Ethan had never liked NBC’s nightly newscast. John Cameron Swayze had a funny way of talking where he pursed his lips but never properly opened his mouth and ended up sounding incurably congested. He’d always sort of reminded Ethan of an unhappy fish. Back home, his family always watched See It Now on CBS, even though Edward R. Murrow’s ratings had been dropping since ’54. The Harper household was very anti-Swayze.
Uncle Robert, on the other hand, was NBC’s biggest fan. He reclined on the couch every evening with a pack of Camel cigarettes and smiled in self-satisfaction as the logo flashed on the screen and the white letters spelling out Camel News Caravan switched to John Cameron Swayze’s fishy face. Ethan and Aunt Cara would sit dutifully in the living room, each staring at different points on the wall and pretending to care about the monotonous news report as cigarette smoke strutted boisterously about the room and invaded their noses and eyes.
After dinner at the beginning of Ethan’s third week in Ellison, the three eased into their seats and watched the broadcast begin. The prerecorded intro came on as usual, reminding households across the nation to sit back, relax, and watch the news that had unfolded over the past day. Uncle Robert muttered the show’s tagline in time with the recording, a cigarette tucked into the corner of his mouth. He rearranged himself in his chair.
The image on the screen became one of Swayze leaning against his desk with a map of the world as his backdrop. “Ladies and gentlemen, good evening to you,” he began in his nasally voice. Ethan suppressed a groan. “Controversy has risen in the city of Montgomery, Alabama, after a fifteen-year-old Negro schoolgirl from Hope Hull was arrested this afternoon on the Q7 bus route. The Negro girl refused to give up her seat for a white woman, becoming hostile when asked by the driver. This story is reported for us now by David Brinkley, NBC News, Montgomery.”
Ethan frowned, leaning forward in his seat as Brinkley, the other, less frequently aired anchor of Camel News Caravan, appeared on the screen. He opened with a short greeting, then the picture cut to a slightly blurry school photograph of a smiling, dark-skinned girl. Footage of Montgomery buses rolled across the screen, and Brinkley spoke.
“In Montgomery, colored passengers must sit at the back of the vehicle, leaving the front seats open for white passengers. Today, a child defied this law. When asked by the driver to relinquish her seat to a white woman who had just boarded, she refused, insisting that the woman could stand. Law enforcement was called to the scene, and the girl was taken into custody.”
Swayze returned, his lips pursed. “This incident follows in the wake of the Supreme Court decision in the Brown v. Board of Education case last year . . .”
Ethan had stopped listening, gripped by another image of the girl on the screen, this one of her in handcuffs. She was dwarfed by the heavyset white policeman as he pulled her toward the squad car, but her eyes were narrow, defiant. She stared directly into the camera with a resolve that seemed too expansive for her small frame.
Colored passengers must sit at the back of the vehicle. Brinkley’s words spiraled through Ethan’s mind. He thought of Arcadia, where no one would think twice about where he sat, and imagined a bus split cleanly in half by a color line. And Montgomery wasn’t far away—how easily could it have been him instead of this girl, his same age, with skin not so different from his own?
As Ethan gaped at the screen, Aunt Cara cleared her throat. “Robert,” she said, “maybe we could watch something else.”
At this, Ethan tuned back into the program just in time to see the Montgomery police chief appear on the screen. But before the officer could speak, Uncle Robert had pushed himself out of his seat and turned the dial to another channel. Now it was on CBS, where Murrow was conducting an interview with Groucho Marx. Usually, the Person to Person program was Ethan’s favorite; tonight, for once, he just wanted Swayze to come back on and tell him more.
“Uncle Robert,” he ventured, “would you change it back?”
“Quiet,” his uncle snapped. “I’m listening.” He stared at the set so hard that sweat broke out on his forehead. His cigarette laid forgotten in an ashtray on the coffee table.
The sky was falling.
At least, that’s how it sounded. Something was exploding outside Ethan’s window like a million tiny shards of broken glass crashing against the pavement. He rolled over in bed with a groan, pulling a pillow over his face.
“Go away!” he growled.
The thundering stopped for a moment, as if considering his command. When it started up again, it was accompanied by a wind-chime voice.
