The Silent Boy by Lois Lowry

mind, I scolded Jessie for not obeying her father. "Shhhh," Mrs. Wood said to her angrily, and finally Jessie was quiet.
    Now, into that important silence, was when I should have called out. "Surprise!" I should have shouted. "Here I am!"
    But I didn't. I waited. There was a bug near my toe, and I watched it waddle across the slick surface of wet earth. I put my hand near it and hoped that it would mount my finger and walk on me. But carefully it found a path around my hand. I began thinking very hard about the bug, and I forgot my family and their worry. I crouched there, and then lay down, slowly curling into the warm mud that was as soft and private as a bed. The sun was hot on my head and back, coming down through the curtain of grass that surrounded me, and things became dreamlike.
    I woke when they found me, and now my mother was crying, so I was vaguely sorry that I hid. But I liked the attention. I was the heroine of the story, now: the little lost girl.
The one in danger.
    We were given cookies. Mrs. Wood must have made the cookies, because they had raisins in them, and my own mother knew that I disliked raisins. Meticulously I picked each raisin out and dropped it into the bushes beside the porch. My mother saw me doing this and smiled, creating a secret between us.
    Then we were re-dressed. Jessie was upset still. I recognized her feeling, the feeling of being left out, overlooked, angry at things that you don't even understand, so that you cry in frustration and look for something to blame.
I should be the one crying!
I thought.
After all, I was the one who might have drowned, who might have been eaten by a bear!
Instead, I smiled, and it was Jessie who whined and made the grownups impatient. She wailed when her stockings were pulled on, worried that there may be pine needles—oh, yes! I understood, now! She was troubled by the word
needles.
The mothers, both of them, kept reassuring her that her feet were clean and dry. But it wasn't dirt or dampness that frightened her! It was
needles!
    Later there were the surprising bursts of color in the sky, and the alarming sound of the fireworks display. I curled up on my father's lap on the cottage porch, watching. I was sleepy, puzzled by the sounds and explosions of light, but not frightened. My father's shirt was soft against my cheek, and he smelled as he always did, father-smells of
shaving lotions and shoe polish and pipe tobacco. (Mother was cologne and powder and the laundry starch ironed into her shirtwaist.)
    I suppose Jessie was there on her own father's lap, but she was not part of my evening memory, which had grown small to enclose only my father and me. And mosquitoes. There were mosquitoes buzzing on the porch, and Father brushed them away from my bare arms and slapped at his own neck from time to time.
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    "Yes," I said to Mother, as we looked at the photograph together. "I do remember it."
    From above, still, there came the sound of low voices murmuring. I looked again at the photograph of the two little girls, Jessie and me, and pretended for an instant that they were Peggy and Nell. One quiet and watching, tidy and careful. The other, banging a shovel against a bright tin pail. Eager. Brash. Impatient. Shrill.

7. FEBRUARY 1911

    Winter dragged on, and soon enough we tired of snow. January came and went, and February. Mornings were still dark when I dressed for school in February, and the dark of evening came much too early. Father built a fire after supper and then while Pepper, the dog, slept on the rug, he read aloud to us in the parlor while Mother's fingers flew over her knitting. Upstairs, in a drawer, baby clothes were folded and waiting.
    Peggy sat, sometimes, and listened. Upstairs, her room was very cold, and Mother said she should stay down in the warm parlor with us,
evenings. So she took the dark green chair in the corner and mended. Father read
David Copperfield
and I saw Peggy cry a little at the sad parts.
    In the afternoons