Sometime in Summer

by Katrina Leno

Genres: YA Romance

Synopsis

From critically acclaimed author Katrina Leno comes a tender love letter to books and summertime, with a touch of magic.

Anna Lucia Bell believes in luck: bad luck. Bad luck made her best friend stop talking to her. Bad luck caused her parents’ divorce. Bad luck is forcing her mother, Miriam, to sell the family’s beloved bookstore. And it is definitely bad luck that Anna seems to be the only person in the world Miriam is unable to recommend a life-changing book.

When Anna finds out that she and her mom are spending two months in a New England seaside town called Rockport, she expects a summer plagued with bad luck too. But Rockport has surprises in store for Anna, including a comet making its first appearance in over twenty years and two new—but familiar—friends.

In what will prove to be the most important summer of her life so far, Anna learns about love, herself, and the magic that an ordinary summer can bring.

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Release date: June 28, 2022

Publisher: Little, Brown Books for Young Readers

Print pages: 316

Sample

I really thought thirteen would be the year that changed my life.

People—grown-ups—put a lot of emphasis on thirteen.

It’s the first actual teen year, which I guess could have some weighty significance, but it’s also pretty universally acknowledged to be an unlucky number. Black cats. Broken mirrors. The number thirteen. All things people are taught to stay away from. I mean, half the buildings in Los Angeles don’t even have a floor thirteen. The elevator jumps from twelve to fourteen, like we’re all supposed to think that’s going to save us from something. Like luck—good luck or bad luck—can be tricked with something as easy as misnumbering the floors of a building.

Like we all don’t know that fourteen is really just thirteen in disguise.

Which is why, on the morning of my fourteenth birthday, I felt two things simultaneously: a light, floaty relief to no longer be thirteen, an age that had brought me nothing but the start of my period and the separation of my parents, and a slightly chest-crushing realization that fourteen was probably just going to be an extension of thirteen. Like the fourteenth floor in tall buildings, I was still as unlucky as I’d ever been.

My father, Everett Bell, didn’t believe in luck. He’d owned a series of black cats growing up, all with cutesy, twirly names that belied their true superstitious nature: Mitsy, Buttons, Periwinkle, Fluffy. (How many cats did your family go through? I’d asked him once, and smiling, he’d pretended to count on his fingers but didn’t actually answer the question.) He’d broken enough mirrors (and plates and cups and mugs) to fill a small garage with bad omens. And I regarded one of his biggest vices as always, always opening the umbrella indoors before plunging out the front door into whatever pathetic rainstorm LA had conjured up in an attempt to stay relevant with meteorologists.

My mother, Miriam Bell, was luck-neutral. If she spilled salt onto the kitchen table as we sat down to our breakfast of omelets or quiche, she might lick a finger and touch it to the jagged crystals, pressing it to her tongue so as not to contribute to food waste, but she had never once thrown it over her shoulder. She only sometimes remembered to say bless you after a sneeze. If I wasn’t looking where I was going and accidentally stepped underneath an open, leaning ladder, she might look up at it momentarily, as if contemplating its origin story, but then she’d shrug, and we’d continue walking as I’d mentally try to calculate how many extra years of bad luck I’d added to my tab.

Me, Anna Lucia Bell, I did believe in luck. It was bad luck that filled up the toilet bowl with blood the morning I’d turned thirteen, leaving me peering between my legs in a fuzzy, early-morning panic, knowing there was something normal about what I was seeing but unable to put a name to it until I walked into the kitchen and my mother saw my sheet-white face and took me by the hand and pulled me back down the hall to the bathroom and handed me a box of sanitary napkins. (And you’re sure it will stay where it’s supposed to stay? I’d asked, anxiety thrumming through my veins in a not-unfamiliar way. And Miriam had smiled and taken one out of its wrapping and said, That’s what these flaps are for. They call them wings. I know it’s silly. I’ll show you how to use a tampon tonight.)

