Quarters. Winner in The Summer That Wasn’t Challenge.
To write about a summer that never was: aren’t there infinite? Isn’t there a summer when I was a little kid, and instead of wondering what it meant when my mom stood in my bedroom doorway and told me—on Father’s Day, mind you—that my dad was “hiding vodka” again, I was a happy kid with friends, my only worry a scrape or a bump that my young body would heal with haste? There has to be a summer where I wasn’t 15 and my first kiss wasn’t from the deadbeat, 22-year-old college dropout who worked with me at the local fast-casual Italian spot on the highway, and another one where I didn’t live off peanuts and banana chips during those sweaty, lonely couple of months in Philly between sophomore and junior year of college.
