She was the only one who knew how to make me feel better. She was busy with school and her new life, her new friends, studying and all that, but she’d still make time for me. “Whenever I could, I’d go online and chat with Anne about…you know, whatever was upsetting me that day. I had a hard time picturing Meredith ever being like that, but if she said she was, I guess she was.

Everything was a ‘bore’ or a ‘disaster’ or a ‘waste of time.'” Always grim and complaining about everything. She’d been gone a year, and in that time I’d become this sort of…awful teenager. But her voice continued quiet and unshaken. The tears kept streaming down her face in the heater-light. And she would tell me, ‘Kneel down, and put your hands together, and point your soul toward the light of God.’ And I would sort of steal glances at her while we were praying and she’d have her face lifted up, and her expression would be so still and peaceful, I would think: She’s going off to the angel place. She would come into my room at night, when it was time for me to say my prayers. “I used to think sometimes that she was secretly an angel. Now and then she moved her hand to wipe them away or she sniffed a little. The tears just streamed steadily down her cheeks as she talked. Even the calm tone of her voice remained the same. Her features remained still, distant, sort of serene. Her expression didn’t change at all, the way it does with most people when they cry. I saw the light gleam red on Meredith’s cheek and I felt my throat get tight as I realized that she had started crying. I must’ve been a terrible pain in the neck to her, but she never let it show.

She would tell them, ‘Oh, let her come, she won’t bother anyone.’ Which almost certainly wasn’t true. She let me tag along-to the mall, to get pizza, to the movies-even when it annoyed her friends, which was, like, always. And I just wanted to do whatever she did, follow her around everywhere she went. I’m not just, you know, exaggerating or something. I think she was…the single sweetest, gentlest, kindest person I’ve ever met in my life. The plot contains graphic violence.Finally, not turning to us, not even talking to us it seemed, but just talking into the darkness around us, she said quietly, “I had a sister. When revolutionaries seize control of a country in Central America, where 16-yr-old Will is serving at a mission, he and the other volunteers find themselves in a desperate race to escape the violence and return home.

If we survive by andrew klavan