Red From Green By Maile Meoy Summary

Everyone grows up – no exceptions. You can’t escape it, and sometimes it comes at unex-pected times. Going from childhood to adulthood is the main theme of the 2009 short story “Red from green” by Maile Meloy. Sometimes it’s scary to grow up, and sometimes you experi-ence things in your life that toughen you. Like Sam, who is a child in the beginning of the story but go trough things an adult would go trough. She looses her mother, gets touched by an old-er man for the first time and is applying for a scholarship to a boarding school. Something Sam feels like she is not prepared for. The unknown is frightening. Sometimes its about learning how to stand on your own two feet. This story is her tough journey to adulthood.

Sam is very young, only fifteen years old. The fact that she is going to be a sophomore scares her, and she is not ready to leave her father behind and be independent. She loves her father, and the float trip has become an annual thing for them. Her mother died when she was young, so the father and Sam have been alone for a while. Therefore their bond is strong. We see that she is hesitating to go to boarding school where the text says: “in the fall she would be a

She is still very much a child, and she is not used to men finding her beautiful or complementing her. When Layton tells Sam “you have perfect teeth” , she becomes very awkward and uncomfortable. That’s one of the first grown up experiences she has, and she doesn’t know how to deal with that. She has very low self-esteem. That is why she becomes suspicious of him, and doesn’t believe his words. No one ev-er complemented her that way before, and therefore she is very self-conscious: “Re-mote. That’s a good word,” he said. She felt her cheeks heat up, but didn’t say anything” . She is in-nocent, and is not familiar with the way Layton thinks. She still thinks as a child, whereas Lay-ton is the adult, who teaches her how to be a grown