Summer. It had been my favorite season and it always would be. My fondest memories were of summer time. Running through sprinklers, laughing with friends, earning badges. Especially the days when we followed Isabella into the familiar backyard of Phineas and Ferb. That backyard was a trap where all the kids in the neighborhood would wander into and spend the day outside enjoying whatever latest invention had been built by the town geniuses.

The sharpest, most painful memory I have, however, was also in summer. The day the house emptied and the backyard was abandoned because Phineas and Ferb had moved away. The summer following that day was the emptiest of my memory and suddenly I realized how woven into my life they had been and I'm not even sure they knew my name. Everyone realized this. Friends that I thought I was so close to went unspoken to all summer as we realized our only common interest were our times jumping through whatever hoops were necessary to get another miracle built in that backyard.

It was strange but by next summer we had learned to cope, even though Isabella, Buford, and Baljeet never really got over it. We never forgot though, we would all laugh and talk about that time we spent a day floating in a bubble, or the time we waited at the finish line as they raced around the world, or the day we built a spa. It was sad. The strangest moment though was when I got older and I realized that the government was years away from shrinking technology and that passing through matter was physically impossible.

So I tried, we all tried, to tell our parents and our out of town friends and they all shook their heads and laughed at how vivid a child's imagination can be. I felt sick. I even skipped my second day of high school and sat in my room trying to see if I could imagine myself away, but no beautiful inventions sat in my room. The next day I comforted a sobbing Isabella who had been convinced she was completely insane and I realized we must be broken because suddenly we were older and we had completely lost our imagination.

Because that was all it had been. Those summers had been a dream created by brilliant young kids who at the time didn't know reality from fantasy. That's what we all agreed on. Even at seventeen it still haunted us. I wrote a lot because of that, and I would draw all the time. I would try so hard to get lost in my imagination to see those things again just so that I would know that it wasn't real and I would stop thinking about it.

But I wasn't thinking about imagining anything when my phone rang. My mind was preoccupied with getting a summer job. Fantasy's didn't fill my head when I flipped open the cell and muttered a greeting. I was too busy with colleges and financial issues. I wasn't dreaming when Gretchen nearly shrieked into my ear. "Look out your window! There is a roller coaster in the Flynn-Fletcher yard!"

I was wide awake as I sprinted down the street and met with Isabella and the others at the corner. I wasn't dreaming when we threw open the gate and stood staring in awe at the metal monster that twisted through the streets and up to the heavens. Two young men stood with their backs to us admiring the ride before the one with bright green hair glanced back and nudged the shorter red-head who turned quickly and smiled. He greeted us with a casual "Hey," before asking who wanted the first ride.

And as the fifteen of us who were so lucky to raise our hands first felt our hair whip in the wind and our stomachs drop at the height we knew that it had always been real. Wonderfully real.

Aaaand. Cut.

Review, please and thank you!