Slush,
skydiving from the roof in order to personally test out the Mushwortles' new trampoline.
But there's a darker side to those blissful months bookended by school and the sweet summer freedom they bring - the way it all just stops at September seems a cruel trick of nature.
And this year, for him - for his brother - there's something yet crueler tagging the end of the season.
---
It's an open secret that the thing people call "college" is really part of the International Adult Conspiracy - an old invention for kids who escaped their parents' many careful attacks of Personality Draught, and managed to keep their... well, their kid perspective on things. (The sole exception to this is Mervin Pinkiss of Niagara Falls, the world's youngest accountant at age nine and a half.)
In all actuality, college is a grown-up factory.
You may check in as a kid, but you don't check out.
His brother is going to William H. Taft University. He wonders if the only reason he picked the school is because it's named after a president most famous for getting stuck in a bathtub. That would be his reason for going there, at least.
Ever since March, before summer was a wink in anyone's eye, he's been coordinating careful plans, flowcharts, graphs, anything to bust his brother out of the punishment of a lifetime. He even already has a fake passport and a new name made up. And it wouldn't be terribly difficult for Sancho Hernandez to visit them from the top of Pico de Orizaba on holidays.
("But that's not it at all," is the reply he inevitably gets, every time he brings it up. "I want to go to college. Don't you get it?")
Clearly, Pete is his brother's only hope.
---
For now? The graduation party currently ongoing in the backyard is their parents' main concern.
His brother's friends, Ellen and Teddy and Bill and Magda and Dan, are all crowded by buffet tables and plastic chairs, all looking different degrees of elated and tired and annoyed. Bill cackles loudly when Teddy trips over the garden hose, somehow triggering the nozzle to soak Magda and her environmentally friendly Moroccan sundress. Dan has a selection of dinner rolls balanced perilously high on his paper plate.
Even Endless Mike Hellstrom, his brother's arch-nemesis, stops by. He can only stay for two slices of cake and a thick envelope containing a card and cash from their Aunt Denise.
There Pete sits, glumly chopping up the salisbury steak on his plate with a fork, as his brother talks loudly to his friends about their new schools. Sounding excited. Sounding glad. Glad to get away from Wellsville, away from their families.
Pete's eyes narrow.
Traitors.
"Taft University? And just how far is that from here?" asks Mrs. Heimlicher from next door. Mom glances at Dad.
"Oh, about four hours by car; wouldn't you say, Don?"
Four hours?
It might as well be a billion space miles away from Wellsville.
Pete's fist clenches tight around his fork, the plastic cracking between clammy freckled skin.
A simple, calm utterance:
"This. Is. War."
---
Nona F. Mecklenberg has fourteen different signatures on her latest cast, which is covered in stripes of fluorescent green and purple gauze.
The first to sign were:
James Mecklenberg, her Dad;
Dr. Janice Donovan, part-time dentist and full-time astronaut;
Pete Wrigley, the younger, part-time time traveler and soon-to-be full-time high school student;
Pete Wrigley, the elder, part-time worrier and soon-to-be full-time college student.
Pete is deciding his brother's signature is particularly traitorous-looking; all neat, looping red letters.
(Probably written in the blood of THE INNOCENT.)
"There's really only one way to keep him in Wellsville, you know," Nona says, alternately shoveling strawberry ice cream into her mouth and wiping pink ice cream goo from her chin. After all of these years, she's gotten pretty good at eating one-handed.
"Yeah?" Pete looks at her with interest. Her ideas about revenge are often better than his. "What?"
"We'll have to get him arrested."
A shadow passes over his face; a look that often means trouble or, at the very least, the aid of Krebosporin scrape cream for a month. He grins.
"Arrested, eh? I can work with that."
Nona smiles. The F stands for "Forte" this week.
---
Pete's new pet is a tiny venus fly trap called Gary, Jr.
Gary, Jr. doesn't like getting into trouble, but when the situation calls for it? He's the plant for the job. And to his credit, he makes no protests when Pete whispers to him one June night exactly what needs to happen.
His brother is arrested for plant neglect by the local police not long after.
---
He faxes pictures of Pete to the Mounties, "HAVE YOU SEEN ME?" above, and "DO NOT PERMIT TO LEAVE THE TOWN OF WELLSVILLE, WANTED ON SUSPICION" below, the words neatly bordering a portrait of a bewildered looking teenager. He doesn't bother to clarify exactly what his brother's wanted for on these posters. He figures it shouldn't matter. The guilty expression in the photo alone should do the trick.
The Canadian border's not that far from them, anyhow.
---
After that? It gets kind of - well, ridiculously - easy.
("Did you know it's illegal to have a llama in your bathtub in twelve different states? We live in one of 'em.")
---
Driver Sally Knorp locks Stu Benedict out of their apartment nine times that summer.
Stu keeps threatening to permanently relocate to Lurdnerville. He usually cries and pounds on their door with plates of vegetable kabobs for Sally, instead.
Pete only has enough time to briefly console Stu about how things will look up before disappearing with an apologetic grin and his school bus. It shows up in the Wrigleys' yard later that night, and his brother is arrested for not only stealing a vehicle, but one that's out of gas, at that.
---
Ellen Hickle cuts her hair to her chin and wears long skirts and starts carrying around books with words like "philosophical" and "existentialism" in the titles.
College prep, she says.
She works at the Craft Shack on nights and weekends, selling papier maché armadillos and good luck necklaces threaded with hemp and hammerhead shark teeth. She doesn't even know she's contributing to her best friend's latest arrest when she sleepily nods at Pete and Nona, barely glancing up from her book, selling them an unlucky Tahitian lizard's foot keychain.
Pete's imprisonment for reckless bicycling makes the Wellsville News that night.
---
Mom and Dad aren't pleased.
The bail they keep having to pay was supposed to go toward his brother's college fund.
(Arrest number twenty-three involves a spatula, a stage curtain, and the Peruvian mambo.)
Pete and Nona lean back in their plastic lawn chairs, toasting each other with clinking glasses of pineapple punch.
He adjusts his neon green sunglasses.
"This," he says, "will be the greatest summer ever."
---
"HARK!"
Pete sits up in his lawn chair, blinking awake, startled by the sound. The voice continues:
"Who sits there, drinking fruity-dooty summer punch and lounging in this very front yard?"
The shape looms, red and blue, in the foreground; the voice indignant. Pete nearly chokes on his pineapple punch when he recognizes it.
Something - someone - that's been missing from not only his life, but Wellsville for far too long.
"...Artie?"
---
In between macaroon recipes (you need to time them just right) and updates on how Clark the turtle's doing these days (he misses Zelda and F. Scott something terrible), the most non-adult adult lays out the truth, horrible and simple, about college:
It's no conspiracy.
It's part of life.
Pete listens in stunned silence as Artie relates his own college days.
---
He pays Pete's bail today. They stop, studying each other for a moment, before his brother breaks the tense moment by grinning widely and ruffling his hair.
"Hey."
Pete blinks at his brother. "Hey."
The summer wind is cool and soft against their bare arms as they walk back home.
Artie was right.
He and his brother might not have the rest of their lives to spend together. Because people grow. People change. They learn new things and meet new people and new turtles and new venus flytraps and new planets, and travel, and think, and grow and change some more.
But they have the rest of the summer. And maybe - just maybe - that will be enough time to figure things out.