Now, a year later, I knew better how to track the monthly bloodletting, how to watch my body for signs of its coming, how to lessen the chances that I’d be caught unprepared, scrambling around for something absorbent to shove into my underwear.

Now, a year later, I understood that the only difference between thirteen and fourteen is the acceptance that nothing is really different at all.

I opened my eyes to the same pale purple walls (a color I picked out when I was seven and so far had both gotten sick of and grown fond of again in a steady rhythm of every six months or so). I rolled over in the same bed. I had the same body, only an inch or so taller. I had the same brown hair. The same brown eyes plucked from my father’s head and replicated in mine. The same house, although Everett Bell had packed up (most of) his things and moved into a smaller house, a rental, just a few streets away. The same smell of pancakes—my birthday pancakes, with chocolate chips and bananas, an order that hadn’t changed since even before I’d picked out the paint color—wafting underneath my closed door, drifting into my dreams before I’d even opened my eyes.

Yes, fourteen was here, and so far, everything appeared exactly the same.

I rolled over in bed again and opened my eyes, staring straight up at the popcorn ceiling. A half dozen glow-in-the-dark stars still clung resolutely to its surface. Occasionally, one would fall on me as I was sleeping, and I would wake up in a panic, positive the spider war had started, swiping blindly at miniature enemies that had chosen me as their first human conquest.

I took a deep breath. How many breaths had I taken since midnight? How many breaths as a fourteen-year-old girl?

I grabbed my phone off the nightstand and typed:

How many breaths does the average person take in a year?

Eight and a half million.

I’d taken eight and a half million breaths as a thirteen-year-old, and pretty much every one of them had sucked.

In the kitchen, Miriam was wearing her apron, the red-and-white-striped one that made her look like some sort of vintage magazine advertisement for kitchen appliances. Underneath it, she wore a sleepshirt that fell to her knees and dingy slippers that had once been pink and were now a fuzzy sort of brown. Her hair was clipped up on the top of her head, and it was messy, like she’d slept on it. She had pancake batter on her cheek. My mother was an excellent cook, but she was a messy cook, and the food got absolutely everywhere, like on her cheek, splattered on the top of the stove like a crime scene, even once, memorably, when she’d forgotten to put the top on the food processor, on the ceiling and overhead light fixture. My father called her a walking kitchen disaster. Miriam called herself inventive with a spatula.

I sat down at the kitchen table, and only when she heard the chair legs scrape against the tile floor did she realize I was there—she gave a little squeal and ran over to hug me, probably getting pancake batter all over my pajamas. She smelled like cinnamon—her secret pancake ingredient—and she held the hug for a beat too long. When she pulled away, her eyes were misty, and I groaned before I could help myself.

“Mom—”

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” she said, fanning her face with two flattened hands. “I just—gosh, Anna, can’t you pause for one freaking second?”

“If you’re asking me to pause time, trust me, I’ve tried,” I said. I moved my hands urgently, flipping fingers against thumb in the way of the middle sister from Charmed, but nothing happened.

She caught both of my hands in both of hers and squeezed my fingers hard. Her eyes were big and wet, but to her credit, she didn’t actually start crying. Miriam was quick to tear up but excellent at not actually letting herself cry. I never cried. Everett Bell cried at basically every movie he saw, most TV shows, and certain commercials, like the ones about grandparents and life insurance and, sometimes, new cars.

“My beautiful fourteen-year-old,” she said.

“Mom, geez.”

“I’m so freaking proud to be your mom, kid.”

“You’re about to be so freaking proud of burning the pancakes.”

She jumped at that, dropped my hands, and flew back to the frying pan, flipping a pair of pretty black pancakes. “They’ll taste fine with syrup,” she called over her shoulder. I had a tiny sip of her coffee, decided I still hated coffee, and leaned back to wait for my first meal as a newly minted fourteen-year-old.

