Read A Summer to Die for Free Online

of her fork, shaking her head. She started to laugh. "This family is absolutely nuts," she said. "I haven't the slightest idea what anyone is talking about. Molly, your nose."
    Molly grabbed a piece of Kleenex and clutched her nose. From behind her Kleenex she said haughtily, "I don'd know whad anyone is talking aboud either. Bud
I'm
going to camp, whether Meg does or nod."
    Then she giggled. Even Molly realized how silly she looked and sounded, talking from behind a wad of tissues. "Thad is," she added, "if by dose ever stobs bleeding."

4.

    All of a sudden I know how Dad feels when he completes a chapter of the book. Or Mom, when one of her plants suddenly blossoms, or she finishes a new section of the quilt, and goes around with a smile on her face all day, even when no one's looking. I know how Molly must have felt when Tierney McGoldrick asked her to go steady, which is what happened two weeks ago. She came home wearing his tiny gold basketball on a chain around her neck, and was so giggly and cheerful and bounced around so much that Mom finally had to tell her to calm down so that her newly normal nose wouldn't have a relapse.

    Molly's nose had finally stopped bleeding at the beginning of March, which is about the same time that the sun came out after a month of gray cold; Dr. Putnam in the village said that proved what he had thought, that the bad weather was causing her nosebleeds. Molly said she didn't care
what
caused them, she was just glad they were over, glad she could go back to school. Dad said he was sorry he hadn't bought stock in the Kleenex company.
    I've hardly seen the sun at all because I've been in my darkroom. My darkroom! It's finished; it's all finished, and perfect. My father did it, just the way he said he would, and everything is just the way I dreamed of it. There is
nothing
that my father can't do.
    The first pictures I developed were the ones of Will Banks. I'd had that roll of film tucked away in a drawer under my knee socks for almost two months. I was scared stiff when I developed it—scared that I had forgotten how, that I would do something wrong. But when I took the strip of negatives out of the tank and held it to the light, there were two pictures of the old house across the field, and then thirty-four pictures of Will, looking
at me in thirty-four different ways. I felt like a genius, like an artist.

    When the negatives were dry, I printed them all on one sheet. It's hard to see, from the negatives, exactly how a print will look, so I crossed my fingers again when I developed the contact sheet that would show me the real pictures for the first time. I stood there over the tray of developer and watched in the dim red light as the sheet changed from white to gray, and then saw the grays change to blacks and the shades become the faces of Will; after two minutes, there he was, looking up at me from the tray, thirty-four of him, still tiny, but complete.
    When it was ready I took it, still dripping wet, into the kitchen and laid it on the counter beside the sink. Mom was there, peeling potatoes, and she looked over, first curiously, and then as if she were really surprised.
    "That's Will Banks!" she said.
    "Of
course
it's Will Banks," I told her, grinning. "Isn't he beautiful?"
    She and I looked for a long time at all the tiny prints on the paper. There he was, lighting his pipe, and then smoking it, looking at me, half laughing. Then he leaned back in his chair—I had blown the focus on that one a little, when he leaned back, out of the range of focus. I should have realized that. But then there he was, sitting up straight, back in
sharp focus again, looking at me with his eyes bright with interest; I remembered that he had been asking me questions about the camera, how I determined what settings to use. Toward the end of the roll, his eyes were looking past me and far off, as if he were thinking about something in the distance. He had been telling me about a camera that he