A Summer to Die. Lois Lowry

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       Prologue

      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 СКАЧАТЬ