“Fourteen is a meaningless age,” I said, leaning on one elbow. “Thirteen is the first teen year. Fifteen you can be a lifeguard. Sixteen you can drive.”

“You want to be a lifeguard?”

“If I did, I’d have to wait a year.”

“You always get pouty on your birthday.”

“I do not.”

“You do. It usually burns off by lunchtime.”

She got two plates from the cabinet and transferred the pancakes from skillet to plate with a neat flick of her wrist. One of them landed on the counter. She picked it up with two fingers, then yelped and stuck them into her mouth.

It was June 10. School had been out for two weeks. In the fall, I’d be a freshman. I was one of the youngest in my grade. All my friends were turning fifteen in a few months. They could be lifeguards if they wanted.

Mom set the plates on the table and sat down across from me. She dumped a sizable amount of syrup on her pancakes, then handed me the bottle. “So you want to be a lifeguard,” she said.

“Not necessarily.”

She took a bite of pancake, chewed thoughtfully, then pointed her fork at me. “You can work in a nursery. That’s what fourteen-year-olds can do.”

“With babies?”

“Not that kind of nursery, silly. A flower nursery.”

“A flower nursery?”

“Like Dover Succulents.”

“You want me to get a job at Dover Succulents?”

“I don’t want you to do anything. Except what makes you happy.”

“I already have a job.”

“I know. And don’t get me wrong, Anna, I’d love it if you stayed at the bookstore forever. But maybe it’s time for a change, to branch out.…” She paused, smiled, and added, “Leaf the bookstore. Fertilize a new dream.”

“Okay, okay,” I said. “I get it.”

“I’m just saying. The world is your oyster.”

Bell’s Books. The bookstore my parents had owned since I was one, the bookstore I had been raised in, learning to walk next to bright-red copies of Beloved, cutting my teeth on a dingy paperback of Pride and Prejudice. I’d been helping them after school since I was eleven and could competently recommend One Hundred Years of Solitude to guests wanting something “a little magical,” and now that it was summer, I was there almost every day, sometimes working, sometimes wandering around, sometimes lying down in the back room, amid boxes of unsorted books, breathing in their particular smell of must and ink and pages.

Miriam always said: The right book at the right time can change your life.

Pretty much everyone in our small, touristy, beachside town, at one point or another, had had a book recommended to them by Miriam.

If they were smart, they bought it on the spot.

If they weren’t smart, my mother would somehow procure their address, wrap the book in brown paper, and have me drop it off at the post office.

We’d wait a few days, maybe a week, maybe two weeks, and then inevitably the door of Bell’s Books would open and we’d look up and there would be so-and-so, my mother’s latest victim, clutching said book to their chest with tears welling up in their eyes, sniffling about how they’d just finished it and walked all the way to 219 Olive Street to tell my mother that she was right and they should have listened to her in the first place.

Miriam always smiled. Always took their hand or put her palm on their shoulder. Always nodded and said, “We all take different times to arrive at the same conclusions.”

This was a very nice way of saying, “Yes, duh, you should have.”

I’d seen Miriam recommend Wuthering Heights to the leather-clad leader of a biker gang rolling through town. I’d seen that same biker come back a month later with a fresh Heathcliff tattoo and red-rimmed eyes from crying.

I’d seen Miriam hand a tattered copy of The Road to a young, new father with eyes wide and unfocused from lack of sleep. I’d witnessed him return two days later, holding his baby with a new sense of purpose, a new protectiveness and pride that honestly made me roll my eyes a little (somewhere he couldn’t see).

“I like the bookstore, though,” I said, and it was the truth, even though (and this was something I knew Miriam considered a personal failing on her part) I had never understood the appeal of books. I read them on occasion, of course, mostly when forced to by school, and I knew their summaries because Mom herself had a disconcerting habit of reading aloud, her clear, large voice filling up the store like a familiar audiobook. And not to mention the actual audiobooks, which she loaded her phone with, playing them in the car whenever we pulled out of the driveway, regardless of whether we were going a few minutes down the street or a few hours into the mountains. Snippets of books followed me around my life like ghosts. I could recite the first lines of every Virginia Woolf novel (not to mention the last lines and quite a few of the ones in the middle), though I’d read none of them myself.

