The Grounding of Group 6
Page 27
“I knew you’d be here,” Marigold exclaimed. “I just knew it. Oh, God, I’m glad to see you!” There were hugs, a lot of them. “And, boy, do you look great!”
Nat was sure she’d come to talk them into going back. They asked for news of her, and the rest of the Group, and how the school was going.
Marigold said that everyone was fine, and doing well, extremely well, in fact, as far as the work was concerned, by far the best that they’d ever done, except for Sara, probably. Nat and Ludi told her that was wonderful.
“But there is one thing …,” said Marigold, and grinned her most seductive one.
Ludi smiled; she already knew what was coming. Nat also smiled, the smartie, because he thought that he knew, too.
“I want to come up here and live with you,” said Marigold. “And guess what?” She did that whistle of hers.
And there, through the spruces, came the other three, all of them looking just a little bashful and a little worried, but a little hopeful, too—and wearing big old backpacks. And Coke was dragging Marigold’s, as well.
Julian F. Thompson
has always collected things. Early on it was stamps, bottle caps, and coins. More recently, he’s specialized in kitchen knives, reel mowers, rabbit-ears antennas, and—most of all—things he’s read, seen, or heard that might be useful in a book.
Three such comments were the inspiration for his first book, The Grounding of Group 6.
“I could kill that kid!” an exasperated parent said
one day.
“My parents sent me here to get rid of me,” explained
a ninth-grade boy in boarding school.
“She went away to school and that was the last
anybody ever saw of her,” overstated a hometown
school girl.
Once the seductively repugnant idea popped into his mind that a handful of parents might actually hire someone to terminate their kids, Julian Thompson decided to write a novel to protest against it. The result is The Grounding of Group 6—a seriocomic nightmare about how five good kids escaped a fate none of them deserved.