what summer means to me

        This couldn’t have been literally every summer, but this is how I remember literally every summer: wake up, coach the little kids at swim team, swim practice for myself, eat lunch (a Subway footlong if I’m lucky!!!), fall asleep on the couch watching Star Trek while it rains, and go back to the pool for night practice before devouring dinner.
        Summer swim team was the tits. I loved it. We even had a lady coach for a while. The two of us shared the same birthday, which was totally cool. She was weird, like in an aloof way, and taught middle school English. I liked her. Until we had this one fun day to celebrate the end of the season, and her son’s best friend kicked me in the nipple while we were fighting in the deep end over a greased up watermelon. And the coach took his side and told me some sexist horseshit like I shouldn’t have been playing rough with boys if I didn’t want to get kicked in the nipple.
        But the Vaseline watermelon fights were my favorite! The watermelon always ended up smashed to hell and the gross kids would eat it anyway, EVEN THOUGH there was always fresh, un-lubed and un-chlorinated watermelon available. (We would also dive for quarters in the deep end, which always made my ears hurt and maybe is why I get so many headaches now?)
        Summer wasn’t just for swimming, it was also for going to the library every day and checking out an impossible number of books so all the grown-ups would tell me what a smart girl I was. One year I read what must have been every single book in the Boxcar Children series. Here is why that series is fucked up: these orphans live out of a little boxcar (like from a train or whatever?), and then they--I think extra-judicially--get “adopted” by a rich “grandpa” and then ALSO SOLVE MYSTERIES, like MURDER and shit. There would have been enough trauma and classism to unpack without the Sherlock Holmesiness of it all.
        The MOST fucked up part was how unbelievably jealous I was of these viciously independent children.  They had this whole cool vibe. Their big brother Henry (who is ohmygod 14 I just looked it up) took care of them, and their big sister Jessie (12!!!) scrounged up all these innovative and delectable dishes to keep them from starving to death in the woods. They kept their milk cold by putting the glass bottles in the stream! They were resourceful and could do whatever the fuck they wanted! They did not even notice they were homeless orphans living in abject poverty!
        It sounded glamorous, and that is what led me to play orphan all the time, especially in the summer. As one of the luckiest people I knew, one of the few with un-divorced and alive parents, I used to put a scarf on my head and play act that both my parents were tragically deceased, and I had to make stew and shit to keep myself alive. Plus orphans in children’s stories always end up with rich people, and going from abject poverty to unimaginable wealth must just make the rich part all the sweeter, right?  In conclusion, that is what summer means to me thank you.