Mom smiled sadly. She sort of played around with her fork for a second, then laid it on the side of her plate. “I have a few things to tell you,” she said in the exact same tone she used when she and Dad sat me down in the living room to tell me he was moving out and they were getting a capital-D-Divorce. My stomach turned uncomfortably, and I set my own fork down on my plate.

“Okay…”

“Your father and I have been discussing things—” (So far this was exactly like the capital-D-Divorce conversation, like, verbatim.) “And we’ve decided it’s time to close the bookstore.”

If I hadn’t already put my fork down, I would absolutely have dropped it now. I kind of wished I were still holding it, because the clatter it would have made when it hit my plate would’ve been a very dramatic punctuation to what she had just said. As it was, there was only silence, and the silence was incredibly unsatisfying.

“You’re whatting the what?” I asked.

“It’s time, my love. We’ll finish out the summer and close the doors at the end of August. It’s just not bringing in as much money as it used to, and frankly, with the overhead and the expenses, well… It’s barely breaking even.”

The bookstore. My childhood. My nursery (baby, not plants). The smell. The ink. The words. The cramped bathroom with the door you had to hold shut. The time I fell off a step stool and smashed my nose against a copy of Valley of the Dolls. Miriam’s book recommendations. Miriam’s insistence: The right book at the right time can change your life. All of it. Gone. Donezo. Finished.

“Anna? Can you say something?”

But I couldn’t say anything, because how could I say what I actually wanted to say, which was, You can’t close the bookstore, because you’ve never recommended a book to me; a book has never changed my life, and I need that, I need you to do that, I need that to happen!

“Well,” she continued, still smiling sadly, biting her lower lip in a way that meant, I knew, that her heart was breaking. “I’m sorry, Anna. But I have a bit of good news, too.”

I made myself look interested; I made myself fix an expression on my face that I thought might give off some small sense of hope. I made myself say: “Okay?”

“We’re going to go away for a little bit. A nice vacation. Just the two of us. Well, your father will come for a week or so, but mostly just us two. What do you think?”

“A vacation? To where?”

“The East Coast. My aunt’s cottage, by the sea. Remember?”

I’d been there once when I was six. My great-aunt had died just a few months ago, but at her insistence, there had been no funeral.

“I used to spend every summer at that cottage,” Mom continued. “And she’s left it to me. In her will. I just thought… what a nice opportunity. To get away from everything.”

“And the bookstore?”

“Your father will look after it. When he comes to join us, we’ll have Luke take over for a week. I think this will be good for us. It’s been a tumultuous year for you, Anna. And for me. It might be nice to have a change of pace.”

A change of pace. Right now, my pace was: reeling. What might my pace be on the East Coast?

“When do we leave?” I asked.

“Tomorrow night. Red-eye.”

I nodded. I felt… I didn’t know how I felt. A little numb. A little sad. A little anxious. A little crampy.

“Thanks for breakfast, Mom,” I said, because honestly, I didn’t know what else to say.

She stabbed a piece of pancake with her fork. I did the same. We toasted across the table, clicking forks, pancake against pancake, a thin line of syrup dripping slowly to the table below.

“Happy birthday, Anna.”

“I really thought thirteen would be the year that changed my life.”

“Every year changes your life,” she replied solemnly. “Although it can be hard to see, at first. Hindsight is twenty-twenty. I think you’re an exceptional kid.”

We took our bites at the same time, and the chewing provided a welcome bit of silence.

Then—a warm dampness between my upper thighs.

Bad luck or biology or a little bit of both—I got up to find a tampon.

There were a few things about my mother that did not make sense.