“Wake up, Ethan Charlie Harper! It’s Saturday morning, so I know you don’t have work. Our invincible summer isn’t gonna wait!”
Ethan opened one eye at a time and drew the pillow under his chin. He knew who would be standing outside his window, grinning a grin of lopsided pearly whites. Still, when he gathered the strength to turn over onto his side, the sight of Juniper Jones, her freckled nose pressed against the glass, gave him a start.
“Are you awake?” she asked, her voice muffled. “Come on, hurry!”
Squinting against the morning sunlight, Ethan stretched an arm toward the window. When he opened it, Juniper stuck her head through immediately. “Come on, Ethan! Come on, come on, come on!”
“Juniper, what are you doing outside my window at seven o’clock in the morning?”
She rolled her eyes. “I said I’d see you soon, remember? For our first adventure? So would you please hurry up?”
“Some warning would have been nice.” Ethan yawned. “I’m still in my pajamas, so can you cool it for a minute while I go get dressed?”
Juniper blew out an exaggerated sigh. “Fi-ine,” she grumbled, leaning dutifully against the windowsill.
Ethan ruffled through the closet for a T-shirt and a pair of jeans as Juniper began to sing to herself outside. He could still hear her—“Someone’s in the kitchen with Di-NAH!”—when he stepped into the pink-tiled bathroom and closed the door behind him. There, he dressed quickly and splashed water on his face, then stared into the mirror as he smoothed back his hair with one hand.
He was really doing this, it seemed—going on an adventure with Juniper Jones. He was skeptical, even a little suspicious, but at least on the surface she seemed to be friendly. If she was like the others in town, he doubted she could have hidden it so well.
When he figured he had left Juniper waiting long enough, Ethan returned to his room with his pajamas rolled under his arm. He opened the door slowly and nearly fell to the floor in surprise—Juniper Jones had climbed through his window and was now lying on his unmade bed as if she owned it, her nose buried in a recent issue of Adventure Comics.
“There you are!” she cried when he stepped inside, sitting up and tossing the comic onto the bedside table. “I was worried you’d drowned in the toilet.”
Ethan rolled his eyes. “Keep it down, wouldya? My aunt and uncle are still asleep, and I don’t think they’d be too cool with finding a girl in my bed.”
Juniper blinked innocently. “Why not?”
“Because—are you really—never mind.”
“O-kay, Ethan,” Juniper said, getting to her feet. Today, she had traded her usual skirt for a cuffed pair of jeans, and the colorful plaid print of her collared blouse matched the ribbon that was looped through her ponytail. As Ethan dropped his pajamas on the foot of his bed, she held out her hand.
“Come on, city boy,” she teased, tugging him toward the window. “I’m gonna show you just how great this town can be.”
Juniper had parked her baby-blue bike a little ways down a path behind Aunt Cara’s house that Ethan hadn’t even known existed. “There are forest paths all over town,” Juniper explained as they walked. “We’re outdoorsy folk, here in Ellison.”
Her bike was leaned against a tree, a picnic basket swinging from its handlebars. She righted it, then bit her lip and studied Ethan through squinted eyes.
“Well, seeing as you don’t have a bike, you can just stand on my pegs. The ride’s not too far.”
Ethan eyed the metal pegs skeptically. “Where are we going, anyway?”
“The lake,” was all she said, her smile furtive.
Right. His dad had told him stories about growing up on the lake, swimming and fishing and boating in the summer months, and trying unsuccessfully to ice skate after the odd winter snowstorm, but since arriving in Ellison, no one had so much as mentioned it to him. He’d begun to wonder if it had just dried up years ago.
“This path loops around through the trees and ends up by the water,” Juniper was saying, mounting the bike and placing one foot against a pedal. “Come on, Ethan. Hop on.”
Frowning dubiously, Ethan stepped forward and placed one foot, then the other, on the pegs, wrapping his fingers gently around Juniper’s bony shoulders. The bike tilted a little bit.
“All right,” June said, a mischievous smile stretching across her face. “Let’s hightail it.”
She lifted her other foot to its pedal and took off down the road.
