The world according to Summer They had got into the house without further incident, and Raine was wrestling Summer out of her cloak and shoes, the latter of which sparkled with pink lights when touched or named.
"We're going to put your cloak and shoes by the couch. Look and feel, so you know where they are later," Raine instructed, but Summer was already wiggling away and crawling across the floor. "And you should walk - she can, she's just being lazy," she informed Professor Xavier. Summer stopped by something that was flashing cheerfully.
“Ball!” she declared, staring at the glowing toy. She looked back to Raine. “Ball!” she exclaimed, with a smile.
“No, ball is in your bag. That’s a caterpillar,” she explained, looking over at the toy.
“Shoe,” Summer tried again. These were the main things in her life that glowed. As she said the word, he own shoes flashed their pink lights happily at her, in spite of how badly pronounced it had been. “Shoe!” she declared again.
“Yes, good girl,” Raine praised. “Pink ones are your shoes.”
“Shoe,” she declared again, looking at the other thing.
“No, that one is still caterpillar,” Raine tried to explain.
Summer pouted. She knew ‘shoe’ and ‘ball.’ Sometimes when she said them, it got excited claps and happy voices, but when she used them to talk about other glowing things she saw, she usually got just a lot of nonsense in return. It was disappointing. Giving this new object up as a bad job, she sat down. There were other people there, she knew that much. There was one big one and one small one. Auntie Raine had said they were not going to the library, but being with other pairs of adults and children was what they did there, and she still wanted that to be the case, so she decided this could be a new type of library because why shouldn’t it be? It was not like the library in that no one was singing yet. Well, she could fix that. She let out a string of babble with a very definite tune, and looked up expectantly.
“I don’t think they know the hello song,” Raine smiled, rather amused, “I told you, we aren’t going to the library. This is Professor Xavier’s house,” Raine reminded her.
“Uh-huh!” Summer replied, insistently. And it was hard to know whether this was a contradiction, or whether because Auntie Raine had said ‘hello song’ and ‘library’ which was what Summer wanted. She knew ‘no’ as a command (she didn’t always follow it, but she knew what it was supposed to mean) but negation got a bit lost at sentence level sometimes, especially when it clashed with what she wanted to be happening. Either way, Summer was very clear right now on what she wanted. She repeated her string of melody. She also clapped her hands a couple of times too because apparently the new people were slow on the uptake as they had not yet joined in.