The Year I Turned Sixteen: Rose, Daisy, Laurel, Lily

The Year I Turned Sixteen: Rose, Daisy, Laurel, Lily

Turning sixteen is an unforgettable milestone, and each of these four sisters has her own story to tell. Rose, the oldest, feels like she has the most responsibility when her father dies, and yearns to be true to herself. Daisy wants to break free from her family, but trouble arises when she falls for a bad boy. Laurel struggles with the loss of a close relative and finds herself drawn to a boy who may actually understand. And Lily, the youngest sister, feels like nothing could be more difficult than actually being herself. These four books in one special bind-up make for a great value—and an even better read. Diane Schwemm is the author of The Year I Turned Sixteen, as well as the Silver Beach series. One SOMETIMES I WISH I didn’t live in a small town. Hawk Harbor is the kind of place where everybody knows everybody else. There’s one grocery store and one gas station and one bank. We have to share a high school with a bunch of other towns. We don’t even have our own exit off the Maine Turnpike. And needless to say, the nightlife is rather limited. Now and then I find myself wondering what it would be like to live someplace crowded and exciting. Those are the days I can’t wait to graduate and move to New York or L.A. Then there are days like today, May 21, my sixteenth birthday, when I can’t imagine living anywhere else. This afternoon on my way in from school I stopped on the porch of my family’s Victorian house. Standing on tiptoe, I could see a distant sliver of the Atlantic, past the pines and the rocky shore. The water was speckled with sailboats and fishing trawlers that reminded me of my dad’s old boat, the Pelican. Summer is just around the corner, and that means pretty soon I’ll be heading off to be a counselor at Wildwood, a camp in Vermont. I can’t wait. I want to be a singer, and Wildwood is a performance camp—I won a scholarship there a few years ago, and I’ve been going every summer. There aren’t many opportunities to get musical training in rural Maine, so Wildwood was a total stroke of luck. Plus it’s my only opportunity all year to get a taste of independence. Inside the house I could tell right away that my mother, Maggie Walker, had been chopping and roasting and sifting and baking all afternoon. She’s an awesome cook and always goes all out for special occasions, but this morning I’d told her it was fine if we skipped the festivities. After all, no one’s been in the mood for a party for three months. Why would anything be different today? But she just hugged me and said, “My oldest girl is turning sixteen. That only happens once in a lifetime.” Seeing the tears in her blue eyes, I felt I couldn’t argue with that. I dumped my backpack on the living room couch and followed my nose to the kitchen. “Happy birthday, Rose,” my thirteen-year-old sister, Daisy, called out from the dining room. “Happy birthday!” echoed ten-year-old Laurel and eight-year-old Lily. “Hi, everybody,” I responded. “Smells great, Mom!” I walked into the dining room and watched Daisy set the table with the good china, carefully placing every napkin and utensil just so. Her long blond ponytail was pulled through the back of her Boston Red Sox cap, which I suspect she sleeps in. (I know for a fact that until she was eleven she slept with her autographed Nomar Garciaparra baseball mitt under her pillow.) I couldn’t help noticing that in spite of her usual uniform of gym shorts and T-shirt, she’s starting to get really pretty. Of course, she’d probably punch me if I said so. When the guys on her baseball team started telling her that last year, she switched to all-girls’ softball. I opened my mouth to tell Daisy how nice the table looked but was interrupted. “It’s my turn to lick the beaters,” Lily whined from the kitchen. “Uh-oh,” I said, and Daisy rolled her eyes in a here-we-go-again look. We both peeked through the doorway into the kitchen, anticipating a good show. Sure enough, Mom had just made the chocolate frosting for my birthday cake and Laurel had, naturally, seized the beaters. She’s going through a growth spurt or something and consumes about half her weight in food a day. She’s currently about a foot taller than Lily. So there was Laurel, holding one beater high above Lily’s head and licking the other while Lily danced up and down, fuming. I couldn’t help laughing. Lily likes to dress up, and the costume du jour consisted of the calico skirt I had worn in our high school production of Oklahoma! last year, a hot pink tube top that wasn’t staying up very well, and clip-on pearl earrings. For some reason her blond pigtails were sticking straight out from the sides of her head. Laurel was a sight, too: cutoff jeans, scraped knees, and a grass-stained shirt. “Personally, I wouldn’t want to eat anything she just touched, but that’s me,” I said to Daisy under my breath. Laurel turned bright red. She doesn’t like to fight, but she has a real stubborn streak—especially when she k