My Secret Summer

Chapter 1

The Styles’ were forbidden from the start.

But that’s not why they’re important.

I remember the day they moved in like it was yesterday. I stood in our front yard, watching as my mother and my older sister, Tiffany, planted tulips in the garden.

Coming around the corner, you could hear the sound of their battered sedan before you saw it. Parked in front of the slightly rickety house across the street, two adults (the parents I assumed) and five kids, all around my sister and I’s age, climbed out. Like a clown car, I thought.

My mother stood with her hands on her hips and sighed. “I hoped we could have avoided this. There’s one in every neighborhood.”

Tiff, 8 years old at the time, stood in the driveway, already done with my mother’s gardening plans of the day.  “What do you mean?” she asked.

“The family that never mows their lawn. The ones that have toys scattered everywhere. The people that lower real estate values. There they are. Right over there,” my mother said with a disapproving look on her face.

I was squatted above the garden, patting the dirt with my plastic shovel. I couldn’t keep my eyes of Mr. Styles, who had just lifted a curly brown-haired boy from the back of the car.

“They look nice,” I said with a hopeful smile. There was silence after that, and my mom looked down at me.

“Nice is not the point, Gabriella. You’re seven years old; you need to understand what’s important. Good god, just look at them! Five kids, I almost pity them.”

My mom never stopped talking about the Styles’ after that, complaining about their dirty pool, the bikes scattered all along the driveway, or the dead patchy weeds that filled the place of grass. Whatever it was, I learned to tune her out. Because what she didn’t know, what my sister didn’t know, what nobody knew, was that I had a secret. One they would surely disapprove of.

I watched the Styles’ all of the time.

Over the years, the Styles’ proved to be exactly what my mother said they’d be. Christmas lights that stayed up until Easter, a backyard packed with a trampoline, monkey bars, and a pool filled with leaves and dirt. It was clear from the start that we were not to play with the Styles’.

“They’re indecent,” my mother would say.

In the ten years the Styles’ lived next door, 5 children became 8: 5 boys and 3 girls.

James, Andrea, Harry, Addy, Jason, Dan, Ty, and Sarah.

Mom would release an impatient breath each time she looked out the window, shake her head, and pull out the vacuum cleaner. It was the lullaby of my childhood, the sound of my mother running the vacuum across our beige living room carpet.

My mother was one of those cleaning freaks. It’s hard to understand the meaning of clean if you haven’t met my mother. It’s her way of calming down, and she didn’t dare leave window streaks or a fleck of dust on the shelves. In a lot of ways, you could say she was the stereotypical mother. Except for a few tiny details.

My mother, a single parent with two kids, would never admit parenting was hard for her. I never met my dad, he had walked out on my mother when my sister was one, and my mother was newly pregnant with me. Despite this, our lives were clean and complete. My sister and I attended a private school, Perry. We were a part of the country club in our small Connecticut town and our lives could not have been any more opposite of the Styles’.  

Maybe that’s why I couldn’t take my eyes off that clustered, mad house next door, but watching the Styles’ was a break from my ordinary life.

The window in my room opened up to a flat section of the roof. Each night I climbed out. Over the years, it not only became my spot to think, it became my spot to dream. From my hidden perch, I’d peer out at the yard trying to locate Addy, figure out Ty’s latest escapade, or see what outrageous outfit Andrea was wearing. The Styles’ were my bedtime story, long before I ever thought I’d be part of the story myself.