Ethan had intended to keep his grip light, but as Juniper took off at a breakneck pace, he found himself holding on for dear life. Hot air blew her hair into his face and brought tears to his eyes. When he looked up, the trees were bent into natural mosaics and he thought that he must not be in Ellison anymore. Juniper laughed that wind-chime laugh, and it brought up a carbonated happiness in his stomach until he was laughing too. The sound spewed out of him hesitantly at first, then grew until his entire body shook.
When Juniper screeched to a halt at the edge of the lake, Ethan tumbled from the bike and rolled, cackling, into the grass. Juniper stood over him, looking childishly pleased.
“Glad you’re having fun,” she said. “But you’ve got to get off the ground. That was only the beginning.”
Ethan climbed to his feet and brushed loose dirt from the seat of his pants, taking in the scene around him. The lake stretched out ahead of them in a bean-like shape, so large he could hardly see the other end. They were on a small beach, but the rest of the lake seemed to be surrounded by trees.
“Nice, huh?” Juniper asked. Ethan nodded, trailing her alongside the glittering water and toward a shingled gray boathouse at the edge of the trees. At the door, she handed him the picnic basket and rapped lightly against the wood.
“That you, June?” a gruff voice asked from within.
“Who else?” Juniper rocked onto her toes, and a moment later, the door swung open to reveal an aging but clearly athletic man. His teeth sliced through his salt and pepper beard as he stepped through the doorway and offered the energetic redhead a crooked smile.
“This the boy you were telling me about?” he asked. “The Harper boy?”
“That’s me.” Ethan stepped forward and shook the man’s outstretched hand.
“I’m Gus,” he said, nodding briskly. “Knew your dad growing up. Good guy.” He grunted. “Anyway, bet you kids want to go out on the lake. Come with me.”
They followed him into the dimly lit boathouse, where a line of rowboats were tied up along the dock.
“This one!” Juniper cried, stopping in front of a wooden boat that looked exactly like all the others. She all but leapt into it, sending the boat rocking. “Welcome aboard the SS Juniper,” she said, holding out a hand to help Ethan climb in after her. “It’s named after me.”
“That’s right,” Gus affirmed, unhooking the SS Juniper’s rope and tossing it into the boat. “And she’s a real star out on the lake.” He leaned off the dock and pushed aside the wooden doors, revealing the lake in all its cerulean glory, then handed Juniper a pair of oars.
As she positioned them above the water, Ethan reached out tentatively. “Do you want me to—?”
Juniper snorted. “Please. Leave the real work to the girls who can handle it.” And with a surreptitious wink, she cut the oars through the water and sent them gliding out into the glassy blue.
The air smelled different out here. Ethan took a breath and thought he must be inhaling the entire forest, that saplings must be sprouting between the bones of his rib cage. Juniper chatted up a storm as she rowed, and though he tried to listen, he found himself mesmerized by the rhythm of his lungs. Trees surrounded them, casting their long shadows across the water. It was a dance of the senses, touch and smell and taste, and another sense: the feeling of calm.
“And, we’ve arrived,” Juniper announced, snapping Ethan from his reverie. He looked around to find that they were in the middle of the lake, floating on the open water. Juniper laid the oars across the bow and reached for the picnic basket. “From here, we drift.”
Ethan craned his neck, taking in the sunlight, the tumbling leaves, and the mist of the water as it carried them along on timid waves. “Wow,” he said.
“Wow is right.” Juniper paused for a moment to glance around the lake and smile. “This is my second favorite place in the whole entire town.”
Ethan raised an eyebrow. “Second? What’s your first?”
“Oh, no, you don’t.” She wagged a finger in his face. “That’s for another day. For now, take one before they get cold.” She pushed the basket toward him and, looking in, he saw that it was filled to the brim with misshapen biscuits that all seemed a little bit burned. Juniper gave them a sheepish glance. “My baking skills could use some work,” she said. “But I also have jam, and jam fixes everything.”
