Last Summer

by Holly Chamberlin

  Anyway, Meg just started spending some time with Sister Pauline from her church. I met her once and liked her. She’s younger than Mrs. Giroux and has a degree in counseling. I’m not exactly sure what they talk about, but Meg says she learns a lot from their talks, so I guess that’s a good thing. I hope Meg talks about her relationship with her dad before things get even worse. I guess in exchange for whatever help Sister Pauline can give her, Meg helps her with an after-school program St. Teresa runs for little kids. Meg has always been really good with children, maybe because she doesn’t make a big fuss about them, so she’s probably a big bonus for Sister Pauline.

  It’s odd. Not so long ago I considered Meg a traitor. Now I think that was too harsh a judgment on my part. Now I see so much more of Meg’s vulnerability. Before, I always saw her as sort of invincible, way stronger than me, the leader while I was the follower. But I think that seeing her as a real person is much healthier for the both of us!

  There’s good news about Meg’s mother. A few weeks ago one of her company’s repeat clients asked to talk to her privately. Turns out he knew of a great opening in administration at York Hospital because he’s friends with some bigwig there. Anyway, he was so impressed by what he had seen of Mrs. Giroux’s performance over the years that he wanted permission to recommend her for the opening. Mrs. Giroux told us that at first she said “no, thanks” because she was afraid of making a big change but that this man kind of pestered her (her word) into submitting a résumé. Well, she got the new job and it’s way better than the one at the lumber place. Meg was so happy for her that she made a huge banner and together, with Dad’s help, we hung it across their living room. It says, “Way To Go, Mom!” We had a cake and champagne and Meg and I got to take a sip. Neither of us liked it much. Blah. I thought it was too sweet and Meg thought it wasn’t sweet enough!

  Anyway, I’m really happy for Mrs. Giroux. Mom is helping her build a wardrobe more suited for this better job and I think they’re having fun doing it together. They’ve been out shopping three times this week! Mom knows all the great secondhand shops and she knows good quality, of course. Plus she can do any alterations Mrs. Giroux needs for free. Oh, and Mom has convinced Mrs. Giroux to join her book group again. I’m glad. Mrs. Giroux needs to have some fun in her life. Everybody does! Maybe Mrs. Giroux can convince Mom to go with her to that bar she used to like on the Pier in Old Orchard Beach. Ha!

  Okay, I’m not even supposed to know this, but I’m only telling this journal. Mom told me that Mrs. Giroux met a guy through her new job and kind of likes him. Get this—he’s an operating room nurse, so he has to be smart. That’s good news because Mrs. Giroux has had enough of dumb guys! They haven’t been on a date yet and she hasn’t said anything to Meg yet. But she’ll have to tell Meg if she does go on a date with this guy. I have no idea how Meg will react. Isn’t that odd? I mean, I know her so well, but given all the stuff with her father and all, I can’t really guess what she’ll feel if her mother gets involved with another guy. I’ll have to wait and see. Hopefully, Sister Pauline can help if Meg really freaks out.

  And OMG, how could I have left this for last, speaking of GUYS, the guy I’ve really liked since Christmas but who didn’t even seem to notice I was alive came up to me today and asked if I wanted to go to the movies this weekend!!!! I haven’t asked Mom and Dad yet and they’ve always said I can’t date until I’m sixteen, but they just have to say yes! His name is Jared and he’s really nice and super smart. I’ll make sure Mom and Dad know that he had the highest overall average of the entire tenth-grade class this year. Maybe that will persuade them. (BTW, I came in third. It’s math that really brings my overall average down! Oh, well. I don’t want to be a scientist or a financial advisor when I grow up, anyway!) Meg thinks Jared’s nice, too, and Stella says she thinks he has the most beautiful blue eyes she’s ever seen. I agree! I hope she doesn’t get jealous if Jared and I get serious....

  OMG, did I just say “serious”? I have to calm down before I talk to Mom and Dad. I don’t want to seem too excited.. . .

  Here’s something a bit funny, not in the ha-ha way. All along Meg’s been the one talking about boys and saying she was dying to start dating, and it turns out I’m the one who might have a boyfriend first. Meg doesn’t even like anyone at school. Lately, she’s been saying that boys only get in the way of living your own life and that they only cause trouble. She says there will be plenty of time to date once she makes a good life for herself and her mother. (But what if her mother marries this operating room nurse she likes and doesn’t need Meg to take care of her???) Anyway, I think I understand why Meg feels the way she does. Partly because it can be true if you let it be true, that guys can ruin your life, and partly because of all she’s going through with her father. Maybe if someone really special comes along she’ll change her mind. But Meg can be pretty stubborn, so I doubt it. I hope she doesn’t judge me if I do get to go out with Jared. But I don’t think that she will. After all, she admitted that he’s nice.

