Lucy's Perfect Summer Read online

  Besides, if a few drops fell, that wouldn’t stop her and J.J. and their soccer game. Lucy’s grin widened as they rounded the bend in the dirt road and zipped under the red-white-and-blue sign Veronica and Dusty’s moms had painted: “Los Suenos Soccer Field, Home of the Los Suenos Dreams.” Lucy had her bike behind the bleachers and the ball out of the bag almost before J.J. was off his seat.

  “One-on-One!” she called out. “Bet you can’t score on me, J.J.!”

  “Bet you can’t stop me!”

  They used the penalty mark as one goal and the real goal area as the other and turned and faked themselves dizzy. Neither of them scored — until Lucy did a perfect shimmy to one side and kicked the ball in the other direction, right past J.J. and over the line.

  She threw her head back to cheer into the sky and froze with her mouth open. Somewhere between the turning and the faking, clouds blacker than Lollipop the kitty had formed, and even as Lucy stared, one of them spit out a mouthful of lightning that crackled through the power line above the refreshment building. The thunder smacked into Lucy’s ears and rooted her to the ground.

  ”Come on!” J.J. yelled, and he grabbed her sleeve and hauled her out of the goal area. Before they could get to their bikes, the sky flashed again and then again, and the thunder was so loud Lucy couldn’t hear what else J.J. was yelling. She dove for her handlebars, but he pushed her under the bleachers, just as a torrent of rain beat down on them with drops sharp as needles.

  “Holy frijoles!” Lucy said.

  J.J. turned his backward cap around, but even under the bleacher seats, water slid down the bill and plastered his shorts to his legs. Lucy shook her head to get the rain out of her eyes and smacked J.J. in the cheek with her ponytail. He didn’t even flinch.

  “I didn’t see that coming!” Lucy said. “Guess we oughta just wait it out, huh?”

  J.J. hunched his shoulders and peered out at the rain that now came down in sheets. “Guess so,” he said.

  But ten minutes later, as a lake formed between them and the fence and the storm battered on, J.J. shook his head. “Better make a run for it,” he said.

  Lucy tried, but the wind and the slapping rain pushed her back a step for every two she took forward.

  “Leave the bikes — we’ll get ’em later!” J.J. shouted.

  He hooked his arm through Lucy’s and pulled her around the giant puddle that was by now taking up most of the area behind the bleachers. They sloshed through another one that had formed outside the fence, and Lucy had to tuck her chin to keep the rain from shooting its bullets into her eyes. When J.J. stopped, she peeked over his shoulder and nearly bit into it.

  The dirt road was a river, charging past them as if it had someplace important to go. Even as they stood there, the water raced over Lucy’s toes and pulled at her feet.

  “Hold on!” J.J. yelled.

  Lucy wrapped her arms around J.J.’s, one hand clinging like a monkey to his T-shirt, as he picked his way along the mini-river that widened by the minute. Plastic bottles and crushed-up cans tumbled past, and Lucy tried not to imagine herself and J.J. falling in and hurtling with them to who-knew-where. She placed her feet exactly where J.J. had put his, but even at that, she slid in the mud and went down on her knees. The water tried to drag her with it.

  J.J. stopped and stooped over. “Get on my back!”

  “You can’t carry me!” Lucy shouted — though she was sure the next crash of thunder stole her words.

  “Get on!” J.J. said.

  Lucy did and braced her arms around his neck as he half-ran, half-slid to the bridge. The trickle of water from the irrigation ditch had now swollen over the banks and ripped at the underside of the bridge as J.J. careened across with Lucy hanging on. The ground was higher on that side, and the water only covered their ankles. Lucy slid off of J.J.’s back just as the air cracked again. Only this time, it wasn’t thunder.

  She gazed in horror as the bridge collapsed behind them.

  2

  The bridge caved into a V, and Lucy felt her knees cave too.

  “Come on!” J.J. cried out.

  She could barely hear him over the crashing of planks and the angry protests of the water below. Somehow she was able to run after him, sloshing through the rising water to the highway. Ahead of them, Sheriff Navarro’s cruiser blocked the intersection, and the sheriff himself stood in thigh-high boots in the middle of it, waving off the few cars that tried to crawl through like turtles going uphill.

