The Lost Summer Read Online Free

“I’ll be your counselor this summer.”
    Ruby pursed her lips. Fidgeting with a loop on her shorts, she stared at me, wide-eyed and suspicious.
    A tanned freckled hand landed on Ruby’s shoulder. “Ruby’s a little shy,” her mother explained. “But you’re excited about your first summer at camp, aren’t you, sweetie?” she said to Ruby.
    Ruby looked up at her mother and nodded slowly.
    â€œShe just needs some time to adjust,” Mrs. Standish whispered.
    I smiled in understanding. “Would you like me to show you the cabin?” I asked Ruby.
    She nodded and, when I reached for her hand, didn’t resist. Glancing back at her parents only once, she followed me into the simple cabin that we’d both call home for the next five weeks.
    â€œIt smells funny.” Ruby wrinkled her nose at the smell of wood, dirt, and dust that, try as we might, could never be completely swept out.
    For me, the worn plank floors, buckling cubbyholes, sagging bunk beds, and screened windows were comforting. Still, remembering back to my first summer, when Sally McDougal had shown me this same cabin, I could see how foreign and spare it must have looked to Ruby.
    I laughed at her pinched expression. “You’ll get used to it,” I promised.
    I settled Ruby into the bunk next to mine and directed her parents to the Bath, where campers were supposed to take their toiletries. As I watched them walk down the hill, Ruby holding a hand on either side, I had to shield my eyes from the sun. It was directly overhead now, and still no Katie Bell. My eyes swept from the lake, just visible through a stand of trees to the right of the cabins, to a knot of girls hugging each other as they jumped up and down, to two young campers flying down the hill toward the footbridge that led to—
    â€œRansome.” The sound of a deep male voice stopped my heart. I held my breath as I watched a tan, wiry frame carrying a trunk swing around to reveal his face. Ransome. My stomach fluttered.
    Abe always sent a few Brownstone counselors over on opening day to help carry trunks. We pretended to resent the implication that we couldn’t handle them on our own, but in the oppressive July heat, we were secretly more than happy to watch the boys sweat it out. I’d play damsel in distress any day if it meant seeing Ransome.
    The hottest counselors were like Greek gods to us, and our crushes were no less fervent for the fact that they would never be fulfilled. This over-the-top ego boost was probably the only reason Brownies fought tooth and nail over the honor of lugging our eighty-pound trunks in hundred-degree weather and taking giggly screaming girls for inner-tube rides.
    Technically, Ransome was only three years and two grades older than I was, but in my mind, he was light-years more mature and equally out of reach. Still, unlike some lucky girls, my improbable crush had not faded over the years. It might have even gotten worse. Watching from Cabin One’s porch, my heart beat like a bongo drum in my chest as the sweat beaded below Ransome’s close-cropped, copper-brown hair and dripped down his forehead and over the tip of his straight, noble nose. What was cuter than a guy willing to haul a ten-year-old’s trunk full of too many T-shirts and a year’s supply of socks? I wondered.
    I was lost in my favorite dream sequence (all hazy light and slow motion), in which Ransome turns, finally recognizes the goddess of a woman I have become— Aphrodite to his Adonis—tosses the trunk like it weighs no more than a feather, and runs to sweep me off my flip-flops and into his arms, when—
    â€œHel!” My thoughts were interrupted again. “Hel!”
    Before I even turned to see her hanging half out of her parents’ car window, waving her arms and beaming, I knew Katie Bell’s voice. I launched off the porch steps toward the fire engine–red truck, from