Last Summer (4 page)

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Authors: Holly Chamberlin

BOOK: Last Summer
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4
T
he long metal chains that held the swing to the support rods squeaked as Meg kicked off halfheartedly. She knew she shouldn’t be wasting time. There was still a lot to do before her mother came home from work, like vacuum the rugs in the living room and front hall and do a load of laundry and change the sheets on her bed and on Petey’s. But she just couldn’t make herself get up off that swing and do anything productive.
She wished the housework would magically do itself. Meg wished a lot of things would take care of themselves or go away or change. Like, she wished she were taller, not five feet three inches, where she had been stuck for over a year. She wished she were naturally thin, not grossly thin like runway models with their bones sticking out all over the place, just thin. She wished her hair were a richer shade of brown, or maybe even auburn. She fully intended to color her hair as soon as she was old enough to do it without getting in trouble with her mother. Mrs. Giroux didn’t seem to believe in hair color; her own brown hair was pretty streaked with gray. It drove Meg a bit crazy that her mother didn’t take more interest in her appearance. Lots of things had been driving Meg crazy for a long time now. Her mother said it was just hormones. Meg wasn’t so sure.
Meg sighed, and for a moment was glad she was alone. It was hot, and swinging had made her sweat enough so that her glasses kept sliding down her nose. There just wasn’t a cool way to push glasses back up your nose. Meg had tried in front of a mirror and every way just made you look stupid or like a definitely not cool kind of nerd. (She wouldn’t mind being a cool nerd. Cool nerds grew up to make lots of money.)
Anyway, she wished she didn’t have to wear glasses. The frames were okay, even though she’d had them now for three years and was dying for a newer, more stylish pair, maybe something in purple or blue. Worse, though, was that on really bright days she had to use clip-on sunglasses, as her family couldn’t afford to buy a separate pair of prescription sunglasses. Most days Meg preferred to squint rather than to use the clip-ons, which, she was convinced, only old people used. She would love to be able to wear cool sunglasses, which you could get almost anywhere and which didn’t have to cost a lot, either. She had seen some fantastic frames in Goodwill for three dollars! But she could only wear cool sunglasses if she could wear contacts, and that was another issue. Meg’s mother only allowed her to wear contacts on special occasions, and there hadn’t been one of those since Easter. According to her mother, regular old Sunday Mass didn’t count as special enough for “wasting” the money on a pair of disposable contacts. And the only reason her mother had let her get contacts in the first place was she had promised to make a one-month supply last for a year. It was unfair and very frustrating.
Meg stopped swinging and kicked at the dirt with her foot. Her whole life was unfair and frustrating. Once, in a fit of anger or maybe it was annoyance, her mother had told her to stop being so discontented with everything in her life. “Life is tough,” she had snapped. “Get used to it.” Meg remembered shouting back something like, “Why should I have to get used to it? Just because you have?” That exchange had not ended well. She had lost Internet privileges for a week and had to clean the bathroom floor for a month.
A slight squeak of a door hinge caused Meg to look up and across to the Patterson yard. Rosie was coming out of the door to the small screened-in room at the back of her house.
Meg lifted her hand in a wave. The gesture was automatic, though the shout of greeting she was about to call out died in her throat.
Rosie ignored her wave (or maybe, Meg thought, she hadn’t seen it) and walked back to the toolshed at the edge of the Patterson property. She went inside and a few minutes later emerged with a large, empty clay pot in her arms. Again without acknowledging Meg, she went back inside the house. Meg heard the door closing firmly behind her.
Suddenly, Meg felt sad, and embarrassed, and very alone, sitting on that rusty old swing. There originally had been two swings, but somewhere along the line the chains on the other swing had broken. For over a year the useless swing had sat right where it had fallen, until Meg’s mother got tired of asking Meg’s father to either reattach it or take it to the dump. Finally, Mrs. Giroux had hauled away the broken swing herself. That was back when Mr. Giroux still lived with them and Petey was still a baby. Petey was a toddler when her father had left them. Or had her mother really thrown him out? Meg couldn’t remember clearly the sequence of events or the messy details that had led to her father’s final and for-good exit. Not that she missed him. Much. Not that she cared. Not usually. Now, if he had been anything like Rosie’s dad ...
