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I’ve loved summer.

CHAPTER 6: BUT THIS SUMMER?
    It surely didn’t start out so well.
    So, I was down at the nursing home the other day, minding my own business, when …That might be a good way to begin a comedy routine, but it’s total crap if it’s an actual description of what you do every morning. Oh, yeah. I know a thing or two about nursing homes.
    For example, you know what isn’t pretty? Old ladies in their underwear. You know what I got to see lots of? Old ladies in their underwear.
    In fact, this summer, I saw no fewer than ten thousand old ladies in their underwear. That’s because one of my big stops on Gus’s ridiculous paper route was a nursing home. Ridiculous. Lots of times when I ran through there, delivering the State Journal , the old ladies would shout “Get me out of here!” Oftentimes, the old ladies were wearing old lady robes or morning dresses or whatever, and the clothing wasn’t tied right or it had slid down wrong, and I got to see their Old Lady Underwear with an Old Lady in it, which made me very sad.
    What also made me sad was the very fact that nursing homes even exist because they’re hot, stinky prisons for innocent old ladies who have lived too long (like that’s a crime).
    Not that all of them were old. One lady was actually sort of young. Whenever she saw me, her eyeballs popped out of her head, and she screamed and waved her arms and freaked out, apparently for good reason (more on that later if I can stay awake).
    Through email, Gus told me to never look the inmates in the eyes, which was easy for him because of his hair wad. Not for me. My hair is curly and can’t cover my eyes no matter how much I grow it and comb it down. ( Boing —the sound of my hair springing upward.)
    I biked so damn fast when I got out of that place. I would just want to run away and never go back but totally knew I’d be back the next day. Paper route! Jesus. Looked like a banner summer.
    Poor Gus was unhappy too. He wrote that hanging with his grandma was like hanging at the nursing home all day, all summer long. Then he said it smelled like tacos in Caracas, but he hadn’t yet found any tacos to eat. I answered back that I was bored and hot and tired, and I couldn’t stop eating, and Jerri was being weird, and Andrew hadn’t taken a shower since school got out.
    We’re losers was his reply. He also said, Tell Andrew he must clean himself.

CHAPTER 7: THEN SOMEONE MOVED INTO GUS’S HOUSE
    Like ten days after Gus left for Venezuela, the lights went back on, and someone in there ordered the newspaper, which meant I had to deliver a paper to Gus’s house every day.
    Aleah. But I didn’t know that yet.
    So I wasn’t happy at all with this development. See, there’s nothing fun about visiting your friend’s house when he’s not home because he’s in Venezuela with his dying grandma and he sends emails about taco smells and says we’re losers and his house just reminds you of how great it would be to go down to the rec room and sit down on one of the giant bean bag chairs they have down there and watch some movies and eat chips and shoot the bull and exchange some serious laughs instead of having to visit that house at the butt crack of dawn just to dump a newspaper in the screen door and then bike away to another fifteen houses that don’t contain your friend, including a big house full of crazy old ladies who are really prison inmates.
    Peter Yang’s house is on the route too, but it was clear things weren’t going well between us (although we hadn’t talked—I mean, that’s really it, we hadn’t talked). Plus, his house smells like fish, so I don’t like going in anyway.
    The people who moved into Gus’s house for the summer redecorated it immediately, which I felt was a gesture meant to rub my nose in the fact of Gus’s absence.
    The second morning I delivered the paper there, the curtains on the picture window were open, and I could see that all the photos that are usually