“I’m kind of like wherever the wind takes me,” she confesses, a freewheeling spirit who has not lost track of where she comes from (the Midwest) and why she had to leave her underpaid vanilla employment — and the small-minded men who kept trying to tie her down — and join the porn circus.

If you had to guess Summer’s vanilla employment just by looking at her, you’d probably say preschool teacher — and you’d be correct. Right after the pandemic, she found herself trying to survive on that salary, plus some babysitting gigs, and, like most Americans, she found herself one big bill away from financial disaster. In her case, it was a car bill.

“The brake line broke, and my old car died,” she explains. “I had to get a new car. You need a car in Chicago, and especially where I moved later, in the cornfields in Northern Illinois. That’s when one of my friends said, ‘Just sell your underwear!’ and I’m like, ‘That’s not a thing,’ and they’re like, ‘Yes, it is…’”

Summer (although she wasn’t Summer yet) checked out PantyDeal.com, which bills itself as the “World’s #1 Marketplace for Used Panties.” Like Alice jumping into the rabbit hole, she had no idea whatsoever about where that decision would lead.

“I made an account and I sold the first pair for like $100!” she marvels. “I was like, ‘No fucking way.’ So then I was doing that, and then people would say, ‘You’re doing this already, why don’t you cam,’ and I would cam without showing my face, because I was still teaching pre-school. And then people offered me more money to show my face. So then I just stopped caring, and I was like, ‘All right, show my face.’ So that’s basically like how it started.”

Part of the reason why Summer stopped caring was that the cost of living was making her day job increasingly non-viable.

“I was the hardest worker at that school,” she shares. “I’m working 40-plus hours a week, and I’m making $930 every two weeks, and I got nothing to show for it. I’m busting my ass. All responsibilities get put on me. I was making $17 an hour as a lead teacher, I had my own classroom, full of 2- and 3-year-olds that I had to care for by myself. I had to do parent-teacher conferences. I had to lesson-plan. I had to clean shit and piss and vomit up off the floor and the walls. I should have been getting hazard pay!”

With the car bills mounting, the inherent tension of the lowly paid job did likewise.

“And if you’re stressed out, then the kids are gonna get stressed out,” Summer reminisces, now far from that midwestern classroom. “They feed off of that energy. It was just a hot mess. So that’s why I was like, ‘I don’t fucking care. I’m gonna do what I’m gonna do. If they’re gonna fire me because of what I need to do to pay my bills.’”

Her face lights up as she lifts her hand.

“Look! A ladybug. That’s pretty cool. He just landed on my finger. Bye, friend. I love bugs. Back at home, I have tarantulas and praying mantises as pets, besides my bunny Gus!”

Then we resume her porn superheroine origin story (and, yes, Summer would have made a superior choice for the DCU Supergirl).

“But yeah, that’s why I was fine taking the risk. I was starting to resent the teaching job. I used to love going to work and just being there, and then I hated going to work to the point that I fantasized about crashing my car on the way there. I was crying in the bathroom. I’m even spending all my money on buying things for this classroom, and I can’t pay for my car.”

Before stumbling into sex work, Summer thought that the only socially acceptable way she may be allowed to get out of her bind was by depending on a man.

“I don’t want to do that because you never know when a man’s gonna decide, ‘Oh, I don’t like you anymore. Bye,’” she says. “The only way I was told I could function as a teacher was if I got married and found a man to support me. I don’t want to do that because I can’t fucking depend on them. One day they love you, the next day they hate you. I’m not doing that, absolutely not.”

She mentions the recent plot in the third season of “Euphoria,” when Cassie’s marriage to Nate collapses and she chooses a life of sex work. Critics of the show focused on the ‘OMG, she’s doing OnlyFans’ aspect of the story, but fewer remarked on how the show accurately depicted a young woman having been let down by an early marriage to a failing man.

“They were showing exactly that,” she says. “I’m not going to sit here and wait till I find a great guy or something to depend on, and then what? I’m going to feel like I’m stuck with him because I need him to pay my bills. No, I was like, ‘That’s my worst nightmare. I’m not doing it.’ So that’s why I was like, I really need to think about this and change it. And although teaching was my passion, and I studied that for so long, I had to just let it go, and it makes me sad. Sometimes I miss the kids. They were never the problem. I miss getting excited to see you, being their favorite person, teaching them stuff, and being proud. But I wouldn’t change how things are now. My family’s cool with what I do now. When I told them, they were like, ‘The light is back in your eyes. You look so much happier.’”

After her brief stint camming face-on, Summer took the next obvious step for a budding 2020s sex worker.