  J.J.’s ponytail flapped from side to side, and Lucy knew he was looking for a way to escape before the sheriff saw them. Lucy grabbed his arm and pulled him toward the car. By now, its hubcaps had all but disappeared into the Highway 54 river.

  Sheriff Navarro peered at them from under the dripping bill of his hat, and even through the downpour, Lucy could see the I-should-have-known-it-was-you-two in his sharp, black eyes. She’d seen that look plenty of times, from the sheriff and his son.

  “Get in the car!” was all he said.

  Lucy kept a tight grip on J.J.’s T-shirt so he wouldn’t bolt and waded with him to the cruiser. The sheriff could barely get the door open to let them in. They were already soaking the backseat when he climbed into the front.

  “I’m not even gonna ask what you’re doing out in this,” he said.

  That was good, because J.J. probably wasn’t going to answer, which meant Lucy would have to think of something, and right now all she wanted to do was get home to Dad.

  “I gotta park this thing anyway before it turns into a boat,” the sheriff said, more to himself than to them. He didn’t talk to kids that much.

  Then he didn’t say anything at all as the car nearly floated down Granada Street and fishtailed to a stop in front of Lucy’s house. He twisted to look over the seat.

  “I’m gonna have to carry you kids in.”

  J.J. just grunted and opened the door. Water rushed onto the floorboards and drowned his feet, but J.J. splashed out and flailed his way across the now-flooded street toward his house. His front yard was a sea of broken bicycles and wash tubs and old tires, all bobbing like bathtub toys. Lucy hoped he didn’t get bonked in the head with any of it as he swam for his front door.

  “Let’s go,” Sheriff Navarro said to her, and he didn’t wait for Lucy to climb onto his back. He just hauled her out of the car and threw her over his shoulder the way she’d seen firemen rescue people from burning buildings on TV. She sure hoped none of her friends were witnessing this.

  But Mora was at the kitchen window, of course, her always-huge brown eyes twice their normal size as she watched Lucy pass by practically upside down. Lucy could see that Mora’s lips were fully operational. She was probably giving Inez an inch-by-inch description of Lucy being delivered like a sandbag to the back porch.

  Inez met them, barely able to keep the door from blowing off as Sheriff Navarro deposited Lucy inside.

  “Don’t let her out,” he shouted at Inez above the wind. “We got flash flooding. I’m surprised she didn’t drown already.”

  “Gracias, Senor Sheriff,” Inez said. “You want to come in and dry your — ”

  Sheriff Navarro just grunted at her and, to Lucy’s relief, ducked back into the storm. It was going to be bad enough enduring what Inez had to say. She didn’t need both of them telling her she should know enough to come in out of the rain. She would rather hear it from Inez anyway. It wasn’t so bad in Spanish.

  “Oh, my gosh, you’re, like, totally soaked!” Mora said from her perch on the edge of the kitchen sink. Her fingers, as usual, were punctuating every word in the air. She was all about exclamation points, too.

  “Seriously?” Lucy said.

  Inez grunted. “Mora, get the towels for Senorita Lucy.”

  “Towels? She needs, like, a giant blow-dryer.”

  But Mora didn’t have to be asked twice. You didn’t argue with Inez, even though her English wasn’t that good. She was a short lady with a haircut like a little Dutch boy, only black instead of blond, but she had powerful eyes and a voice that got bigger the more softly she talked.

  Mora produced five towels, and Inez rubbed at Lucy until her skin was almost raw, all the while muttering things in Spanish. Even if Lucy could have understood what she was saying, she couldn’t have heard it over Mora’s babbling.

  “We totally thought you drowned. We tried to call your dad, only the phone is out. I almost freaked, and Abuela was, like, ‘The Lord, he will take care of Senorita Lucy,’ and she’s all praying, and I’m thinking, ‘Well, if she drowns, at least she’s with J.J. — ”

  Lucy was glad to be sent off to the shower by Inez. Mora could talk longer than you could listen to her sometimes, and about the weirdest things.

