A Summer to Die
Having a sister who is blonde and pretty and popular can be tricky if you’re like Meg – serious, hardworking, and, well, plain.But when Molly becomes seriously ill, Meg, no longer jealous, has to face up to something quite different: that Molly is not going to come home from the hospital, that Molly is going to die. Difficult to accept at the best of times, and when Meg has to cope with all the problems of growing up too, it’s the hardest thing she’s ever had to do.
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HarperCollinsChildrens’s Books, a division of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd, 77–85 Fulham Palace Road, Hammersmith, London W6 8JB
First published in the US by Houghton Miffiin Co. 1977
Published in Great Britain by Lions in 1990
Copyright © 1977 by Lois Lowry
Lois Lowry asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
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Source ISBN: 9780006735984
Ebook Edition © JUNE 2014 ISBN: 9780008100797
Version: 2014–08–18
Contents
A Summer to Die
I don’t know what time it was when something woke me up. I wasn’t sure what it was, but something was happening that made me afraid; I had that feeling along the edge of my back, that cold feeling you get when things aren’t going right. And it wasn’t a dream. I sat up in bed and looked round in the dark, shaking off whatever was left of sleep, and the feeling was still there, that something was very wrong.
“Molly,” I whispered. Stupid to whisper, if you want to wake someone up.
But she answered, as if she were already awake. Her voice was strange. Frightened, and puzzled. “Meg,” she said. “Call Mum and Dad, quick.” I ran.
It was Molly who drew the line.
She did it with chalk – a fat piece of white chalk left over from when we lived in town, had pavements, and used to play hopscotch, back when we were both younger. That piece of chalk had been around for a long time. She fished it out of a little clay dish that I had made in last year’s pottery class, where it was lying with a piece of string and a few paper clips and a battery that we weren’t quite sure was dead.
She took the chalk and drew a line right on the carpet. Good thing it wasn’t a fuzzy carpet or it never would have worked; but it was an old, worn, leftover carpet from the dining room of our other house: very flat, and the chalk made a perfect white line across the blue – and then, while I watched in amazement (because it was unlike Molly, to be so angry), she kept right on drawing the line up the wall, across the wallpaper with its blue flowers. She stood on her desk and drew the line up to the ceiling, and then she went back to the other side of the room and stood on her bed and drew the line right up to the ceiling on that wall, too. Very neatly. Good thing it was Molly who drew it; if I had tried, it would have been a mess, a wavy line and off centre. But Molly is very neat.
Then she put the chalk back in the dish, sat down on her bed, and picked up her book. But before she started to read again, she looked over at me (I was still standing there amazed, not believing that she had drawn the line at all) and said, “There. Now be as much of a slob as you want, only keep your mess on your side. This side is mine.”
When we lived in town we had our own rooms, Molly and I. It didn’t really make us better friends, but it gave us a chance to ignore each other more.
Funny thing about sisters. Well, about us, anyway; Dad says it’s unacademic to generalize. Molly is prettier than I am, but I’m cleverer than Molly. I want with my whole being to be something someday; I like to think that someday, when I’m grown up, people everywhere will know who I am, because I will have accomplished something important – I don’t even know for sure yet what I want it to be, just that it will be something that makes people say my name, Meg Chalmers, with respect. When I told Molly that once, she said that what she wants is to have a different name when she grows up, to be Molly Something Else, to be Mrs Somebody, and to have her children, lots of them, call her “Mother”, with respect, and that’s all she cares about. She’s content, waiting for that; I’m restless, and so impatient. She’s sure, absolutely sure, that what she’s waiting for will happen, just the way she wants it to; and I’m so uncertain, so fearful my dreams will end up forgotten somewhere, someday, like a piece of string and a paper clip lying in a dish.
Being both determined and unsure at the same time is what makes me the way I am, I think: hasty, impetuous, sometimes angry over nothing, often miserable about everything. Being so well sorted out in her own goals, and so assured of everything happening the way she wants and expects it to, is what makes Molly the way she is: calm, easy-going, self-confident, downright smug.
