The Firefly Summer by Morgan Matson

Author:Morgan Matson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers
Published: 2023-05-02T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 16

Sweet Baby Jane’s turned out to be an ice cream parlor.

Right after the dinner dishes had been loaded into Hobart, my cousins had run out the lodge door, all of them screaming, “Not middle!”

They ran to the driveway and slapped their hands on one of the four cars parked there, then started arguing about who had gotten there first. I hadn’t known this was a thing we had to do, but I resolved to make sure to do it next time. Diya and Pete got into a shoving match over who had gotten to their SUV first, with the plates that read SOLV4X. Aunt Abby had declared that because they were fighting, Diya would get middle on the way over and Pete would get it on the way back. Hattie had successfully claimed a not-middle seat in the station wagon—it turned out to be her family’s car. And Max had called it on the truck, which was Grams and Gramps’s. Quinn’s beat-up Volvo stayed behind—we could fit into three cars, just barely, but we fit. It helped that Uncle Neal stayed behind to attend a virtual department planning meeting. Grams took his shotgun seat in the SUV, and Uncle Neal left Aunt Abby with his order and stern warnings that she not eat his ice cream on the drive back home—from the way he said this, it seemed like that had happened before.

I ended up in the truck. Gramps was driving, Quinn shotgun, and me and Max on either side of Archie, who’d ended up in the middle but claimed he didn’t mind because there was no point to anything.

“Three cars just to go get ice cream,” Gramps said, shaking his head. He pulled down the driveway, and we started to head into town. “This is why we used to have the camp bus.”

I stared out the window in the fading twilight—it was almost dark but not quite yet—and I realized with a start that this was the first time I’d left the grounds since I’d arrived.

It was funny to realize how Camp Van Camp had become my whole world, and how everything else had disappeared. But maybe that was the whole point of actual camp too—that you got to live in the camp bubble and forget about your “real” life back home.

We parked on the main street—which was helpfully called Main Street—and headed toward the ice cream parlor.

It was a warm night—which I was still getting used to. Back in California, even in the summers, as soon as the sun went down, it got cold. As we reached the ice cream parlor with its blue awning, I could see there was a crowd spilling out the door—it seemed like everyone else in Lake Phoenix had decided it was a good night for ice cream as well.

“Okay,” Gramps said, clapping his hands together. “Van Camps, circle up. There’s not enough room for all of us in there, so figure out what you want, and we’ll go in and order it.

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