by Georgia Byng
“He wanted you to have these. He told me to tell you that meeting you was one of the greatest pleasures of his life.”
“Where’s he gone?” Yet even as these words left Molly’s lips she knew the answer.
“The question of what happens after life is question that unifies human beings.” Do sighed again, his chest giving a slow heave up and then down. “I don’t know the answer.”
Molly was stunned. “I can’t believe it . . .” she whispered.
“He very old, Molly. His spirit strong but his body weak. It run out of power. He conk out. I’m sorry for you.”
Molly shook her head and held the precious bag tight. “I wish . . .” she murmured. “Oh, I wish I’d gotten to know him better.”
Everyone was quiet.
Do broke the silence. “Now you come upstairs. I have good surprise for you.”
Molly nodded and she and the others followed the monk out of the apartment and up in the elevator to the roof garden.
There a lovely sight greeted them. The trees on the roof had all burst into blossom. White blossom.
“They’re all boffed up!” Gerry shouted.
“Boffed up?” Rocky asked. “What does that mean?”
“I made it up,” Gerry replied.
“It like six white clouds living on our roof!” Toka exclaimed.
“All over Japan, blossom start,” Do said. “Look, see in park!”
The children peered out beyond the roof terrace and saw that, indeed, the park a few blocks away was full of blossom trees. Pink ones and white ones.
“It’s like cotton candy!” Gerry said.
“That cherry blossom. And see people having picnics?” Hiroyuki pointed out. “Now the season of hanami, of celebrating blossom. Everyone celebrate life.”
There were blossoms everywhere. On rooftops, on balconies, in small triangles of grass in the city and in the parks.
Do sat cross-legged beneath one of the trees. “White blossom my favorite. It blossom with big beauty but only for a week. Then blossom blow away. It remind me of life. So beautiful . . . then suddenly gone.”
Molly sat down beside him. “Thank you for bringing Dr. Logan’s things, Do. But . . . but what about his . . . his body?”
Do nodded. “He ask me to cremate body. I did.” The old monk dipped his hand into his bag and passed Molly a green porcelain urn. “These are Dr. Logan ashes.”
Rocky sat down beside Molly and put a hand on her shoulder. “That’s really cool, Molly. We can take them back to Briersville and scatter his ashes there.”
“Yes,” Do agreed. “Like blossom blowing away on the wind, he will go.”
Tickets were bought for Molly, Petula, Rocky, and Gerry to travel back home.
It was arranged that Miss Sny was to be left in charge of Chokichi’s and Hiroyuki’s music careers until Mr. Proila returned, which everyone knew was going to be never.
On the day that Molly and her friends were due to leave, they finally met the boys’ parents. They were all going to live together again, with Miss Sny.
As Molly, Rocky, Petula, and Gerry drove away, the boys’ mother was making lunch in the kitchen, and their father was playing a Japanese board game with all three of his sons. And the old grandmother was painting the missing eyes onto her strange dolls. All the wishes she had made had evidently been granted.
As they boarded the plane, Molly realized how lonely she had been when she’d lost all of the people she loved in her life. She realized how fabulous it was that they had cared so much for her that, even when she was a monster, they had wanted to help her.
Molly knew she could be a monster again—a mini-monster, cross about something or bad-tempered or angry—and her friends and family would be horrible sometimes, too. But she knew for certain that underneath, however grumpy the people in her family might be, they actually all cared about one another.
Molly saw clearly how amazing and brilliant and lucky this was. And she knew, too, from losing her great-great-great-grandfather, how she must try from now on to appreciate the people about her. For in Do’s words, they might just “conk out.” Then it would be too late to show them how much they were appreciated.
Part of Molly was sad that she had lost her powers. But oddly she was also half pleased that they had gone. Without them life was more of a challenge. She would be a regular person now, someone without incredible hypnotic skills; someone who couldn’t hypnotize people with the flash of an eye, who couldn’t time travel or mind read or morph.
She recognized that her greatest pleasures in life came from her friends and her family. She didn’t need the hypnotic arts to make this better.
But the greatest lesson that Molly had learned in her time in Japan was about badness. She saw how bad deeds not only hurt the people they were aimed at, they also hurt the person doing them. And it had become obvious to her that the more bad things a person does, the more their character becomes bad. A pinch of it here, a ladleful there, the badness mounts up until it starts to mold the person. The person becomes what they do.
Molly saw that it was all about choice. A person who does good things glows with goodness because they have chosen good things. You are what you do, Molly thought.
She watched Rocky helping Gerry work the airplane DVD player.
“You are what you do . . .” she said under her breath.
She looked out of the window at the earth below and thought of the billions of people living on it. The billions of people of the world living, breathing, each one being who they were because of what they did, each one affecting the world and one another by their actions. As though a mass of voices were whispering to her inside her head, a bigger thought came to Molly:
“We are what we do.”
Acknowledgments
Thanks to my patient editor in the UK, Polly Nolan, for her brilliant notes. And to Sarah Dotts Barley, my editor in New York, for her careful reading, her good suggestions, and for translating all of the British words into American ones.
Also a big thank-you to my agent, Caradoc King, who has been with me since Molly Moon’s adventures began. He is very clever and well-read and has always been hugely helpful and supportive.
About the Author
GEORGIA BYNG grew up by the River Itchen in Hampshire, England, in a large family. She started writing as a child, interviewing people who lived in the local village. As an adult, Georgia wrote comic strips and eventually turned to writing books without pictures. Georgia lives with the artist Marc Quinn and her children Tiger, Lucas, and Sky. Georgia has the following message for readers of this latest Molly Moon adventure: “Music is incredibly powerful. Some of it even hypnotic. Listen and see!”
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Georgia Byng
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Molly Moon, Micky Minus, & the Mind Machine
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Copyright
Cover art © 2013 by David Roberts
Cover design by Michelle Taormina
Author photo by Marc Quinn
Molly Moon & the Monster Music
Copyright © 2013 by Georgia Byng
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
www.harpercollinschildrens.com
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Library of Congress catalog card number: 2012952450
ISBN 978-0-06-166163-1 (trade bdg.)
EPUB Edition January 2013 ISBN 9780062190222
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FIRST EDITION
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