Page 83 of The Summers of Us

I gulped. “What would your definition be?”

“Something that brings light to every day.”

“Have you found your sunlight yet?” I asked.

“Yeah.”

I tried to read his face. The carousel lights didn’t help me detect anything in his expression.

“Have you?” he asked.

I shrugged. There was a lot in my life that I could consider my sunlight, but what if sunlight actually wasn’t for me?

Maybe life was easier if Everett and I were moonlight instead—soft, bright, and reliable, like how the moon churned the tides.

Soon, it was our turn to board. The carousel horses we rode last time were occupied, but this was a night for new memories, even if they were cast in the shadows of the past. I pulled myself onto a green and blue horse. Everett was on the yellow and white one next to me. The carousel belonged in the night, its glow a perfect contrast to the indigo sky.

The butterflies in my stomach shouted from somewhere within:Hold his hand!

Who was I to clip a butterfly’s wings? This was a new night. I was happening to my own life.I wish for a rollercoaster.I could do this.

I waited for the carousel to start dancing. The twinkling music sang of days and nights of endless wonder. Music was a form of time travel. The adolescent jingle sent me back to my early adolescence: my temple pressed to the cold bar, thirteen-year-old Quinn making sense of Everett—his hair, his beauty mark, his boyish charm.

Seventeen-year-old Quinn knew the score. Seventeen-year-old Quinn was different.

I did not walk life afraid.

I held my hand out in the space between us. My arm weighed two tons, but my chest was even heavier. Everett looked between my hand and my face, his eyebrow furrowed, until he finally took my hand in his.

There was everything before this, then everything after. The last and only time we’d held hands was at the aquarium—a guiding hand from the whale—but this was something else entirely. This had weight. This was real, two people holding hands because the space between them was too great. Because people with history like ours should have held hands the first time they rode this carousel. My first tinge of rosy cheeks—my first taste of romance—should have been enough for me, but life was a sticky thing sometimes.

I looked away from him to catch a glimpse of myself in the oval mirror. I couldn’t keep my smile from splitting across my face, but why stop it?I wish for a rollercoaster. I leaned my head against the bar, looking back at seventeen-year-old Everett Bishop.

Sometimes that was all I knew how to do.

I was carrying a bag of cotton candyso large that it bounced off my kneecaps as I walked. There was no better place to wander aimlessly than here. We walked through the sounds and colors until something spoke to us. This time around, we were headed to a vendor with rows of freshly spun cotton candy. The woman inside must have finished a new batch because the pink vanilla scent pulled us in all the way from the back of the bumper cars.

Everett and I got the thought at the same time, both of us hungry from arcade games and two rounds of bumper cars. We needed something even sweeter than the Boardwalk. He took my hand and dragged us to the opening in a huge glass structure.

“You want some?” I asked Everett, a nod to the day we met.

He looked at the bag with disgust, like he did then. “I’d rather not.”

“Are you kidding?” I fit half a clump in my mouth and talked as it dissolved on my tongue. “Fresh cotton candy is one of the greatest pleasures in life. If you’ve never tasted this, you’ve never tasted summer.”

“I don’t know that I want to taste a season.”

“It’s your loss; summer happens to be the best tasting season.”

Everett laughed at me. “But don’t coconuts taste like summer?”

I wiped my sticky hands on my shorts. “Notmysummer.”

Life was stickyandsweet. There was peace in the balance.

“Notyoursummer?” His eyebrows raised. “That’s not how it works.”

“Here, please have some summer.” I turned to him with pink cotton pinched between two fingers, waving it in front of his face. “Open wide!”

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