The Lost Summer Read Online Free PDF Page A

won her horse shows.
    â€œEh.” She shrugged.
    We settled into a comfortable silence, listening to the girls around us talk and the birds sing in the trees. It was funny to know the ins and outs of each other’s lives without ever having laid eyes on most of the people or places we told each other about. Of course Katie Bell knew all about John. He and I had dated for four months that spring—in the pseudo way we dated at home, where “going out” meant hooking up with someone on a regular basis, with the occasional movie thrown in to make it official. But he’d never given me butterflies. Sometimes making out with him felt like kissing my brother —if I’d had a brother. By the end of the school year, I guess we’d both given up. When he just stopped calling, I had a panicky moment of fear that he was the love of my life, which reignited the flame for about a week. It promptly burned out again. I acted pissed when we broke up for good, because my friends made me feel like that’s how I was supposed to be, but honestly, it felt almost obligatory. And with camp on the horizon, I’d already resumed my fantasizing about Ransome. Katie Bell knew that too.
    Suddenly the sound of a dog barking rose above the talking, and the whole atmosphere in the clearing changed. Fred and Marjorie were coming, trailed by their yellow Lab, Butter. Fred was carrying the bugle and a torch he’d use to light the bonfire. We fell silent in anticipation, the only sound coming from the wind in the trees, until Butter ran and jumped onto a counselor named Caroline, and everyone laughed.
    Fred handed the torch to Marjorie and walked to the top of the fire pit, so that the lake was at his back. We watched expectantly as he raised the dented brass bugle to his lips. He puffed out his cheeks and launched into a familiar tune. We cheered as his face turned red and his chest expanded for each rolling refrain.
    At the end, a breathless Fred lowered the bugle. “Camp Southpoint’s fifty-seventh summer is now officially in session!” he called proudly to the tops of the pines.
    â€œWooo!” Girls whooped and yelled and clapped. Katie Bell put her fingers in her mouth and let out an ear-piercing whistle.
    Fred traded Marjorie the bugle for the torch and raised the orange flame high above his head. “As most of you know,” he said, smiling out at ninety-three campers and twenty-one counselors—his one hundred fourteen daughters for the summer, “we like to start our Southpoint summers with a ceremonial bonfire. Marjorie and I”—Fred glanced back at his wife, who smiled as she rubbed Butter’s grizzled old head—“expect this camp session to be the best yet. We hope and pray that it will be happy and healthy and full of fun. And we like to take this night to remember—and to show our first-year campers—what it is that makes this place so special: friendship.”
    Though Fred never asked—it wasn’t a religious camp— we bowed our heads as if we were at church. I suppose, in that moment, in a way we were. For me, this ground was more hallowed than any pew I’d ever been forced into.
    Fred continued. “Mother Nature, thank you for holding us in your embrace as we come together for another camp session. We ask that you keep us safe, shelter us from the storms, and lift us up in the spirit of friendship and family.”
    â€œAmen,” a few girls murmured reflexively under their breath.
    Silently, Fred took the torch and very slowly circled the firewood stacked like a teepee in the center of the clearing, touching the flame to the dry wood. As it crackled and hissed, gray smoke curled up into the clear sky. Katie Bell and I both held out our arms to compare goose bumps.
    When the bonfire had caught and was starting to burn strong, Fred threw the torch into the flames and went to stand again next to Marjorie. In her hand she held a