Ethan stared at her, with her wild red hair and big blue eyes, hunching over a basket of botched biscuits, and maybe the absurdity of their makeshift friendship hit him all at once, or maybe there was something left over from the bike ride, but suddenly he found himself laughing relentlessly. He doubled over until his face was nearly pressed against the damp wooden hull, until he was coughing and nearly crying, until Juniper had joined in and their combined glee made the little rowboat quake.
When the guffaws had subsided into spurts of loud chuckles, Ethan clutched his aching stomach and took a shivering breath. “I don’t know,” he gasped, “what’s actually so funny.”
“Neither do I,” Juniper replied, brushing tears from her eyes. “But by gosh, isn’t that just the best way to laugh?”
It took another short eternity for them to catch their breath enough to handle Juniper’s breakfast. They sat on the lake and ate the smoky, but surprisingly soft, biscuits dipped straight into jars of strawberry jam, and even Juniper was silent. They ate until their happy-sore stomachs were filled to the brim, then sat there as the boat drifted in lazy spirals across the lake, watching the clouds go by.
“That one looks like a rabbit.”
“No way, it’s definitely a platypus.”
“Juniper, not every cloud can look like a platypus.”
“Says who, the cloud police?”
Ethan elbowed Juniper in the side, a gesture she returned with a smack to the chin. They were each lying on one of the two center benches, their shoes discarded and their toes grazing the water. The clouds took a stroll overhead, slow and gentle.
Sighing, Ethan lifted himself into a sitting position, twisting once in each direction to snap the cricks out of his back. Juniper remained where she was, her eyes closed and her hands folded across her stomach. A peaceful smile tugged at her lips.
In the past hour, in between cloud watching and biscuit eating, Juniper Jones had laid bare her invincible summer, piece by piece. She’d been thinking about it, she said, since that day at the malt shop. Ethan wasn’t sure how she remembered it all. She wanted to have a race through the entire town, but holding kites. She wanted to organize a sock hop night at the Malt. To plant sunflowers on every front lawn in Ellison. To paint a mural on the empty wall outside the general store. To climb to the top of Big Red, allegedly the tallest tree in all of Alabama. She wanted to go to the movies in Montgomery, learn how to use a record player, read twenty-one books in a week, put on a puppet show. And the list went on. She’d scatter her ideas through their conversation like she was coming up with them on the spot.
“And that’s why Mrs. Westbury has warts on her feet,” she’d say. “Also, I want to knit scarves for all five of Mr. Callahan’s new puppies. I don’t know how to knit, though. Oh, that too! I want to learn how to knit.”
Ethan wasn’t sure how, but something about the upside down and sideways way she spoke made sense to him. He mentally made a note of all her summer plans that were plausible—when she suggested holding her breath for two hours, he carefully dissuaded her—and did not once wonder if they would actually follow through on all of them. She made it all seem effortlessly possible.
At one point he had said, “You know what we should do? We should get a really long piece of paper, like a scroll out of an adventure flick, and we should write everything down. We can hang it up somewhere, and every time we finish something we can check it off.”
Juniper had grabbed his arm and shook it, squealing, “Yes! Ethan Charlie Harper, you are an absolute genius!”
Now, Ethan crossed his legs on the bench and glanced over at her, lying there with her eyes still feigning sleep. On a whim, he passed a hand over her face. No response. He poked her in the side. Only the slightest twitch. “Hey, Juniper,” he said loudly, “I think you’re dead. Hope you don’t mind, I’m gonna toss your body into the lake now.”
He reached toward her with both hands and was mere inches away when she leapt to her feet and then dropped heavily onto her butt, rocking the boat so hard that water splashed them both from over the side.
“No, I can’t swim!” she shrieked, then snapped her fingers. “That’s another thing! I want to learn how to swim.”
Ethan snorted, shaking his head incredulously. “You’re telling me,” he said slowly, “that you’ve lived in a lake town your entire life and you’ve never learned how to swim?”
“Well, no one ever taught me!” Juniper crossed her arms and huffed, then muttered, “Also, the lake water is really cold.”
“Ha! Maybe we should call you Chicken instead of Starfish.”
“How dare you!”
“Relax,” Ethan said playfully. “Look, I’ll teach you to swim, all right? That’ll be an easy one.”
