Page 77 - SpringBoard_ELA_Grade8_Flipbook

aCTIvITy 1.9
continued
The return
nauseating: making feel ill reiterating: repeating
vestige: a bit or trace of something
my Notes
21 But not herself. Not Meg. It did not quite have her.
22 She blinked her eyes rapidly and against the rhythm until the redness before them
cleared and she could see. There was the brain, there was IT, lying pulsing and quivering on the dais, soft and exposed and nauseating. Charles Wallace was crouched beside IT, his eyes still slowly twirling, his jaw still slack, as she had seen him before, with a tic in his forehead reiterating the revolting rhythm of IT.
23 As she saw him it was again as though she had been punched in the stomach, for she had to realize afresh that she was seeing Charles, and yet it was not Charles at all. Where was Charles Wallace, her own beloved Charles Wallace?
24 What is it I have got that IT hasn’t got?
25 “You have nothing that IT hasn’t got,” Charles Wallace said coldly. “How nice to
have you back, dear sister. We have been waiting for you. We knew that Mrs Whatsit would send you. She is our friend, you know.”
26 For an appalling moment Meg believed, and in that moment she felt her brain being gathered up into IT.
27 “No!” she screamed at the top of her lungs. “No! You lie!”
28 For a moment she was free from ITs clutches again.
29 As long as I can stay angry enough IT can’t get me.
30 Is that what I have that IT doesn’t have?
31 “Nonsense,” Charles Wallace said. “You have nothing that IT doesn’t have.”
32 “You’re lying,” she replied, and she felt only anger toward this boy who was not
Charles Wallace at all. No, it was not anger, it was loathing; it was hatred, sheer and unadulterated, and as she became lost in hatred she also began to be lost in IT. The red miasma swam before her eyes; her stomach churned in ITs rhythm. Her body trembled with the strength of her hatred and the strength of IT.
33 With the last vestige of consciousness she jerked her mind and body. Hate was nothing that IT didn’t have. IT knew all about hate.
34 “You are lying about that, and you were lying about Mrs Whatsit!” she screamed.
35 “Mrs Whatsit hates you,” Charles Wallace said.
36 And that was where IT made ITs fatal mistake, for as Meg said, automatically, “Mrs
Whatsit loves me; that’s what she told me, that she loves me,” suddenly she knew.
37 She knew!
38 Love.
39 That was what she had that IT did not have.
40 She had Mrs Whatsit’s love, and her father’s, and her mother’s, and the real Charles
Wallace’s love, and the twins’, and Aunt Beast’s.
41 And she had her love for them.
Word CoNNeCTIoNS
Etymology
The word miasma appeared in the 1660s as a Modern Latin word meaning “noxious vapors.” It derives from the same Greek word that means “stain” or “pollution.” Now it is used to mean a poisonous atmosphere.
50 SpringBoard® English Language Arts Grade 8
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