The thought of Mr. Patterson, upright and kind, so vastly different from her own father, filled Meg with sadness. For as long as she lived she would remember the day her mother had made her apologize to Rosie; it was just after Rosie had left school a few weeks before the end of the term. And Meg had so wanted to apologize, so very much, but those moments when she stood in the Pattersons’ living room in front of Mr. and Mrs. Patterson and the girl who had always been her best friend, her cheeks red and burning with shame, well, those moments had been the most awful moments in her entire life. She barely remembered what she had said exactly, and she thought that when she had stopped talking Rosie had mumbled something like “Okay,” but she couldn’t be sure. What she did remember very clearly was coming home and sobbing for hours alone in her room, a chair propped up under the doorknob so her mother couldn’t come in. Not that she had tried.
Anyway, even if Rosie had accepted her apology, Meg didn’t think Rosie really believed that she was sorry. Ever since then Rosie had been avoiding her, once even running back into her house when Meg came out of her own. Mrs. Patterson had frowned and glared the whole time Meg and her mother had been in that living room, and Meg was 100 percent certain Mrs. Patterson hated her now. Which was also awful because Meg had loved spending time at her house. She was a really good cook and was always so calm and happy, or at least she acted that way, and she let Meg try on some of her jewelry and the awesome clothes she had made for herself. And last year, for Meg’s fourteenth birthday, Mrs. Patterson had made something special for her, too, a really cool top with a faux necklace sewn on the front. Rosie had thought it was too flashy, but that was because her idea of fashion was a comfy flannel shirt and also because she didn’t read
Teen Vogue
and
InStyle
like Meg did. Not that she had a subscription to either magazine, but an older girl down the street did and was cool about giving each issue to Meg when she had finished reading it. Sometimes a page or two had been torn out but, as Meg had heard her mother mutter on occasion, “beggars can’t be choosers.”
Well, she certainly didn’t consider herself a beggar, but she understood what her mother meant. “Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth” was another way you could put it. Her mother was full of sayings like that. She said she had gotten them all from her parents. Meg had never really known her maternal grandparents. They both had died before she was two. She had seen pictures, of course, but looking at the pictures didn’t tell her much about Harold and Eileen Donaldson, other than that they seemed pretty stern. But maybe they just hadn’t liked having their picture taken. Her mother didn’t like having her picture taken, but her father was always mugging for the camera. Like anyone would want a picture of him, with his missing front teeth and scraggly little beard and sagging stomach. Ugh.
A little yellow butterfly was fluttering around the kind of sad-looking roses her mother was trying to grow by the fence that separated their yard from the Pattersons’. Meg thought it would be nice to be an insentient thing like an insect, even if only for a day. All that mattered to an insect was that very moment, and the insect didn’t even know that the moment mattered, just that the moment was ... there. If she were a butterfly or even a mosquito she wouldn’t be thinking ahead to the long summer months and wondering how the heck she was going to survive them. Because there wasn’t much to look forward to this summer, not without Rosie’s companionship. Not even the prospect of her fifteenth birthday in August excited her. There definitely would be no gift from Rosie or Mrs. Patterson, and certainly no handmade birthday card. And no birthday sleepover, either, where she and Rosie would try to stay awake all night but fall asleep by one or two o’clock. Gloomily, Meg wondered if anyone at all would send her a card. Her father usually forgot, though in past years Meg had overheard her mother on the phone reminding him that her birthday was coming up. So maybe it wasn’t that he forgot to send her a card. Maybe it was that he just didn’t want to. Petey would give her a card, something he had made with construction paper and glitter. Petey loved glitter.
The thought of her little brother brought a smile to Meg’s face. Lately, the thought of Petey was the only thing that could. But the smile disappeared as rapidly as it had come. Since she had told Rosie’s secret to Mackenzie and the others, which Mackenzie had then texted to almost everyone at school, Mrs. Patterson had refused to have anything to do not only with Meg and Mrs. Giroux, but also with Petey. Meg felt horrible guilt about that, but at the same time she felt angry that Mrs. Patterson could take out her anger on a totally innocent little boy. Maybe Meg deserved to be punished, but Petey certainly didn’t. She was the one who had messed up.
