The Summer of June

Jamie Sumner

• Publisher: Atheneum Books for Young Readers
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9781534486034
• eBook ISBN: 9781534486041

From the acclaimed author of Tune It Out and Roll with It comes a “needed, hopeful” (Booklist) middle grade book about a young girl who sets out to overcome her anxiety over the course of one life-changing summer.

Twelve-year-old June Delancey is kicking summer off with a bang. She shaves her head and sets two goals: she will beat her anxiety and be the lion she knows she can be, instead of the mouse everyone sees. And she and her single mama will own their power as fierce, independent females.

With the help of Homer Juarez, the poetry-citing soccer star who believes in June even when she doesn’t believe in herself, she starts a secret library garden and hatches a plan to make her dreams come true. But when her anxiety becomes too much, everything begins to fall apart. It’s going to take more than a haircut and some flowers to set things right. It’s going to take courage and friends and watermelon pie. Forget second chances. This is the summer of new beginnings.

1

Behold

I AM A WONDER TO behold.

At least, that’s what Mom said when she saw the clumps of hair on the bathroom floor. She took one look at my bald head and my bare feet itching under all that shed weight and announced, “Junebug, you are a wonder to behold.” And then she pried the pink Bic razor from my fingers and took it to her own head. That’s the thing about Mom. She is a woman of action.

Her dark waves fell and mixed with my blond ones, and altogether we made an unruly mess. But it was a mess on the floor and not on our heads, so that was that.

She was not a wonder to behold. Honestly.

All that hair had been hiding bumps and divots and a scalp so white it was almost gray. She scratched at it with her glittery purple nails, exploring the whole craggy moonscape.

“Mom, you look sensational,” I said, our brown eyes hooking on each other in the mirror. It was not true. Sometimes you have to tell a little lie to call a bigger truth into being. This summer I am summoning all our truths.

Truth #1: I will not be the girl who pulls out her own hair because she’s running from the anxious thoughts in her head.

Truth #2: Mom and I will own our power as fierce, independent females.

Just because her boyfriend, Keith, dumped her last week does not mean Mom has to turn into the lonesome librarian. He wasn’t even supposed to be her boyfriend in the first place. He stopped by to try to sell us insurance and stayed three years! We can be happy without him. Together. On our own.

Here’s Truth #3 (the secret truth): I am tired of being the nervous mouse girl who is scared all the time and runs from everything. And I’m sick of waiting for the right things to happen. This summer, I am going to be a lion. And I will make happily ever after come to me.

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Ten minutes later:

I stand in front of my dresser mirror and stare at my “melon,” as Mom calls it. I hate my hair. Mom lied. I am no wonder. I look like a visitor from another planet. I feel like that all the time, but now my outsides match my insides and I’m not okay with it. I turn my head left and then right, but the view’s no better. I’m no lion. I am a pale white thing in a pale white room. I turn away from the mirror before I have to watch myself cry.

My head itches to be itched, but I tuck my fingers into my palms. That’s what got me in trouble in the first place. First the itch starts on the inside, from all the prickly thoughts, and then it spreads outside like a creeping vine until I can feel it all over me, like poison ivy. So I scratch. But once I start, I can’t stop. And then the scratching isn’t enough. So I pull. I yank and yank until, with a tiny satisfying ping of pain, a hair or five come away. For a sweet second, I’m numb. The worries go quiet. I can stop rocking in place. I can be still, inside and out.

What nobody gets is that hair-pulling is satisfying with a capital S. Each strand is a pull-chain in the tub. Yank on it and a little of the worry leaks out. It keeps me from overflowing… or it did. I knock on my bare head with my fist, once, gently, like I’m knocking on a door. Hello, anybody home? This was a colossal mistake. Why did I think that because my hair is gone the itchy worry would be too? What am I going to do when it starts and I’ve got nothing to use to stop it? Can you drown in your own thoughts?

I pace, following the swirls in the grain of the wood floor, back and forth, back and forth. There is a patch of morning light in the shape of a diamond. I stop. Crouch. Stick my hand over it so the diamond is on my palm. It is warm as a hug. I wish I could carry it with me, that warm patch of light.

