The Silent Boy by Lois Lowry Read Free Book Online Page A

could see her bright pink scarf fly in the wind as Paul, behind her on the sled, steered the two of them down, slicing a turn at the bottom each time. The tree at the bottom
loomed like a danger, but all the sledders knew how to make the turn at just the right instant.
    "Push me!" Laura Paisley begged, so Peg would give her a gentle shove and watch as she slid slowly and then tumbled, giggling, from the little sled at the bottom of the gentle slope.
    Going home for lunch, I think we were all like the horses, excited and prancing. Nell, especially, was like a wild thing let loose; she teased and shouted and her voice was so shrill that Peggy murmured "Shhhh" to her in embarrassment at what others might think. But Nellie turned away with an irritated shrug and went to walk with Paul.Shedidn 't care what others thought.

6. JANUARY 1911

    Nell came over to visit her sister late on a sleety Thursday afternoon. They both had Thursday off, and usually Peggy went to the library that day, often taking me with her; she said she didn't mind. Nellie always went to town, to the pictures or the shops.
    But today it was too cold and wet to walk far. Nellie was in a foul mood when she came over. She pulled off her coat and boots in the kitchen and unwound the scarf from her thick, damp hair. She had had other plans, she said, but the weather made her plans fall through.
Together the sisters went up to Peggy's third-floor room. Sometimes Peg let me go up there and visit when she had free time, but I could tell she didn't want me tagging along now. She and Nellie were chattering about grown-up girl things, and from my room below I could hear Nell's whoops of laughter and Peggy's quieter, more serious voice.
    "They want to be by themselves," I complained to Mother, feeling left out.
    She was in the little room at the end of the upstairs hall, the one we called "the sewing room" though no one ever sewed there. Mother was at the pine table with an album open on it, and she was carefully pasting things in what she called a "memory book." It was where the postcard of Niagara Falls was, and the newspaper account of Mother and Father's wedding. A dried and flattened flower was attached to one page, with a note in Mother's careful penmanship describing a tea party where a vase of pink roses had been part of the decoration. It was hard to imagine the brown faded thing as one of those roses.
    Mother listened for a moment to the noises from Peggy's bedroom. She smiled. "I'm glad we got the quieter of the Stoltz sisters," she said. "Mrs. Bishop says that Nellie's a good worker but she has a very frivolous side."
    "What's
frivolous?
"
    "Silly."
    "I don't think Nell is silly. She's very serious about wanting to be in pictures."
    Mother raised an eyebrow. I knew she disapproved of the pictures, and I was sorry I had mentioned it. "What's that?" I asked, and pointed at a wisp of hair gathered and tied with a ribbon and attached to the page.
    "That's yours, Katy," Mother said, looking at it fondly. "You were two years old and I trimmed your hair. You didn't have a lot, but it was in your eyes until I snipped it back.
    "And look at this!" She pointed to a picture. "You might remember this. You and Jessie Wood were both four that summer, and Jessie's father had a new camera."
    I peered at the photograph of two solemn little girls, side by side, wearing hats, and gradually I remembered that day at the lake. It was summer. It came to me in fragments, in little details.
    Jessie had black shoes, and mine were white.
    The air smelled like pine trees.
    A cloud was shaped like my stuffed bear. Then its ears softened and smeared, and it was just a cloud, really, not a bear at all (I knew it all along); then, quickly, the cloud itself was gone and the sky was only blue.
    And there were fireworks! We were visiting at
the Woods' cottage there. Cottage sounded like a fairy tale: a woodcutter's cottage. Hansel and Gretel and their cottage.
    But the Woods' cottage was not