  Mom just called out that dinner is ready. Wish me luck! Next time I write I might just have a dog and a boyfriend! I don’t know what I’m more excited about!

  Okay. I’m actually more excited about the dog!

  Rosemary xx

  Afterword

  Bullying is not new, but in recent years it has become especially dangerous to the health and happiness of some of our most vulnerable youth.

  As with any problem, knowledge is key to the solution. Adults should know if their local school district and/or state have instituted a system-wide code of conduct, one that defines bullying and outlines its punishment. Parents should be informed about their children’s involvement in online social networking sites and should know with whom their children are spending time during and after school. If an adult has been bullied in the past, he or she should reach out to current victims, offer support, and assure them that life will improve.

  Young people, too, are not powerless to combat bullying. Peer victimization experts suggest that young people should choose not to be a part of an existing bullying problem (for example, they should refuse to spread damaging gossip); that when possible, they should help the person being bullied to get away from the victimizer; that they should try to befriend the target of the bullying and let them know they are not alone; that they should ask their friends not to bully others; and perhaps most importantly, that they should tell responsible adults (school personnel, parents, older friends) about any bullying of which they are aware.

  Bullying does not happen in a vacuum. The damage or loss of one young life seriously affects the health and future of the entire community. Standing up for oneself or for others in the face of harassment takes courage, but the rewards of courageous action are great.

  Please turn the page

  for a very special Q&A with

  Holly Chamberlin!

  Q. What made you decide to write a story featuring a fourteen-year-old girl who is bullied by classmates?

  A. Well, my editor approached me with the idea of addressing the topic of bullying, and I immediately agreed. No one with half a heart can help but feel deep dismay at the news of a child or teenager killing himself or suffering deep depression because of having been tortured by neighbors or schoolmates. It’s a disgusting situation, and if this book can do anything toward encouraging even one person to get involved in a local anti-bullying campaign or educational effort, then great.

  Q. But Last Summer is more than just the story of a young girl. It’s the story of how what happens to her affects her family, as well.

  A. Right. What happens to one person in a community—a family, a school, even a neighborhood—has repercussions for every person in that community. So in this book I tried to show how one negative action—Meg’s betrayal of her best friend—almost destroys lifelong friendships, and also how it puts a terrible strain on the relationships among the members of both families. Rosie’s parents, Jane and Mike, find themselves lying to each
other. Frannie finds herself socially isolated and depressed. Meg is overwhelmed by shame. Petey is confused by the strange behavior of the adults around him. Of course, in the end, some good comes of Rosie’s suffering. She learns how to stand on her own two feet and be an individual. Still, that lesson comes at a terrible price.

  Q. Were you bullied as a child?

  A. Well, yes, a bit. I was a very shy kid, the kind who got all As and had only a few close friends. Within one week, at the start of fifth grade, I got glasses and braces. Not the funky kind of glasses we have today, or the almost invisible braces. No, I had an awful, unflattering pair of frames and a mouth full of metal. It didn’t help. Some tough girls in the sixth grade gave me a hard time and accused me of calling them sluts, which was interesting because I had no idea what that word meant. And there was one boy in my grade who called me names. On the whole I think I got off pretty easily, though, at least compared to a particular classmate, a friend of mine from early grades, who was really tortured by both boys and girls. She was a bit different from the majority of kids in our school, not in a way that a normal person would consider odd, but the kids who hurt her were not, in my opinion, normal. They were idiots.

  Q. At the time did you tell an adult about what was done to you or to your friend?

  A. Well, I know I kept my mouth shut about my own experiences. I didn’t want to cause trouble. Being quiet and staying out of sight was important to me as a child. As for what I might have reported about my friend ... I honestly don’t remember going to an adult. I do have a memory of yelling at one of the boys who was bothering her in the schoolyard one day. So you see, I could stick up for other people, but not myself—just like Rosie!

  Q. What about being bullied in high school?

  A. No, in high school I was fine. It was okay to be yourself at the Academy of Mount St. Ursula—nerdy, goofy, athletic, smart. Which is not to say that some girls might not have been bullied, but I suspect the nuns and lay teachers would have put a quick stop to that! My high school was a very nurturing place, focused on teaching its all-female student body self-respect and stressing its potential for success on both a personal and a professional level. The school is still going strong, by the way.

  Q. What about as an adult, in the workplace?

  A. No, I can’t say that I have ever been the victim of mean or bullying behavior during the course of my career, unlike Frannie and some of my friends. Again, that doesn’t mean I haven’t encountered a few—how shall I say this nicely?—difficult people along the way. But I was never a sole target of their ... difficult ... behavior.