“Junebug, you better be dressed and on the curb in two minutes!” Mom yells from the kitchen just as the toaster oven dings. I can smell the cinnamon and butter from here. Mom makes an excellent croissant French toast, which most of the time we eat in plastic bags filled with syrup in the car. We are always late. It’s the most dependable thing about us.

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When I settle onto the cracked leather of Thelma’s interior, the tag from my T-shirt slides up, touching a spot on my neck I did not know existed. I flinch. I did not anticipate the tag issue. Without my hair in the way, it is a lightning rod, a buzzer to my senses like that game Operation, where you have to pull out the organs with tiny tweezers. I tug at my collar while Thelma coughs and rumbles and sighs. When Mom curses her whole existence, Thelma finally vrooms to life. Thelma’s our Ford. She used to be red, we think, but now she’s mostly rust—the color of a rotten orange. But we love her. Seven years ago, she got us all the way from New Orleans to Nashville. Thelma is the means of all our great escapes.

Ants go marching up and down my back. No, it’s just the tag. I wriggle my shoulders up and down, up and down. My therapist, Gina, likes to say my mind has a mind of its own. It fixates on the strangest and most unreasonable things. I worry about the tag. I worry that I will keep worrying about the tag. I worry that it worries me. It is the worry-go-round, a hamster on a wheel.

I try my favorite car trick to stop the thoughts. I crack my window and let the wind blow straight in my eyes until they fill with tears and the maple trees blur, their green leaves waving like peacock feathers. I would like to be a peacock—so bright and beautiful that people are drawn to me.

Mom rolls her own window all the way down too. She finds a Ray LaMontagne song on the radio. I don’t know how she can seem so easy in herself, with her hand out the window riding the waves of the wind. She is the yin to my yang.

Nick, Mr. Ex #2, was a musician, and he sounded just like Ray on the radio. He is how we ended up in Nashville in the first place. He lasted the longest, ages four to eight in “June time,” but he was also the worst. He was the slowest to realize that nobody can stick with Mom without getting me in the bargain. When he finally showed himself for what he was, Mom kicked him to the curb. But it was too late for me. Not all shadows dissolve in the sunshine. He’s been my shadow for years. But I don’t like to talk about that.

We’re only a five-minute drive to the Columbia Public Library, where Mom works. It’s just south of the teeny tiny downtown of Franklin that has been our home these past seven years just outside Nashville. At ten till ten on this Saturday morning, we pull into the library’s parking lot, more potholes than road, and bump along to the employee slots under the row of crab-apple trees around back. I tip the plastic baggie into my mouth and suck out the last few drops of syrup.

“Ick, June.” Mom shudders.

I smack my lips. “Don’t yuck my yum.”

Like bank robbers, we kick Thelma’s doors open and launch ourselves out, bald heads and all, into the damp morning heat. Summer, here we come.

2

Juveniles

THE LIBRARY DOES NOT KNOW it’s the first day of summer vacation and therefore smells as it always does, like circulated air and dust and lemony wood polish. I love it.

But I do not love Mrs. Tandy’s angry red mouth and clickety fingernails on the high wooden checkout counter as she watches the automatic doors swish closed behind us. Mrs. Tandy is in charge of the whole library. She darts between the juvenile and teen and DVD sections so she can sneak up on you like the world’s worst hall monitor if you so much as tip something out of place. If she catches you, she sucks air between her teeth so it makes a wet whistling sound and barks, “May I help you?” in a way that leaves only one answer: “No.” She is a bird of prey. And right now she has got her beady eyes aimed at our bald heads.

The Tandy, as I like to call her, clicks her fingernails. “Ms. Delancey, may I see you for a moment?”

“Wait right here, baby girl. I’ll be back in a hot second,” Mom says, and winks at me. Her big brown eyes look even bigger without all that hair. I wonder if mine do too. No way I’m finding a mirror to check. I’ve had enough of my own reflection today. I run a hand over my scalp as Mom walks away, her skirt swishing and sandals jingling. Mom should be on a beach somewhere with me, not following the Tandy into the cave-dark sorting room.