How, how, how could she have been so awful? She had never planned to reveal Rosie’s secret to anyone, ever. Her mother had taught her how important it was to keep your word as well as how important it was to keep a friend’s secret. Unless, of course, it was a secret that could really get someone hurt, like a crime or something. And Rosie’s secret certainly hadn’t been dangerous. Well, only if it had remained a secret.
Meg would never forget that fateful day. She was in downtown Yorktide, window-shopping and trying to outrun a bad mood, when she spotted Mackenzie and Courtney and Jill standing outside the pharmacy. She had stopped in her tracks, her mind suddenly racing. Her feelings were a jumble of fear, frustration, and anger.
She was just so fed up with the whole situation. Rosie just never fought back when Mackenzie and the others bullied her. She never stood up for herself. Meg was so tired of trying to help and of being rebuffed. So many times she had been on the verge of taking matters into her own hands and telling her mother what was going on with Rosie and Mackenzie. It would solve everything, she thought. Her mother would tell Mrs. Patterson and then Mr. Patterson would step in and everything would come out into the light and ...
And Rosie might never talk to her again. And Meg would have been branded a tattletale. And she might be dragged into whatever the Pattersons decided to do, like confronting Mackenzie and her father, Mr. Egan... . No, Meg had decided time and again, telling her mother would solve nothing. It would only complicate things. She had grown so angry with Rosie for putting her in this frustrating position. She felt like an accomplice to something wrong, but to what, exactly? To Rosie’s self-destruction? That was sick. Rosie had pulled Meg into her nightmare.
And so, that day in downtown Yorktide, Meg had found herself walking toward the girls who had been making Rosie’s life, and Meg’s life, miserable for months. It was like some other Meg had taken over her mind and was operating her feet as she approached Mackenzie and her crew. She felt helpless to stop. She felt as if she were watching herself from a great distance, crying out, “No! Don’t!” It was a terrible few moments.
And then she was standing in front of Mackenzie, Courtney, and Jill. She remembered Mackenzie sneering. “What do you want?” she had demanded, the emphasis on “you.” Meg Giroux, loser friend of loser Rosie Patterson.
And then the words were coming out, almost but not entirely against her will. “Rosie Patterson used to wet her bed. Until, like, fifth grade.”
The moment, no, the split second after she had spoken, Meg felt as if she were going to throw up.
“So?” Mackenzie had answered, looking to her cohorts and then back to Meg. “Why would we care?”
There was nothing Meg could say to that.
With a laugh to show just how pathetic they found her, the girls had walked away, leaving Meg standing rooted to the spot and still fighting nausea. How she made it home after that without getting hit by a car she couldn’t recall. She did remember praying that nothing would happen as a result of her misconduct, that Mackenzie would just forget what she had told her and leave Rosie in peace. Once she was safely in her bedroom she actually got down on her knees like in church and begged God to hear her prayers.
But if God had indeed heard her prayers, He had chosen not to answer. The very next afternoon it seemed as if the entire school—at least, the entire ninth and tenth grades—knew that Rosie Patterson had wet her bed. And the only way that information could have gotten out was through Meg. There was absolutely no use in trying to deny her guilt. She had tried to apologize right then and there, at Rosie’s locker, with kids swarming past, some of them laughing and pointing, but Rosie wouldn’t even look at her. Even at the time Meg felt that it was more like Rosie couldn’t look at her, that her shame and sadness were too great. Not anger. Meg would have preferred that Rosie punch her in the nose rather than look so ... defeated. She had looked, Meg thought now, remembering, as if she had deserved the betrayal.
And that had been the last day of Rosie’s normal ninth-grade life. She had completed her classes from home and missed out on all the end-of-the-year social events. Meg had participated in those events—a trip to Portland, Judy Smith’s party, and the festivities at school—but without enthusiasm or interest. All she felt was shame. Her father had said nothing at all to her about the incident, even though Meg knew her mother had told him what had happened. Her mother had been seriously disappointed in her, though at least she had acknowledged that Meg’s admitting her bad behavior right away was a good thing. Meg had accepted responsibility for her misdeed and her mother had forgiven her. But still, she felt lousy. It was good to feel genuine remorse, but it was not good to have done the thing for which you felt the remorse in the first place.

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