When We Had Summer


 
 Copyright © 2023 by Disney Enterprises, Inc.
 All rights reserved. Published by Hyperion, an imprint of Buena Vista Books, Inc. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher. For information address Hyperion, 77 West 66th Street, New York, New York 10023.
 First Edition, April 2023
 Designed by Torborg Davern
 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
 Names: Castle, Jennifer, author.
 Title: When we had summer / by Jennifer Castle.
 Description: First edition. ● Los Angeles : Hyperion, 2023. ● Audience: Ages 12–18. ● Audience: Grades 7–12. ● Summary: When thirteen-year-old Summer Sisters Daniella, Alaina, and Penelope are about to be separated for the summer after the death of their friend Carly, they vow to complete the bucket list she wrote before she passed.
 Identifiers: LCCN 2022009424 ● ISBN 9781368081405 (hardcover) ● ISBN 9781368081429 (paperback) ● ISBN 9781368081542 (ebook)
 Subjects: CYAC: Best friends—Fiction. ● Friendship—Fiction. ● Grief—Fiction.
 Classification: LCC PZ7.C268732 Wi 2023 ● DDC [Fic]—dc23
 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022009424
 Visit www.HyperionTeens.com
 
 Contents
 Title Page
 Copyright
 Dedication
 Summer Sisters Bucket List
 Chapter 1
 Chapter 2
 Chapter 3
 Chapter 4
 Chapter 5
 Chapter 6
 Chapter 7
 Chapter 8
 Chapter 9
 Chapter 10
 Chapter 11
 Chapter 12
 Chapter 13
 Chapter 14
 Chapter 15
 Chapter 16
 Chapter 17
 Chapter 18
 Chapter 19
 Chapter 20
 Chapter 21
 Chapter 22
 Chapter 23
 Chapter 24
 Chapter 25
 Chapter 26
 Chapter 27
 Chapter 28
 Chapter 29
 Chapter 30
 Chapter 31
 Chapter 32
 Chapter 33
 Chapter 34
 Chapter 35
 Chapter 36
 Chapter 37
 Acknowledgments
 About the Author
 
 For Peggy Sweeney, my own Summer Sister
 spring, fall, and winter, too
 
 
 
 
 WHEN YOU STAY UP ALL NIGHT, THERE’S A POINT when you stop being tired and start feeling kind of indestructible.
 Like you could do anything. Leap a tall building. Lift a truck off a little kid. Maybe even fly.
 Or hop from one rock to another out toward the ocean without worrying about slipping. Without even looking back to see if your friends were right behind you.
 Penny was in that zone. The no-sleep-totally-hyper phase in between being really tired at 4:00 a.m. and passing out at lunchtime, hopefully in the car way past the New Jersey Pine Barrens.
 Every year, on the last night of summer, Penny and her friends Carly, Lainie, and Daniella had a sleepover on the screened porch of Lainie’s grandparents’ house. The house was right across from the beach. They’d drift off sometime after midnight, then wake up early to climb onto the longest jetty in Ocean Park Heights and watch the sunrise.
 But this summer, they were thirteen. Officially teenagers. And they’d decided early on that they’d have to do something that fit better with how much older and cooler they were. So this year, sleepover meant they’d sleep when it was over.
 “When there’s only one day left of summer,” Carly had said, “you should be awake for every minute of it, you know?”
 Penny agreed completely. Summer was sliding away, like each wave at low tide after it hit the jetty and rushed back out to sea. She hopped onto another rock, breathing in the salty air, which already felt a little colder, a little more September.
 “Hey, I can’t go that fast!” Daniella called. “I’m carrying important cargo!”
 Penny glanced back. Daniella was holding out one arm for balance. Her other arm hugged a giant bag filled with three colors of cotton candy: pink, blue, green.
 “Ah, crap! My flip-flop just broke!” Lainie cried.
 She stopped to pull it off her foot and held it up in front of her face, eyeing one piece of rubber that had come loose from another. “Really?” Lainie said to the useless sandal. “You made it all summer. You couldn’t have held out for, like, another hour?”
 “When you start talking to footwear, you know it’s time to leave the shore and go back to real life,” Carly said, laughing, her hands on her hips, her long auburn hair whipping around her face. Penny could see her freckles, even from seven rocks away. By late August, Carly always had twice as many as she started the summer with.
 Penny could still remember the first time she met Carly, when they were six years old. She could actually see where it had happened: that stretch of sand down there, in front of Lifeguard Tower 9. Penny had been digging in the sand for an hour, trying to find the little plastic lizard she’d buried the day before. When she finally gave up, she curled into one of her holes and stared glumly at the water.
 Then a girl’s feet had appeared in front of her, sand stuck to her skin halfway up her calves. “Hi,” Carly had said. “What are you looking for?”
 “Lost treasure,” Penny had mumbled.
 “Cool,” Carly had replied, nodding her head. “Can I help? I’m good at finding stuff. My dad calls me Eagle-Eye Carly.”
 A few minutes later, Carly had pulled the lizard from the sand and Penny had tackled her in glee. From there, Penny’s memories blurred into meeting Carly’s cousin Daniella and then, later that summer, Lainie.
 Now, the four of them were moving in a practiced zigzag across the stone shapes they’d all played on in the years since. At first, the jetty was a castle wall and they were princesses and witches and fairies and various flying animals. Then it was a ship, and they were all a crew of famous pirates…but nice pirates who stole stuff from other pirates so they could give it back to their owners. It all seemed so silly to Penny now. But in a good, we-were-so-cute kind of way. Once they all got big enough and brave enough, they started leaping across a series of smaller rocks to one huge, flat rock, which was a little