The Lemonade STand

Anouk Shin

By the time I was eleven, I had heard much about the lemonade stand behind the playground, but I had never seen it. Everyone knew about it, even Aisha, the new girl from Pakistan, who told me with wide, horse-like eyes as we shared her mother’s naan: “Feifei said there is a girl at the counter. No one knows who she is. That is creepy, no?” 

“You know what’s creepier?” I leaned towards her and whispered dramatically, “Apparently, a family leaves every summer. ‘Cause they bought lemonade from the stand.” 

Aisha’s mouth fell open. “Really?” 

“Totally,” I said, and realized how uncomfortable the grass felt, and how quiet everything was at sundown. That summer was a still one. Slow time. No wind. Unusually humid for a Midwestern August. I wanted something big to hold me. 

“Let’s play at the Scary Tree.” 

Aisha nodded and followed me in that eager, deferential fashion of one new to the land. When I dusted the grime off my shorts, she did too. When I adjusted the pink plastic clip pinning back my bangs, she twisted her coarse, dark hair between her fingers. 

Like everything else in the Commonwealth Terrace Student Housing Cooperative, the path to the Scary Tree—an unusually large, deformed willow—was ancient and crumbling under the weight of a thousand little feet. Aisha and I stepped gingerly along the rotting concrete and plucked the fresh dandelions that adorned the cracks. 

“What do your parents study?” I asked. This was a standard introductory question in the neighborhood. My father studied books and words—boring. Miguel’s father studied money—also boring. Feifei’s mother studied airplanes—exponentially cooler. 

Aisha paused. I could see the gears turning behind her hazel eyes, working to string a sentence. I knew this pause well. On first impression, English often tasted better swallowed, looked prettier than the sum of its sounds. 

“My Baba studies maths… I think.” She pointed to the half-finished dandelion crown in my hands, “Can you show me how to make one?”

* * *

We reached the Scary Tree, golden wreaths tangled in our hair, and Aisha wanted to pretend we were squirrels. I had outgrown pretend play years ago, but because the sunset had reached full bloom, and because the red-orange glow behind her made her look otherworldly, ephemeral, I said, “Sure. Let’s say your fur is dark brown with like, beige spots.”

Aisha smiled with her whole face. “What is your color?”  

“Just plain brown. But greyish.” I hoisted myself up on a low branch. “C’mon, let’s climb to our houses.” 

Every child at Commonwealth Terrace had their own way of climbing the Scary Tree, and mine was the most excessively difficult. It relied on the stubbier branches, which were harder to balance, and required large jumps upwards that seemed almost impossible until you tried it. If it had been anybody else, I would have scrambled up first, just to show off. But Aisha and I climbed the easiest way together, limbs jumbled in the smooth branches, giddy with the smell of sun-soaked wood. 

From our high spot in the tree, we could see most of the neighborhood. I hugged a large bough with my legs, sloth-like. Aisha did the same. Then I closed my eyes and listened to the droopy willow leaves rustle around us. I liked to think they spoke their own language. Maybe, in green whispers, they gossiped about us. Maybe they told us we smelled like sweat, right in front of our faces. 

It took me some time to realize Aisha was talking. The cadence of her accent had joined the leaves and the wind, soft and omnipresent. 

I opened my eyes. “What did you say?” 

“I said, I think that your squirrel name would b—” She froze. 

“Be what?” 

Her hand clutched mine, warm and sticky with dandelion milk. 

“What?” I followed her gaze. 

“There is no girl,” she whispered hoarsely, “there is no girl.” 

The lemonade stand stood on a patch of light grass, looking startlingly neglected in the dense, lush weeds around it. Everything about it was empty. The cash box was open but housed no quarters. The glasses, sweating in the stagnant heat, droplets running down their sides like fat tears, were only filled with ice. There was no lemonade in the pitcher. And there was no girl. 

* * *

I saw the stand again the summer after seventh grade, when I began to argue with all of my mirrors. 

By then, the years had shared a layer of sameness. The coming and going of seasons and immigrant families and children. One from Mexico and another from Portugal. Our third from China, from Somalia, Kazakhstan, and, to my father’s delight, a small family from South Korea. The smell of spices rising with daybreak and dying with twilight. A deep, unspoken reverence for the English language, for academia, that haunted the neighborhood like the Holy Ghost at witching hour, as fathers and mothers stayed up to write their dissertations. Aisha, smiling between white bedsheets hung to dry. Aisha, swinging her legs in our spot in the Scary Tree. 

In this way, the weeks repeated themselves, but I could not stay still. After school, I often made my way to the patch of grass at the back of the playground, backpack bouncing in my wake, and waited for nothing until evening crept into the sky. And now, with the summer half-baked in July, I was more restless. Every morning, I ran to the lemonade stand like a girl possessed, and every morning, I was met with the same patch. 

I did not see Aisha sprint beside me that day. She materialized, sometimes—a dash of black, a whiff of turmeric. 

“Hey,” she greeted, a little out of breath, and I did a double-take. Her thick waves of hair were replaced by what looked like a DIY pixie cut, messy and uneven and too short in the wrong places. But it was not bad on her at all. If anything, I thought, the cut had freed her features and made them prettier. 

“Wow,” I gasped. “Your dad’s gonna kill you.” 

“Dad’s way too into writing right now. I don’t even think he’s noticed.” She shrugged. I imagined Mr. Sheikh at his computer, fingers busy on the keyboard. His dissertation was due in two years, the same time as my father's. 

