Summer before college

The summer before college is the interval Auden first experiences as empty waiting and then makes into a life of its own. Instead of spending the months alone at home, studying ahead, and feeling out of place with old friends, she goes to Colby, forms a close nighttime friendship with Eli, and begins to accept that a missed experience can still be approached anew. The season becomes a bridge between the future she has prepared for and the relationships and experiences she had not known how to pursue.

Between school and a life on hold

Auden enters summer after concentrating on her final year of high school and the approach of college. With school suddenly over, she has little sense of what the time before Defriese University should contain. She gathers materials for her courses, tries to pick up shifts at Huntsinger Test Prep, and finds tutoring work slow. Her old friends from Perkins invite her to dinners and trips to the lake, but conversations about summer jobs and boyfriends leave her feeling like an outsider. Kiffney-Brown’s intensely academic atmosphere has become so different from their experience that, after a few awkward outings, Auden begins declining invitations until her friends stop asking.

Home offers little relief from the sense of suspension. Auden’s mother is occupied with a research grant, and her graduate assistants fill the house with impromptu dinners and cocktail hours. When the noise and company become too much, Auden takes a book to the front porch and reads until it is dark enough to go to Ray’s Diner. Her routine makes the summer feel less like freedom than an extension of her isolation: she has plans for college, but no immediate life that feels like hers.

A message to Robert changes the season’s direction. After considering that travel might offer a change of scenery, Auden writes to ask whether she can visit. Robert replies that she is welcome to stay as long as she likes, and the decision turns waiting into movement. The next morning she packs a small duffel, her laptop, and a large suitcase of books, including course texts she has already sought out at the U bookstore. The books are a telling measure of how she expects to spend her time. She anticipates little beyond the beach and being around Heidi, neither of which appeals to her, but she also sees the visit as a rare chance to catch up with Robert during eight weeks when neither of them is teaching or attending school.

Colby after dark

Auden arrives with doubts about the full summer ahead of her, but her wish to see Robert and her memory of how lonely she has been at home help her get out of the car and onto the porch. Her experience of Colby changes most decisively at night. Before meeting Eli, she has driven alone to the Wheelhouse, through neighborhood streets, and occasionally stopped at Gas/Gro; those outings feel monotonous. With Eli, the same hours become a shared world of errands, conversation, and unexpected destinations.

Their nights gather detail through small, ordinary adventures. Auden and Eli share pie and coffee with Clyde at The Washroom, search Park Mart for items on Eli’s mental list, and get pizza on the boardwalk after the clubs close. They fish from Colby Pier and watch phosphorescence in the water. Auden often leaves Clementine’s after closing, talks briefly with her coworkers, then heads out alone; sometime later, at Gas/Gro or Beach Beans, she encounters Eli and the night opens up. These repeated crossings turn chance into a routine, and the routine gives her a form of companionship absent from her earlier, solitary drives.

The hours together also change how Auden understands time. Their conversations move between college and childhood, the future and the past, and the possibility of making up for experiences she feels she missed. The nighttime setting makes their exchanges feel different from what they might have been during the day: time seems at once to speed up and slow down, and what they say and do acquires greater weight. Eli’s insistence that it is not too late for a happy childhood gives Auden a way to think about experience not as a fixed record of what she failed to do, but as something she can still enter.

That idea takes practical shape in the quest they work through one item at a time. The summer is not a single dramatic escape from Auden’s old habits; it is built from errands, bowling, food, and the willingness to try things she has not done. Even an absurd phrase such as chicken salad becomes part of the joke surrounding a possible do-over. Auden recognizes that there are many legitimate ways to spend a life, but when offered a genuine second route, she is willing to take it. Her investment in the nights becomes personal as well: while working through receipts at Clementine’s, she finds herself looking forward to what the evening might bring with Eli, a feeling of expectation about someone else that she has not experienced before.

Work, friendship, and renewed connection

Over the following weeks, the summer settles into a rhythm: Auden sleeps in during the mornings, works in the evenings, and spends her nights with Eli. Their meetings no longer depend on pretending to run into each other by accident. They meet after her shift at Gas/Gro, where coffee and whatever else they might need help launch the evening’s plans. The regularity matters: the nighttime adventures are no longer isolated excursions but a shared practice, and Auden’s life now contains work, friends, and anticipated time with another person.

The change is visible to Robert. He tells Auden he is glad she came to Colby, spent the summer there, and made friends, because he had worried she would spend it as she had spent earlier summers: at home with her mother, refilling wineglasses at gatherings, and studying for classes that had not begun. His recognition gives the summer a measure of its distance from the life Auden had initially expected. She has not abandoned her academic future, but she is no longer treating preparation for it as the only meaningful use of her time.

Auden’s connection with her mother also begins to loosen from its long-standing distance, though it remains hesitant. In a later phone conversation, neither of them says much directly; Auden describes their indirect, stilted exchange as the closest they have come in a long time. She ends the call because her friends are downstairs, but agrees to call again the next day. The small promise does not resolve their differences. It marks a change in what is possible between them: Auden can leave the conversation and still choose to return to it.

Second chances and the passage into college

The summer’s logic of trying again extends beyond the nighttime quest. As the Beach Bash approaches, Auden feels that the dance has already fallen short because it is not the real prom she might have attended the first time. Heidi offers another way to see it: a second opportunity can still become memorable if Auden takes part in making it so. The exchange echoes the summer’s larger movement. A substitute experience cannot become identical to the one missed, but it need not be meaningless for that reason.

By October, Auden is at Defriese University. She has learned to make the cafeteria’s mediocre, bottomless meal-plan coffee acceptable, and the campus routine has its own concrete texture: a jumbo cup with a travel lid, a backpack, an empty quad, and drizzle beginning as she returns to her dorm. The season of unscheduled nights has given way to college, but the change is not a return to the earlier pattern of living only for school. Her calls with her mother now range from studies to family matters, and she is willing to help her mother talk through her growing relationship with Finn when she is ready.

The family circumstances have also shifted after the summer. Robert returns to Heidi and Thisbe only gradually, through negotiations that change their working arrangements: Heidi goes back to Clementine’s part-time, while Robert teaches one course so they can share time with the baby. On days when neither can be home, Thisbe stays with Karen Stock or Weymar students who receive clothes from the store. Robert continues trying to sell his novel and begins another, writing late at night; he is also available to talk when Auden is awake during an all-nighter. The summer before college therefore sits between two forms of change: Auden’s move toward friendship and experience, and the family’s slower effort to reorganize itself. It does not erase what came before, but it gives Auden a first sustained chance to live beyond waiting for her real life to begin.