Meg at Sixteen Read Free Page B

In three years’ time, Meg had learned to like the bed. She liked the room too, she supposed, at least as much as any other room she’d stayed in since her parents’ deaths.
    Meg sighed deeply, and looked through the window toward the ocean. It was her sixteenth birthday, and she knew she shouldn’t be spending it thinking about her parents. There was no point thinking about them anyway; dead was dead and they would never come back and rescue her. The thought made her smile. Before her parents had died, her favorite book had been A Little Princess . In there, the orphan truly needed rescuing. Only by Meg’s own lonely standards, could she claim to be so burdened.
    Birthdays, Meg realized suddenly, were the worst, the absolute worst. She’d been unhappy the entire week, without being able to figure out why, and now the truth was staring right at her. She hated her birthday. When her parents were alive, her birthdays were splendid, filled with festivities, and presents, and sweets. There were at least twenty children at her party, and for weeks, she and her mother would conspire about all the details, going shopping for new dresses for both of them, having endless discussions with the cook about just how the birthday cake should be decorated, debating which lucky children should be invited, and which should be left out. Her birthday plans had been fun, and the days themselves were never anticlimactic. She could still remember the morning she woke up to find the four-foot-high doll-house in her bedroom, with real electricity, and the most cunning furniture: a Queen Anne style dining room, and a perfect Victorian parlor, which, now that she thought about it, bore a strong resemblance to Aunt Grace’s Beacon Hill parlor. Had the furniture been commissioned to match? She would never know, since with her parents’ deaths, the dollhouse, like so much else of their lives, vanished, sold or put away in storage, or given to some cousin or other, to help pay off her father’s debts. Not for the first time, Meg was uncomfortably aware of how similar the words death and debt were.
    But that dollhouse! It had simply materialized in her room that day. She woke up to find it there. How had her parents managed that? It seemed magical to her then, and now as well, now that she lived with Aunt Grace, whose every footstep seemed to thunder through the houses she owned.
    Meg turned away from the ocean and tried to remind herself how fortunate she was. When her parents had died, she’d been left with nothing. Her parents, Aunt Grace had explained to Meg on more than one occasion, thought the sole function of money was to spend it. Meg couldn’t see what else one was supposed to do with it, but she was always too frightened to challenge Aunt Grace on that, or any other subject. What few assets did remain, though, Aunt Grace, and Uncle Marcus, Aunt Grace’s younger brother, managed to save and invest, and turn into what was always referred to as a “small” trust fund for Meg. How small Meg was never sure, but she assumed it was very small indeed.
    â€œYou are fortunate you have family to provide for you,” Aunt Grace had declared at the funeral. That was the only real memory Meg had of the funeral, that, and the strange feeling she had because such an important dress had been bought for her without the help of her mother. It couldn’t have been easy to find a black dress for an eleven-year-old. It was velvet, Meg remembered, and hot in the early-fall weather. It had a white lace collar, but so many ladies had bent down to kiss her that the collar ended up permanently stained with lipstick and powder, and the dress had been given to the poor. They were welcome to it.
    Meg tried to remember if her eleventh birthday had been her most perfect one, but it didn’t seem any better than any of the others she could remember. The dress, the cake, the party, the gifts, nothing stood out at