A Summer to Die by Lois Lowry Read Free Book Online Page B

a box to protect it, and Mom took it with her when she drove to Portland to visit Molly. It worked, too; I mean it did make the room more cheerful, Mom said.
    Molly was lots better, and coming home the next week. In the beginning she had been very sick. They had, first thing, given her blood transfusions; then, when she was feeling better, they decided to do a lot of tests to find out what was wrong, so that her nose wouldn't bleed anymore. They even had specialists see her.
    You'd
think
that with medical science as advanced as it's supposed to be, that they could figure out what the trouble was and fix her up pretty
quickly. I mean,
nosebleeds!
What's the big deal about that? It's not as if she had a mysterious tropical disease, or something.

    But first, Mom said, after they put all that new blood into her, they started taking blood out, to test it. Then they did tests on the inside of her
bones.
Then they x-rayed her. Then, when they thought they knew what was causing the nosebleeds, they started fooling around with all different kinds of medicines, to see what would work best. One day Mom and Dad went in, and when they came home, they told me that special medicine had been injected into Molly's spine. That gave me the creeps. It made me mad, too, because it seemed to me that they were just experimenting on her, for pete's sake. By that time they knew what the trouble was—her blood didn't clot right—so they just should have given her whatever medicine would fix that and sent her home. But no, instead they started fooling around, trying different things, keeping her there longer.
    And my parents were very strange about the whole thing. They were just like the doctors; they didn't even think of Molly as a person anymore. They talked about her as if she were a clinical specimen. They came home from the hospital and talked very coldly about different drugs with long names: whether this one was better than that one.
They talked about reactions, side effects, contraindications; it was hard to believe they were talking about Molly.

    I kept my mouth shut as long as I could. But then one night at dinner, the only thing they talked about was something called cyclophosphamide. There I was, sitting there with them, and I wanted to talk about other things: my darkroom, my Easter eggs that I was working so hard on, what I was going to do during spring vacation from school.
Anything.
Anything, that is, except cyclophosphamide, which I didn't know anything about and couldn't pronounce.
    "Stop it!" I said angrily. "Stop talking about it! If you want to talk about Molly, then talk about
Molly,
not her stupid medicine! You haven't even sent in her camp application, Mom. It's still on your desk!"
    They both looked as if I had thrown something at them. But it worked. I don't think I heard the word "cyclophosphamide" again, and for a while they talked of other things, and life was somewhat normal. And now Molly will be home soon, all better—and no more nosebleeds—and after all that business with the fancy drugs, it turned out that what she ended up with is pills. When she comes home, she'll have to take pills for a while. Big deal. They could have found that out when she got there, and sent her home sooner.
    But since they didn't, I made the Easter egg for Molly, to cheer her up, and I made another one for Will. Will's egg was blue, and special in a different way. I thought and thought about how to paint it, and finally I looked up spices in the encyclopedia, and found a picture of nutmeg. I painted tiny nutmeg blossoms all over his eggshell, intertwined so that they formed a complicated pattern of orange, brown, and green over the blue background. I varnished and packed it, and on Easter Sunday I took the box with his egg, and the envelope with his pictures, and walked down the road to his house.

    I hadn't seen Will since Molly got sick. Things were just too complicated at first. My parents spent a lot of time at the