The book thing was one of them, sure: her ability to sell Shakespeare to an uninterested middle schooler or Judy Blume to a distracted father.

But there were other things, too.

Her eyes, the impossible shade of lavender at dawn.

The way she knew—before opening it, before even touching it—whether a used book would have an inscription on the inside cover or title page. It was her true passion: finding books addressed to other people. A copy of Little Women to Jenny, love Mom. A copy of Beowulf to Mikey, who loves monsters. A copy of The Secret History to Amanda, I hope this book changes your life like it changed mine.

She loved finding these books that had once belonged to other people. The really good ones she kept on a special shelf in her bedroom. The others she’d resell in Bell’s Books.

Bell’s Books.

Another thing about my mother that did not make sense.

It was as much an extension of her as I was, so much so that I often referred to it as my sibling and didn’t think I was that far off from the truth.

A bookstore that, while fairly unassuming and generic from the outside, held as many impossibilities as its owner.

In this small town, people had been known to go into Bell’s Books on a Monday and emerge on a Wednesday evening, newly versed in Chaucer and speaking only in Middle English for a full month straight.

In this small town, people who had frequented Bell’s Books every week for their entire lives suddenly found themselves in an aisle of the store they had never before seen, an aisle with bookcases that stretched upward into a ceiling so far away that it could hardly be seen through the clouds that gathered at the topmost shelves.

In this small town, my mother moved like a shadow in the corner of your eye, sticking close to the edges of your periphery, her nose often hidden behind the cover of a book so she didn’t have to answer direct questions like “Is this store bigger on the inside than it has any right to be according to the laws of physics?” and “I swear last week you didn’t have an American history section, but I just got lost for an hour in a labyrinth of books about the Civil War—what gives?”

Because she generally liked books more than people, my mother rarely walked from point A to point B without one, some broken hardcover or dog-eared paperback she’d probably read already, some of them three, four, five times, enough so that she could recite them without the burden of pages.

“But I like the smell,” she’d say, and breathe deeply: the scent of paper, of ink, of dozens of years being passed from hand to hand to hand until they ended up in our store.

Which was why it was impossible to me, impossible, that we’d sell the bookstore.

Which was why I sat on the toilet, my pancakes getting cold, my stomach cramping uncomfortably, and cried. Even though I never cried, I cried now, balling up toilet paper and burying my eyes in a big pillow of it, letting the tears flow down my cheeks.

I know, I know—I’ve already admitted that I don’t really like books.

And my mother loved me in the fierce, powerful way of mothers everywhere, since the dawn of time, but I also knew without a smidge of doubt: that was the one thing she would change about me. She would wiggle her nose and I’d suddenly be Matilda, carrying around stacks of books, eating words like honey, letting them drip down my chin.

But my not liking books didn’t mean I wanted the bookstore to close. No, no, I wanted the exact opposite. I wanted to live in the bookstore. I wanted to never, ever leave it.

Trust me. I wished I liked books. I wished I was more like my mother in basically every way. I wished I had her lavender eyes or her thick, long hair or her one-dimpled cheek (the left), just something to mark me as hers. But alas, I was my father’s child through and through: lank, frizzy hair, unextraordinary nonlavender eyes, flat chest, and undimpled cheeks.

A knock at the bathroom door. “Sweetie,” she said, her voice gentle and soothing. “Are you okay in there?”

“I’m bleeding to death,” I said, which was true.

“You sound sort of sniffly,” she replied. “Why don’t you come out here and finish your pancakes?”

“I don’t want to sell the bookstore.”

“I know, honey.”

“Can’t we do something?”

“It’s just time to let it go. Your father’s doing so well with his new business, he doesn’t have as much time as he used to. And you know the bookstore was always my thing, anyway.”

My father’s new business was a tattoo parlor he’d opened up in town. His waiting list had quickly filled up to a year, with tons of famous people scrambling for an appointment.. . .