The library is technically not open yet, so I have the whole lobby to myself. I wander over to the recent returns cart. It’s my favorite shelf-that-is-not-a-shelf in the whole library. These are the books that are so newly brought back, they haven’t been sorted yet. You can find a Rachael Ray cookbook leaning against a John Grisham paperback that’s propping up six Llama Llama books. Sometimes there is an atlas of ancient Greece or a leather-bound encyclopedia, covering letters X, Y, Z, and it makes me want to meet the person who skipped Google and chose that instead. What was their impetus? “Impetus: a moving force; impulse; stimulus.” I learned that from a Webster’s thesaurus found on this very shelf last November. There was a lot of time to fill over Thanksgiving break.

Unlike all the other shelves in the library that are already sorted, this one has no order. It’s the place you go when you don’t know what you want. For me, that’s almost always. I once found a Dr. Seuss book about two towns fighting over which side to butter your bread on, top or bottom. I took it home to experiment. I toasted two big slices of Mom’s sourdough and tried it both ways. It turns out I am a butter-side-down girl. All thanks to Dr. Seuss and the recent returns.

Today’s selection is slim. I sift through Watership Down, Computer Programming for Dummies, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, and a how-to knitting book. If they all came from the same person, that would be someone I would want to know.

I shiver under the air-conditioning and pull my T-shirt up higher on my neck. It’s so much colder without hair. But then the tag starts to bother me again and I tug it down. But that feels wrong too and I can’t stop my fingers from yanking at the neck of my shirt, tugging it all out of shape. As Mom comes swishing out of the sorting cave, I grab the knitting book and tuck it under my arm to give my hands something to do. She has an ugly scarf with big brown-and-orange swirls all over it wrapped around her head. She looks like a grandma ready for bingo. Ick.

“What is that?” she asks, pointing to my knitting book.

“What is that?” I ask, pointing to her head.

She sighs and steers me by the elbow up the stairs to the teen section, where she is the head librarian. It is like day versus night up here compared to downstairs. She has strung fairy lights so she doesn’t have to turn on the overhead fluorescents that make your eyeballs ache. And in the center of the room there is a big round rug that’s designed to look like you’re staring into the bottom of a well. I call it the wishing rug.

She also keeps extra chargers for iPads and iPhones and laptops and whatever else you could need in her desk, and she lets anyone borrow them anytime they want. And she has read every YA fantasy/thriller/rom-com in existence. Basically, she is the coolest librarian there ever was, and she’s not even a real librarian. She never went to school for it or anything, but the Tandy’s so prickly, people don’t tend to hang around for long. When the last librarian quit four years ago, Mom’s friend Sharika got her the job, and she’s been here ever since.

“The Tandy made you put that on, didn’t she?” I say the minute we get to her desk.

Mom sighs. “Don’t call her that, and yes, she did. She said I needed to look more professional.”

We study her orange-and-brown head in the reflection of her computer monitor. She starts laughing first, and so I don’t feel so bad joining in.

“Oh, heaven help me, that is awful,” she says, ripping off the scarf and shoving it in the bottom drawer of her desk. She scratches at her neck, which makes me scratch.

“Honey, no.”

She sets a cool hand on my neck, capturing my fingers. “I like our new look. We’re a team, remember? The Tandy can deal with it.”

I sniff. “I thought you said we couldn’t call her that.”

“Well, some rules are worth breaking.”

She leans in and gives me a kiss right on the top of my head. It’s strange, being kissed there on my bare skin. It sends shivers down...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Epigraph
• Chapter 1: Behold
• Chapter 2: Juveniles
• Chapter 3: Seedlings
• Chapter 4: Shrinks
• Chapter 5: Accidental Friends
• Chapter 6: Friends Forever
• Chapter 7: The Hair Experience
• Chapter 8: Technical Difficulties
• Chapter 9: The ABCs of Gardening
• Chapter 10: Watermelon Pie
• Chapter 11: Dragonfly Wings
• Chapter 12: Independence Day
• Chapter 13: The Wilderness
• Chapter 14: Poetry and Music
• Chapter 15: Little Crowne Bakery
• Chapter 16: Sticks and Stones
• Chapter 17: The Tandy
• Chapter 18: How to Play Chess
• Chapter 19: Goodbyes and Garden Parties
• Author’s Note
• Acknowledgments
• About the Author
• Copyright