“Where are you going?” Aisha asked. 

 “Hm?” 

“You’ve been running somewhere every morning. Where are you going?” 

“Wha—are you stalking me?”

Aisha rolled her eyes. “Seo-yoon.” She said my name just the way I liked it: every syllable pronounced with equal care. Nothing efficient, nothing clipped away. “I can literally see your kitchen from my kitchen.” 

I briefly wondered where Aisha had picked up the word “literally.” Her English had improved astronomically in the last two years. All that was left of her Pakistani accent was a rare, subtle lilt in the vowel, a gentle roll of the tongue. Some kids did not believe Aisha had lived in Pakistan for most of her life. I did. It was familiar, that whittling, sharpening, polishing of language.

“Don’t laugh.” 

“I won’t,” said Aisha, grinning. 

“Really, don’t. Really. I’m serious.” 

Aisha’s grin morphed into an eye roll. “I said, I won’t.” 

“Okay,” I breathed. “I’ve been looking for the lemonade stand.” 

If I had not been staring at my sneakers and the way they crossed, perpendicularly, to the weed-packed crack in the sidewalk, I would have seen Aisha’s shoulders stiffen. I would have noticed how the crude ends of her pixie cut bristled, like a threatened cat, and how quickly she stuffed her hands into her overall pockets. I would have seen her feet mirror mine, two pairs of weathered Converse bridging a gap between crumbled cement. 

But what I heard was her voice, a little flat. “So?” 

“So what?” 

“Are we gonna look?” 

* * *

Aisha and I walked in silence. As we made our way down the woodchip paths and crooked concrete, the usual neighborhood cacophony greeted us: hopscotch counting, chalk scratches, basketballs and jump ropes beating away at sidewalks. Someone shrieked “WATERGUN FIGHT!!!” as we passed the Scary Tree, which had become much less daunting ever since we started junior high. Still knotted and deformed, but thin-haired and hunched over, like it was finally mortal. 

Aisha fiddled with a dandelion, plucking out the yellow fuzz, smushing it, and letting it stain her fingers. She pinched the neck between her thumb and forefinger, piercing flesh. Pearl-white milk oozed from the dent. 

“I feel bad sometimes,” she said. 

“About what?” 

“Picking dandelions.” 

“They’re weeds,” I said. 

“I guess.” Aisha paused. “But they have super long roots. Like, longer than the stems.” 

“That’s most roots,” I muttered. 

I was only half-listening. We had turned onto the foot-trodden trail that led into the playground. I took a deep breath. There was no reason to believe the stand would be there now. There was no reason to believe it was ever there at all. 

“You don’t get it. They grow up to six feet.” 

I hummed in distracted agreement. The dirt beneath me felt tender and alive, as if all the roots had suddenly decided to hold hands and form an earthly web of connections. 

We were close. I saw the unruly weeds that announced the playground entrance, messes of thistle spotted with bright magenta flowers. Then our feet broke the bushes with a soft crunch, and there it was. Peeking out between the dull plastic slide and the eroded firefighter pole. I reached for Aisha on instinct, but found nothing to hold on to. She stood rigid beside me, eerily silent. 

The lemonade stand was full this time. I could smell the lemons from where we stood, bitter and sour like rot. I saw the pitcher. The cash box. The glasses. A girl behind the counter with long, black tresses cascading down to her pelvis. She wore a simple hanbok. But where her face should have been, there was nothing. Just an empty plane of pale skin. 

I choked back a scream and grasped Aisha’s arm. “Oh God. Oh God. We’re leaving.”

She did not budge. I shouted her name and, with both hands, pulled her hard. 

“Just like Baba said,” Aisha chanted as I dragged her out of the playground. “The chudail, I see…she’s…Baba…Baba…Baba…” 

When we made it out, panting, I thought of a story my father had told me long ago. Once upon a time, there lived a woodcutter who ventured into the mountains at night. Under the moonlight, he spotted a young girl in the woods, bending over to pick up a chestnut. Miss, the woodcutter called out, Miss, the mountain is not safe. When the girl did not respond, the woodcutter placed his hand on her shoulder. She turned to him. She was faceless and shiny, like an egg. They called her dalgyal gwishin. The egg ghost. 

* * *

Aisha’s family left for Pakistan a week later. I saw her once before she was gone, in the remnants of her childhood bedroom. We sat on makeshift chairs made of U-Haul boxes. I cried and cried and watched my tears stain the cardboard. Aisha said nothing. She held my right hand and absentmindedly turned it over as she used to do with the smoothest rocks in her collection. 

For several blurry days, I could not sleep. I am not sure how long I had been awake when I crept downstairs. The living room was enveloped in a special kind of sanctity that comes after a night of good study. My father sat on a dining chair waiting for me, a whirring computer open and papers and books scattered around him, glasses pulled down the bump of his nose. 

I poured a glass of water, even though I was not thirsty. I drank half of it in a big gulp. 

“Did you see her?” I asked into the darkness. 

My father thumbed the tip of his pencil. The blue light from his computer cast deep shadows on his face. He looked older than he was. 

“I did,” he said. “I saw the dalgyal gwishin. She told me I wouldn’t make it here with books. She asked me why I had come.” 

“What did you say?” 

“I didn’t say anything. And I didn’t buy her lemonade.”

Anouk Shin (she/her) is a writer from St. Paul, Minnesota. She is an alumna of The Adroit Journal Summer Mentorship Program. Her writing has been recognized by the Alliance for Young Artists and Writers and appears in Eucalyptus Lit.