The Broken String Read Online Free PDF

other side. I recognized my last name: MacPherson. The first name was L-I-S-A. Who was that? The address was too hard for me to read, but I knew it wasn’t my address. It wasn’t even a North Carolina address. North Carolina was NC. This address was VA. Maybe L-I-S-A was my mother’s sister or cousin or someone? Could she be the little blond girl in the picture?
    I took the case from where it rested against the wall and set it on the floor in front of me. I felt a thrill as I opened the latches and lifted the top of the case. The violin was so beautiful, with its pretty shape and warm reddish-brown wood, but it was much too big to have belonged to the little girl in the picture, and it was certainly too big for me. I’d never be able to hold it under my chin the way the girls in the orchestra had held theirs. Still, I wanted to try. I lifted the violin from the case, surprised by how awkward it was to hold. It took both my hands to try to fit it beneath my chin and it kept slipping down my chest. I stared at it in frustration. There were those pegs the girl in the school orchestra had turned. They’d made no noise, I remembered. It would be safe to play with them.
    I turned one of the pegs just a tiny bit and one of the strings popped off with such force that it slapped me in the face. It didn’t hurt, not really, but it surprised me to the point that I yelped and scrambled to my feet, dropping the violin to the floor.
    “What was that?” my mother called up the stairs.
    “I don’t know,” I shouted back, hoping she thought my voice was coming from my room rather than Daddy’s office. I stared at the violin on the floor. I didn’t think it was broken except for the string, but when I picked it up I saw a little ding on the side of the wood. I heard my mother’s footsteps on the stairs. Quickly, I put the violin back in its case, my hands shaking. My mother’s footsteps reached the hallway. I almost had the violin fully in the case now, but when I closed the lid, that broken string stuck out, and when I hurriedly rested the case against the wall, it fell over.
    My mother opened the door. “What are you doing in this room?” she asked.
    “Nothing,” I said.
    “You know you’re not supposed to be in here without Daddy.”
    “He always lets me look at the compasses and lighters,” I said.
    Mom’s eyes were on the violin with the tag and I knew the moment she spotted the loose string.
    “What did you
do
?” she screamed.
    I backed away until I butted up against my father’s desk and could move no farther. My parents never spanked us, but I had the feeling today was the day that would change. I saw Danny in the doorway, his pale blue eyes as big as I’d ever seen them.
    “I didn’t do anything,” I said in a small voice.
    My mother was down on the floor next to the violin case. I watched helplessly as she opened it, and there was my handiwork. She lifted the wounded instrument into the air and gasped when she saw the little ding on the bottom. My whole body went stiff because I was sure she was going to hit me. Instead, she started sobbing. She held the violin in her arms like it was a baby. Danny and I looked at each other, both of us frozen with fear, unsure what would happen next. We watched as our mother finally seemed to pull herself together, her steady tears turning to an occasional gulping sob. She placed the violin tenderly back in the case. She seemed completely lost in her own world and oblivious to me, and I wondered if I could somehow escape.
    Danny motioned to me with a small wave, and I had taken one step toward him, when she roared up like an angry bear, towering above me. “Don’t you
dare
leave!” she shouted. “Don’t you dare even
think
of leaving this room. How many times have you been told never to touch anything in this office? Now you’ve ruined it. You’ve …”
    “It can be fixed,” Danny said from the doorway.
    “What do you know?” she snapped at him, then turned