  When Lucy came out in dry clothes, Inez had tortilla soup and hot tea ready. Lucy put Marmalade, their orange kitty, in her lap and drank her tea out of the butterfly mug that had been her mom’s. Mora sat across from her, cross-legged in the chair, and picked up where she’d left off.

  “Okay, so, like, how deep is it out there? Could you swim in it? I would have been so freaked out — ”

  Lucy clapped her hand over Mora’s still-moving mouth and leaned into the radio on the table. Dad’s voice crackled from it.

  “The National Weather Service is reporting — ” Big pause. “ — frontal winds of thirty miles per hour.” Another pause. “Make that fifty. Gusts up to fifty.”

  Lucy felt a frown form. Dad was usually so smooth on the radio. Listening to him was like hearing molasses pour, people said. Lucy had never actually heard molasses pour, but she knew what they meant. He never said “um” or “uh” or “like,” which Mora would have said every other word if she were a radio announcer. But today he sounded more like a car engine that couldn’t quite start.

  “Because of our sparse vegetation here in New Mexico,” Dad said, “the runoffs from this storm can cause flash flooding.”

  “Ya think?” Mora said to the radio. “No offense, Mr. Rooney, but that already happened.”

  Lucy was glad Dad couldn’t hear her. She glared at Mora and turned up the volume.

  “Today is a good day to stay home,” Dad was saying. “We’ll keep you updated, so just sit back with a cup of coffee and count on us. We’ll . . .”

  Another big pause. Lucy turned up the volume again, but there was only silence.

  “What happened to him?” she said.

  “Senor Ted, he is fine,” Inez said. “The radio, it is not.” She nodded at the light over the table that flickered and blinked into darkness.

  “The power’s off?” Mora wailed. “I wanted to watch The View.”

  Lucy didn’t know what that was, and she didn’t care. She had a sudden icky-achy feeling in her stomach.

  “You think my dad’s okay, Inez?” she said.

  “Senor Ted, he can take care of Senor Ted.” Inez poured more tea into Lucy’s cup. “And I can take care of you.”

  But as Lucy watched the wind slam the rain against the window, she felt a scared kind of lonely. Dad always said that once you’ve lost somebody you loved, it was hard to trust that it wouldn’t happen again. That was why they had God.

  God and soccer. There were drills she could do in the house if she moved the furniture around some. She could at least toss the ball into the air and catch it with her foot. Lucy pushed the tea mug aside and went for the hook by the back door where she kept her ball in its net bag. She was halfway there when she realized she’d left it on the soccer field. Now she was ready to freak.

  “What’s wrong?” Mora said. “You look all weirded out.”

  “My soccer ball’s probably floated all the way to Alamogordo by now,” Lucy said. “Not to mention my bike.”

  She stuck her hands in her pockets, pulled them out, picked up Marmalade, put him down. Her skin itched on the inside. And then she realized something else.

  “Oh, my gosh!” she said. “Where’s Mudge? He’s out in this!”

  She tore for the door, but Inez got between her and it.

  “He’s in the house,” Mora said. “Abuela has the scratches to prove it.”

  “He is under Senor Ted’s bed. Come. Sit.” Inez pointed to the table. “We will talk.”

  “About what?” Mora said. Her eyes were already in suspicious slits.

  “Senorita Esther.”

  “Who?”

  Inez reached into her bag on the counter and pulled out a beat-up looking leather book.

  “Bible study?” Mora said. “Abuela — it’s summer!” An exclamation point came out of her finger. “Why do we have to ‘study’ in the summer?”

  She didn’t even know the half of it. Lucy sank into a kitchen chair. It seemed like a long time ago that Dad told her she had to do schoolwork all summer. She wished he was here saying it now. She would listen to it a hundred times.

  Inez waited until Mora had flopped into a chair before she turned the thin-as-onionskin pages and folded her hands on them.

  “This is the story of Senorita Hadassah,” she said.

  “I thought you said her name was Ethel,” Mora said.

  “Esther,” Lucy said.

