It's Not Summer without You Read Online Free PDF

she didn’t want everybody gawking at her when she didn’t look her best. Dead people looked fake, she explained. Like they were made of wax. I reminded myself that the person inside the coffin wasn’t Susannah, that it didn’t matter what she looked like because she was already gone.
    When it was over, after we’d said the Lord’s Prayer, we formed our processional, everybody taking their turn to offer condolences. I felt strangely adult there, standing with my mother and my brother. Mr. Fisher leaned down and gave me a stiff hug, his eyes wet. He shook Steven’s hand and when he hugged my mother, she whispered something in his ear and he nodded.
    When I hugged Jeremiah, we were both crying so hard, we were holding each other up. His shoulders kept shaking.
    When I hugged Conrad, I wanted to say something, to comfort him. Something better than “I’m sorry.” But it was over so quick, there wasn’t any time to say more than that. I had a whole line of people behind me, all waiting to pay their condolences too.
    The cemetery wasn’t very far. My heels kept sticking in the ground. It must have rained the day before. Before they lowered Susannah into the wet ground, Conrad and Jeremiah both put a white rose on top of the coffin, and then the rest of us added more flowers. I picked a pink peony. Someone sang a hymn. When it was over, Jeremiah didn’t move. He stood right where her grave was going to be, and he cried. It was my mother who went to him. She took him by the hand, and she spoke to him softly.
    Back at Susannah’s house, Jeremiah and Steven and I slipped away to Jeremiah’s bedroom. We sat on his bed in our fancy clothes. “Where’s Conrad?” I said. I hadn’t forgotten my vow to stay by his side, but he was making it hard, the way he kept disappearing.
    “Let’s leave him alone for a while,” Jeremiah said. “Are you guys hungry?”
    I was, but I didn’t want to say so. “Are you?”
    “Yeah, sort of. There’s food downstairs.” His voice lingered on the word “downstairs.” I knew he didn’t want to go down there and face all those people, have to see the pity in their eyes. How sad , they’d say, look at those two young boys she left behind . His friends hadn’t come to the house; they’d left right after the burial. It was all adults down there.
    “I’ll go,” I offered.
    “Thanks,” he said gratefully.
    I got up and shut the door behind me. In the hallway I stopped to look at their family portraits. They were matted and framed in black, all the same kind of frame. In one picture, Conrad was wearing a bow tie and he was missing his front teeth. In another, Jeremiah was eight or nine and he had on the Red Sox cap he refused to take off for, like, a whole summer. He said it was a lucky hat; he wore it every day for three months. Every couple of weeks, Susannah would wash it and then put it back in his room while he slept.
    Downstairs the adults were milling around, drinking coffee and talking in hushed voices. My mother stood at the buffet table, cutting cake for strangers. They were strangers to me, anyway. I wondered if she knew them, if they knew who she was to Susannah, how she was her best friend, how they’d spent every summer together for almost their whole lives.
    I grabbed two plates and my mother helped me load them up. “Are you guys all right upstairs?” she asked me, putting a wedge of blue cheese on the plate.
    I nodded and slid it right back off. “Jeremiah doesn’t like blue cheese,” I told her. Then I took a handful of water crackers and a cluster of green grapes. “Have you seen Conrad?”
    “I think he’s in the basement,” she said. Rearranging the cheese plate, she added, “Why don’t you go check on him and bring him a plate? I’ll take this one up to the boys.”
    “Okay.” I picked up the plate and crossed the dining room just as Jeremiah and Steven came downstairs. I stood there and watched Jeremiah stop and talk to people, letting them