“So, yeah, then I started my OnlyFans,” she laughs. “Actually, scratch that, I was already doing video calls on Skype. So my face was out there and I had some fans. And I still had a boyfriend. But then I went to a bachelorette party in Lake Geneva in Wisconsin. This is like Midwest people shit! Geneva is just like the closest getaway from Chicago without being Six Flags or something like that. You drive there, go get a hotel or Airbnb, have a little vacation. So we went to the Chippendales show. My boyfriend at the time told me I couldn’t go, that I had to stay at the Airbnb by myself while my friends went to see the strippers, but I didn’t want to be left out, so he broke up with me. He did! Then my friend gave the stripper $1 and was like, ‘She just got broken up with, would you dance with her?’ and then he gave me dances all night, and then he gave me his number, and I told him to come to the Airbnb and give my friend a show. And he did — but after that we were chilling and he showed me his OnlyFans page. And I was like, ‘Damn!’ So that’s how that all started.”

So, indirectly, she has that controlling ex-boyfriend to thank for her current success?

Summer flashes the smile.

“Oh my God — he’s the worst. That’s the one that unlocked my sporting skills. So everything happens for a reason. Thank you. Next!”

But starting an OnlyFans and growing it are two different things, and Summer quickly zeroed in on Twitter and making videos as the next logical steps to thrive. Through Twitter, she found a “guy with camera” who offered to shoot a scene with her. After that initiatory experience, the GWC suggested she get in touch with a girl who was recruiting for the ExCoGi families of sites.

Summer ended up shooting several scenes for the veteran pro-am, casting scene studio that has served as the launching pads for several industry names — but also a large number of amateurs and one-and-dones. In Summer’s case, as soon as her first couple of scenes for ExCoGi dropped, her phone started buzzing in Chicago. Many in the industry had decided she had the elusive “It factor.” Something about her enthusiasm — effortless and confident. The real, vocal orgasms. And yes, the smile.

“I did like the first couple, and then ExCoGi had me come back for a bunch more, so I was like, ‘Okay, maybe I did good…’ And I liked it. I enjoyed it. I loved watching myself. And someone suggested I reach out to Spiegler. I said, ‘I don’t know who that is,’ and then I looked him up and I’m like, ‘Oh shit! All right, I’ll email him.’ But I’m not expecting anything because they said he doesn’t sign new girls, especially ones that aren’t in LA.”

After a couple of conversations with Spiegler and George, and to the shock of many industry observers who knew how hard it is to get on the fabled Spiegler’s roster, Summer was in.

“I bought my plane ticket right there,” she says. “A couple weeks later, I flew out to L.A. and did like a bunch of my shoots, and it was crazy. I didn’t even feel like life was real. And I was here for like all November 2025 shooting, and then I went home for the holidays. And my brain was convinced that it didn’t happen. But when it landed, I couldn’t wait to come back — and I’ve just been like shooting like crazy ever since after AVN.”

And the record shows she has been racking up the credits, with one of the most stellar first-year starlet runs in memory, including high-profile scenes for big studios and several more in the can.

The flipbook of first-year scenes is a blur from her point of view, but the highlight is “Masks,” her Deeper scene with Dan Damage released in May. With the storyline “a young woman is afraid of what she’ll become when a mask allows her to embrace her lustful nature,” the scene tapped into a more sophisticated, superglam persona than the string of “teen next door” bread-and-butter scenes she’s been offered to match her off-camera vibe.

“I looked so good,” she said, blushing. “I love watching my stuff to improve my performance, my angles, and get better. If I think I don’t look great, I know I need to do it different next time. I study the scenes.”

Only with a critical eye?

The smile, again.

“I mean, I do watch them with my Rose Toy nearby… Sometimes when I am watching them to study… I can do both at the same time. I literally did that yesterday.”

Summer also studies (with the Rose Toy nearby) other performers to improve her dirty talk.

“I feel like I run out of things to say,” she confesses. “I like to listen to the things other girls say and play off of that. I mean, there’s only so many things you can say when you’re getting fucked! I don’t want to be too annoying where I never shut up, but I also don’t want to be quiet where I’m not saying enough. In my normal sex life, I make noise pretty much the whole time. So I try to balance it. I try to give a little bit of my natural self, and then amp it up and do some acting, and then not do too much to not overkill it. But the people seem to think it’s pretty good.”

Yes, the people do. A year into her career, Summer is already graduating into group scenes, starting with two BBGs she really, really enjoyed, and even a BBGG.

“I’d like to do more BBGs. That’s what I love,” her eyes light up. “The first time I was with Donny Sins and Scotty P and the second time with Danny Mountain and Jovan Jordan. I’m craving a third — and a fourth and a fifth… Hi, Jules Jordan? Vixen? Kidding — whoever else wants me, that’d be really cool.”

Standing on the verge of her first porniversary, very much in Los Angeles but with one foot in her home state — home of Gus the bunny, the tarantulas and praying mantises — Summer reflects on how she wants to exist in the industry.

“I’m just a kind, approachable person. I’m very open to everybody, and I try to be nice to everyone. I want people to feel like I’m like the person that they can talk to, open up to if they have something they want to talk about. I just want to be that person that’s a comfort person for people, in all aspects. I care about the people that support me. I care about the people that I work with, and everybody that’s helped me. I’m passionate about this job, I love it, and I want to do it as long as I possibly can.

“I just want to be good vibes around everything.”