Excerpt from Too Bad to Die by Francine Mathews, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Ian felt his throat constrict, his air cut off. He tried to swallow.

The Headmaster grunted. "Good man. Now stand up and take your punishment."

Ian got to his feet. He bent over.

Six of the best, from his own plimsoll. He didn't care, this time, how hard he cried.

—

"I GUESS HE WAS TOO GOOD TO LIVE," Hudders whispered from his cot after Lights Out that evening.

Ian did not reply. He'd cadged a candle from Commons and wedged it in a crack in the floorboards. His head dangled from the side of his bunk; the copybook was on the floor and his fingers gripped a bit of pencil painfully.

. . . the wistling sound of shells acrost the muddy grownd.

Forard! cried the stern Majer. He razed his arm and advanst there was a birst of light and . . .

"What are you doing?" Hudders asked.

Ian kicked out with his legs.

"You're writing? What is it? Let me see."

"Shhhhhh," Ian hissed. Writing was his secret, his way of flying through the unheated rooms and grimy windows of Durnford School and back to London, or maybe Arnisdale, where the dogs were, and Cook let you sit on a stool by the kitchen stove on wet days, eating lamb pies with drippings. He kept the copybook under his mattress, along with his Bear, and he never took either of them out until the deep sound of breathing throughout the dormitory assured him that he was safe.

"I play the violin," Hudders whispered.

"Crikey." Ian looked at him. "Don't tell anyone, understand? They'll think you're wet."

There was a silence. Ian closed his copybook and blew out his candle stub. He shoved it and the copybook under the far side of the mattress, where Hudders wouldn't think to look.

"Did they make you learn to play?" he asked. "Your parents, I mean?"

"Didn't have to. I like music. Everyone does in Vienna."

"Well, you're not there anymore." Ian pulled up his blanket. He felt queer inside. Hudders had done it again—he'd told him something he should never have said out loud.

"I play the piano, too," Hudders said.

"Shut up," Ian whispered fiercely. And then, in a silent voice inside his head, the words he would utter before bed until the day he died—

Please, dear God, help me to grow up to be more like Mokie.

He lay there in the dark feeling awful. He had wanted to write about Mokie as a Hero—the sort of father who would die for King and Country. But the words had come out like a Rider Haggard story. Nell, TP's wife, read King Solomon's Mines to the boys at night. It was a cracking good adventure, but it wasn't real. Mokie, dead, was horribly real.

He tried to remember what his father looked like. The sound of his voice. He wondered if it hurt terribly to die, and whether Mokie was watching him, now, from somewhere. Ian closed his eyes so as not to see his father's face among the cobwebs in the dormitory ceiling.

Mokie had come home from the Front for Christmas, and they had all gone up to the lodge at Arnisdale for a few days. Mokie was very tired and Mamma had talked nonsense more than usual, because his father spent all his time out on the Scottish moors with his pack of bassets, stalking things instead of going to parties. Ian had followed the scent of pipe tobacco to the stables. Mokie's face was pressed into his polo pony's neck. His fingers were knotted in its mane. The smell of horse and tobacco mingled with the sound of his father's sobbing. Ian had felt sick. Just like today, when he'd thought it was Peter who'd died.

"I'm to be worthy of him," he muttered to Hudders. "Only I don't know how."

"Your dad wouldn't care, I bet. You were his pal, weren't you?"

Ian shrugged in the dark. "There are four of us boys. Everyone likes Peter best."

Excerpted from Too Bad to Die by Francine Mathews. Copyright © 2015 by Francine Mathews. Excerpted by permission of Riverhead Books. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.