Meg at Sixteen Read Online Free

the time or now. A week later, she and her parents had taken the Queen Mary to England, and spent the summer traveling around Europe. She remembered Switzerland the most fondly, but she’d always loved Switzerland. They’d spent a winter there, when she was younger, and it was a magical country. Meg had flown home alone, to start the school year at Miss Arnold’s School, which she had begun attending the year before, and her parents had flown to Kenya for a safari. It was in Kenya that their plane had crashed, a small chartered airplane, whose pilot had made a fatal miscalculation. The communication system was so primitive that Meg’s parents had been dead for almost a week before anybody knew. Their bodies, Uncle Marcus had explained to her, had been destroyed so badly that cremation was the only proper thing to do. Meg supposed the bodies had burned, but possibly the heat had swollen them, or animals had eaten them. No one told her, and the choice of nightmares kept her awake for many, many nights thereafter.
    So the funeral had been closed casket, and almost two weeks after the actual deaths, and someone had bought a black velvet dress for her to wear. “Miss Arnold wishes to see you. There’s been some bad news.” The memories were all a jumble, and in her dreams, Miss Arnold frequently turned into a lion or a hyena, who threatened to eat her while Meg’s parents stood by helplessly. Of course, Miss Arnold had actually been very nice about it, and had attended the funeral, and seen to it that all the girls at her school treated Meg kindly for the first few days. After that, Meg no longer cared how she was treated. Not that anyone was cruel. No one was ever cruel to her, not even Uncle Marcus’s endless noisy children, with whom Meg was forced to spend that Christmas. Sometimes they’d even stop playing when she entered the room, as though games were an affront to her mourning. They weren’t cruel to her that summer either, or the following Christmas, or even that following summer, so no one was able to understand, not even Meg, why on her thirteenth birthday she’d gone swimming in the ocean, well after everyone else had gone to bed, and swum so far out that her obvious intention was never to swim back. Only the good fortune of a pair of young lovers on the beach, seeing what she was doing and having the strength to swim out after her and pull her back to shore, had kept her from drowning. Meg’s life was filled with good fortune.
    â€œI wash my hands of her!” Uncle Marcus had declared, and there was only Aunt Grace left to take her in. Meg’s mother had been an only child, and her parents had died within a year of their daughter’s accident. So Aunt Grace had the bedroom at Eastgate redecorated with a canopy bed, and Meg had moved in.
    It wasn’t so bad, she knew. Her school year she continued to spend at Miss Arnold’s, and Thanksgiving, Christmas, and Easter were spent in Beacon Hill. Summers at Eastgate were all right, even with Aunt Grace’s many restrictions. Not too much sun. No unsupervised swimming (well, she’d brought that one on herself). No socializing with the year-rounders (but then, none of them were supposed to do that, including Isabelle Sinclair, who was madly in love with the grocery bag boy). No excursions without Aunt Grace’s explicit permission. No fun, really, but then Meg wasn’t sure she remembered what fun was anymore. She supposed she must occasionally have fun at Miss Arnold’s, all the other girls did, and they didn’t shun her, as they did some of the more studious, less entertaining girls. She knew she had gone from Poor Meg to Meg at some point during her years there, but she couldn’t spot the exact moment, and she couldn’t recall ever really enjoying herself. But that didn’t matter. Nothing mattered.
    I’m sixteen, Meg thought. Today I am sixteen. In two more years,