  Inez shook her head. “Her name when she is born is Hadassah. People now call her Esther. It is word for ‘the star.’ ”

  Mora gave a dramatic sigh. “I wish I could change my name. I want to be ‘Madeline.’ Don’t I look like a Madeline to you?”

  “Poor Senorita Esther,” Inez said, ignoring her. “Her parents, they have die, and she lives with her cousin Senor Mordecai.”

  “Now there’s a name I would definitely change,” Mora said. Lucy leaned into the table. “What happened to her parents?”

  “The Bible, it does not tell us,” Inez said.

  Lucy nodded. She was relating to this Esther person already. Mora, on the other hand, was twirling a strand of her coffee-colored hair around her finger and looking like she’d rather be taking a math test.

  “Is her cousin nice to her?” Lucy said.

  “Sí. He is good to Senorita Esther and tells her she will have a fine husband and children someday.”

  Mora showed a flicker of interest. “So he lets her date. I’m down with that.”

  “And then one day,” Inez said.

  Mora rolled her eyes. “I knew it was too good to be true. What happened?”

  “King Xerxes, he send his men into the neighborhood.”

  “Where did they get these names?” Mora said.

  “They are looking for a new queen for the king and want to see all the beautiful young girls.”

  “What happened to the old queen?” Lucy said.

  “She probably got fat or something, and he wanted a younger model.” Mora’s eyes rolled again. “Men are so fickle.”

  “The queen, she disobeys the king,” Inez said. “He sends her away. He will have a new queen who will show him the respect.”

  “So why can’t he find his own woman?” Mora said. “Is he ugly or something?”

  Lucy groaned. “For Pete’s sake, Mora — let her tell the story.”

  “They will bring to him every beautiful young girl,” Inez said. “The senoritas, they will have the beauty treatments for six months, and then he will choose.”

  Mora’s big brown eyes went dreamy. “I would definitely want a chance at that. It would be like American Idol. Even if you didn’t win, you’d be famous and some other guy would marry you — like a prince or somebody.”

  Inez was shaking her head. “The girls he does not choose will stay in the palace forever.”

  “What?” Mora’s hands sprung out like springs. “That is just wrong! I just wouldn’t go, then.”

  “Senorita Esther, she does not have the choice. She must leave her cousin and her friends and do what the king says.”

  Lucy thought Mora was going to jump over the table. She had to admit it sounded like a pretty bad deal. As much as Mora got on her nerves, if she had to leave, Lucy would miss her. And if Dad had to go —

  “There is one more thing that is muy difícil for Senorita Esther,” Inez said.

  Mora looked at Lucy. “That means ‘way hard.’ ”

  “I got that,” Lucy said.

  “Esther, she is a Jew, and the king, he is not. If he will discover this about her, he may be very angry.” Inez leaned in as if she were about to tell a secret. “Senor Mordecai, he says Senorita Esther must never tell at the palace that she is a Jew.”

  Mora shrugged. “What’s so hard about that?”

  Lucy didn’t answer, but she thought she knew. It would be like not being able to talk about God to anybody, just when God was starting to make sense to her. What if she couldn’t keep her Book of Lists where she talked to God?

  She’d probably start throwing soccer balls at people.

  “Okay, so, does she go through the beauty treatments or what?” Mora circled her hand for Inez to get on with the story. “It might be worth it if you came out looking like a model or something.”

  Lucy definitely didn’t agree with that as Inez read about Esther’s beauty coach soaking her skin in oil of myrrh and her hair in cinnamon perfume. It sounded more like marinating a chicken than getting ready for some king she might not even like anyway.

  Lucy was about to check out on this story and dream up some soccer strategies instead when Inez said, “Senor Mordecai, he knows that Senorita Esther, she is sick for her home. And so every day, he comes to the court to visit her.”

  “Are you serious?” Mora said. “I wouldn’t be homesick. I would be totally loving it there!”

  Lucy decided she would not be “loving it” at all. It sounded way too much like Aunt Karen coming in to do a makeover on her. She tucked her feet up under her and wished they could heat more water for tea and that the radio would come back on so she could at least hear Dad and know he was okay.

  “All right,” Mora said, hands on skinny hips, “so does she get picked for queen or not?”