  Q. Did you do a lot of research on the bullying problem for this book?

  A. I did. I’ve got pages and pages of notes drawn from online sources, books, magazines, and television specials. And, of course, I’ve been around a long time. I’ve observed and experienced, and in a way, that’s the best sort of research to be done for writing a novel. Last Summer isn’t an instructional manual or a treatise. Sure, the statistics and professional opinions are important and help flesh out the story and show the enormity of the bullying problem in this country, but at bottom, this is fiction. It’s an imagined tale of two particular girls and two particular women in a particular time and a particular place. Rosie, Meg, Jane, and Frannie are not meant to be Everywoman, though to some degree, as (imagined) human beings, they participate in what Everywoman experiences.

  Q. Of the four main characters in Last Summer which is your favorite? Does one speak to you more than the others?

  A. That’s an interesting question and I’ll try to answer it without becoming entangled. In my experience, the character I think I’m going to most like or identify with or feel sympathy for is often the one I come to like least. Not always, but often. And the character I think I’m going to dislike or toward whom I initially feel unsympathetic sometimes becomes a favorite. And I think that’s because to a great extent, characters create themselves. You give them a name and put them in a certain location, give them a family and friends and some basic personality traits, and they tend to take it from there. So that in Last Summer, for example, at times I was really annoyed with Jane, and then at other times, I felt really bad for her. Her choices often surprised me. Maybe I shouldn’t say this, but when the book was finished I had a vision of Mike leaving her at some point in the not-too-distant future! Toward Rosie, I felt highly protective, when I wasn’t feeling a bit frustrated with her inability to be a person separate from her mother, or from who she thought her mother wanted her to be. I saw in her a more dramatic or drastic version of my early self and it saddened me. I have to say that I love Meg, in spite of her betrayal of Rosie. Certainly what she did was wrong, but she’s not a true bully, like the Mackenzie and Courtney characters. She’s a young person who is under a great deal of stress and unsure of what to do about it. But she’s also a fighter and very self-aware, ready to accept responsibility for her actions. I have to admit, though, that I’m a bit worried about her potential for a happy future. Not that she’ll do anything destructive or stupid, but I think there’s a chance she might deprive herself of the possibility for joy, which would be sad. Frannie is hard to dislike, though I think she was wrong in making Meg such a strong ally against her ex-husband. And if the operating room nurse Frannie meets on her new job is a good man, I’d like to see her marry him. She needs a big change and a chance to be loved. And she needs to break away from her parents’ narrow view of life’s options!

  Q. Rosie’s diary plays an important part in this book. Did you keep a diary at her age?

  A. Oh, yes. And somewhere in the basement there are boxes of diaries and journals and poems and story ideas, probably thousands upon thousands of pages that will never be read again because I don’t think I can come face-to-face with the various people I’ve been throughout my life. I’d rather focus on the current me, for better or worse. As for Rosie’s diary and then journal, I came to see that her written voice was almost a distinct fifth point of view. I came to feel as if Rosie—not I—was really writing those diary entries, whereas when I wrote from her point of view in the “regular” chapters, I felt more in control of her presentation. It was an odd experience.

  Q. You said that you did a lot of research for the book. During that process, did you read other novels that dealt with the topic of bullying?

  A. No. I didn’t want to be influenced or to be intimidated by another’s writer’s story. I wanted to tell the story I was meant to tell. Generally speaking, I don’t read “the competition” for those same reasons. Maybe that’s not wise, but there you have it.

  Q. So what did you read during the course of writing Last Summer?

  A. I recently became obsessed with the novels of Charles Todd, a mother-and-son writing team. I’ve devoured their series featuring ex-WW I soldier and Scotland Yard Detective Ian Rutledge, as well as their newer series featuring WW I nursing sister Bess Crawford. I’ve also read their stand-alone title, The Murder Stone. I’m just blown away by the intricate plotting, the depth of the characters, and the emotional power of the stories. My advice is to run to the nearest bookstore or library and snatch up what titles you can. In fact, one of the books in the Ian Rutledge series, I can’t recall what one, involves a boy who was bullied and how that experience came to warp his adult life.

  Q. Any final words for those of your readers who were bullied as children?

  A. It did get better, didn’t it? Which is probably more than we can say for the bullies.

  A READING GROUP GUIDE

  LAST SUMMER

  Holly Chamberlin

  ABOUT THIS GUIDE

  The suggested questions are intended to enhance

  your group’s reading of Holly Chamberlin’s

  Last Summer.

  DISCUSSION QUESTIONS

  1. Talk about how Meg’s perception of Rosie changes over the course of the story. For example, at one point Meg tells us she has always felt protective of Rosie. How does she come to realize that her f
riend has hidden reserves of strength?

  2. Talk about how Rosie’s perception of Meg changes over the course of the story. For example, at one point Rosie tells us she has always seen Meg as the strong one. How does she come to realize that Meg is vulnerable, too?