Read A Summer to Die for Free Online Page B

seems as if basketball is all he cares about."
    "Well, he's only sixteen, Molly." All of a sudden I realized that I sounded like Mom, and I giggled. So did Molly.
    "Hey, look, Meg," she said, handing her notebook to me. "You're such a good artist, and I can't draw at all. Can you help me make these look better?"
    She'd been drawing brides. Good old Molly. She's been drawing brides since she was five. Her drawing ability hadn't improved much in ten years, either, to tell the truth. But suddenly the idea of her drawing brides was kind of scary.
    I took the ball-point pen. "Look," I told her. "Your proportions are all off. The arms are too short, even though you've tried to hide it with all
those big bouquets of flowers. Just keep in mind that a woman's arms reach down to the middle of her thighs when she's standing up. Her elbows should reach her waist—look, your drawings all have elbows up by the bosom; that's why they look wrong. The necks are too long, too, but that's probably all right, because it makes them look glamorous. Fashion designers usually draw necks too long. If you look at the ads in Sunday's
New York Times,
you'll see—Molly?"

    "What?"
    "You're not thinking about getting
married?
"
    Molly got huffy and took back her drawings. "Of course I'm thinking about getting married. Not now, stupid. But someday. Don't you think about it?"
    I shook my head. "No, I guess I don't. I think about being a writer, or an artist, or a photographer. But I always think about myself alone, not with someone else. Do you think there's something wrong with me?" I meant the question seriously, but it was a hard question to ask, so I crossed my eyes and made a face when I asked it, and laughed.
    "No," she said thoughtfully, ignoring my facemaking, which was nice of her. "We're just different, I guess." She tucked the drawings into her notebook and put them on her desk very neatly, in line with her schoolbooks.
    "Like you're pretty, and I'm not," I pointed out. What a dumb thing to say.

    But I'll give Molly credit. She didn't try to pretend that it wasn't true. "You'll be pretty, Meg, when you get a little older," she said. "And I'm not sure it makes that much difference anyway, especially for you. Look at all the talent you have. And brains. I'm so
stupid.
What do I have, really, except curls and long eyelashes?"
    I ruin everything. I should have known that she meant it sincerely. Molly is never intentionally snide. But she doesn't realize how it feels, for someone with stringy hair and astigmatism to hear something like that. How could she? I can't imagine how it would feel to be beautiful; how could Molly know how it feels
not
to be?
    And I blew up, as usual. I struck a phony model's pose in front of the mirror and said sarcastically, "Oh, poor me, what do I have except curls and long eyelashes?"
    She looked surprised, and hurt. Then embarrassed, and angry. Finally, because she didn't know what else to do, she picked up a pile of her school papers and threw them at me: a typical Molly gesture; even in anger, she does things that can't possibly hurt. The papers flew all over, and landed on my bed and the floor. She stood there a moment looking at the mess, and then said, "There, now you 52
should feel right at home, with stuff all over so it looks like a pigpen." And she stormed out of the room, slamming the door, which was useless, because it fell open again.

    I left the papers where they were, and Molly and I didn't talk to each other when we went to bed that night. Neither of us is very good at apologizing. Molly just waits a while after a fight, and then she smiles. Me, I wait until the other person smiles first. I always seem to be the first one in and the last one out of an argument. But that night neither of us was ready to call it quits, and Molly didn't even smile when 1 climbed into bed very carefully so that all her exercises in past participles stayed where she'd thrown them, and 1 went to sleep underneath the