Read Last Summer for Free Online Page A

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?