She shoved his shoulder again, but this time with a hint of a smile. “Fine. Chameleon.” Ethan raised an eyebrow. “Chameleon,” she repeated. “I’m Starfish, and you’re Chameleon.”
Ethan frowned. “How come?”
“Because,” said Juniper Jones, “you’re the quiet type. Not too noticeable. Not in a bad way, of course—it’s just that I think back where you’re from, you don’t have a problem fitting in.” She paused, suddenly troubled. “But not here. Here in Ellison, things are different, and you stick out like a sore thumb.”
Juniper’s watch read noon when Ethan realized that his aunt and uncle didn’t know where he was.
“Relax,” Juniper assured him, “Mr. and Mrs. Shay love me. They won’t care. But if you really wanna, we can head back to shore.”
Ethan nodded, distracted now because the thought of his aunt and uncle had reminded him of the broadcast the night before. The black schoolgirl had been gone from his mind for these few hours—now, she suddenly reappeared. He glanced sideways at Juniper as she drew two more biscuits from the basket.
“Think fast,” she said, and tossed one at Ethan. Hardly paying attention, he made a weak grab for the flying object, but it flew through his fingers and splashed into the lake. Juniper glared at him as she leaned over the edge of the boat to retrieve it. “Way to go, klutz.”
Ethan said nothing for long enough that Juniper became preoccupied with the biscuit in her hands. When he finally decided to speak, her mouth was full.
“June?” he asked as she swallowed. “You know things about, you know . . . things.”
“Yes, Ethan,” Juniper replied solemnly. “I know many things. About things.”
“Oh, cut it out. Look, I don’t know if you watch the news—maybe not—but anyway, on NBC last night, there was this one report.” He explained the situation, and she listened quietly. “And I just—is that really the way things are here?”
Ethan paused when he saw the way Juniper was staring at him, her eyes wide and her mouth slightly agape. She’d finished the biscuit, but she swallowed again.
“Yeah, Ethan,” she murmured. “In Ellison it’s a little different ’cause the town’s so small, but in the big cities like Montgomery and Birmingham? It’s the law. A place for colored folks and a place for white folks. Even on the bus. Everything is separate.”
Ethan blinked slowly. He looked down at his hands, several shades darker than Juniper’s, and thought about that bus. “Why?”
Juniper looked at him strangely. “Say, Ethan, where did you say you’re from, again?”
“Arcadia,” he said. “City up in Washington state.”
Juniper tilted her head, her eyes troubled. “And when your dad got mad and decided to send you here, he never talked about, you know—what it would be like?”
Ethan thought about Arcadia—its roads dense with shops and houses, its sidewalks scattered with pedestrians. When he rode the school bus every day, he sat wherever he pleased. Growing up he’d had friends who looked like him and friends who didn’t, and until Samuel Hill came along, he’d hardly noticed the differences at all.
“No.” He laughed slightly. “Then again, he doesn’t talk to me much about anything. But he definitely didn’t mention any of this.”
“Well,” Juniper said with a long sigh, “I guess I don’t know what to say. This is how things are around here, Ethan. All the time. For people like you.”
It all played back in his mind: the stares, the women in the general store, the fight with Noah. All because he was colored. Here, he was a deviation from the norm—and that was a threat.
“I can’t tell you why they’re like that,” Juniper went on. “I’ve been trying to figure it out too. The way I see it, you know, people are like the different paint circles on a palette. You’ve got your reds and blues and greens and yellows, and you need all of them to make a painting. But around here, they don’t see it that way.” She shrugged. “They never have. And last year, when that black boy came to town and there was the whole—”
Ethan frowned as she froze. “What?” he asked quickly, leaning forward. Juniper shook her head, settling back onto the bench.
“Nothing,” she assured him, picking up the oars and slipping them into position. “We should go.”
“Juniper. What boy? What happened?”
“It’s not important,” she said. “None of it is.” She forced a dim and tired smile. “Listen, I’m real sorry your dad decided to send you here. Not because I don’t want you here, but because they don’t. And they won’t let you forget it.” She cut the oars expertly through the water, sending the boat forward. “But while you’re here, I’m gonna do my best to make this a good summer for you. I pinky swear.”