Wandering Lights

I keep thinking about the brochure my friend JY brought back from her summer in Santa Barbara when we were in the 8th grade. There was a horse taking carrots from a girl’s hand, red, yellow, and blue water slides on giant lawns, a boy with sun-bleached hair, translucent blue eyes, and a huge smile catching a football in the field, and a big group of kids and their chaperones posing in front of a towering Ferris wheel under the orange and purple sky.

Every single image was drenched in the golden sun, dripping with vivid colors. I traced the pictures with my fingertip. My whole body ached, craving a crayon-colored summer in a place far away from home. I held the brochure on my chest as if it were my golden ticket to the wonderful new world. Only two thousand dollars for the whole summer, she said…only two thousand dollars. That was a ticket we could not afford. I carefully folded the brochure and slipped it into the plastic sheath of my scrapbook.