Read Online Blow Out the Moon by Libby Koponen - Free Book Online Page B

something very important,” I said. “Guard my dolls. Don’t let Willy and Bubby play with them. You can check on them, but we’ll still have the rule about not working each others’. Okay?” She nodded. “Promise?”
    “I promise.”
    “Good.”
    The dolls said good-bye to each other, and then I put all mine in their own beds, under the covers, and put the beds inside the white chest.

    It was a school day for Emmy and Willy, and Jill was taking Bubby with them, too, because by the time she came home, my parents and I would be at the train station. I followed them all to the front door. Willy and Bubby kissed me good-bye, and I kissed them back and gave them each a hug.
    Emmy and I looked at each other, and then she started to cry.
    “Emmy, don’t cry!” I said. “Please don’t cry! It’s not very long until May sixteenth!”
    (That was the first day they would be allowed to visit me, and of course they would come.)
    “That’s right, buck up!” Jill said.
    We both ignored her.
    “But it won’t be the same — it won’t be the same ever again,” Emmy said, still crying.
    I thought that was probably true; but I didn’t say so. I said, “Think of your pet bird!”
    My parents had promised to get her a budgerigar — a small parrot people in England have as a pet — as a sort of consolation present for me going away.
    Then I made our “I hate this” face (the one I always made before I walked upstairs to my London classroom) and Emmy sort of smiled and made hers back at me, and then they left. … I stood in the doorway, and after a few steps, Emmy stopped. She turned around, with her hands still in her pockets, and we looked at each other one last time, and then I waved and ran into the house.

    Emmy, exactly the way she was dressed and standing when she stopped and looked back at me (though this picture was taken a few weeks later).
    I went downstairs: our room was still sunny and very quiet and white. It felt a little funny to be in there without Emmy and Willy and Bubby. … by the time they were home again, I’d be gone. The room was so white, so still!
    When it was time for us to leave, my mother buttoned me into my new gray wool coat (with a name tape neatly stitched into the inside collar with tiny tight stitches, all exactly alike), and a straw hat with a red ribbon round the brim — part of the new uniform. That had a nametape sewn into it, too.

    No one took pictures that day (this was taken several weeks later), but this is the hat I was wearing.
    My father was wearing a tweed jacket and my mother wore her pretty pink suit.
    We took a taxi to Charing Cross, the train station. They weren’t coming to the school — they were just putting me on the “reserved car” (my mother said that meant a whole carriage just for girls going to Sibton Park).
    But when we got to the platform we didn’t see any car marked “Sibton Park,” or any other girls. My father told my mother and me to wait while he went to find out what was happening. When he came back, he looked very embarrassed (I don’t think I’d ever seen him embarrassed before) and told us that he’d called the school: all the other girls had already gone on an earlier train; someone would meet this one.
    “The same mistake was made about her,” he said.
    A very big girl wearing a gray coat and straw hat just like mine was standing a few feet away, scowling awkwardly. Her name was Lindsey Cohen, and my father said we could take the train to Sibton Park together. Lindsey Cohen got on, and then my father said to give him a kiss, it was time to go.
    “So long! See you May sixteenth!” he said, and looked at my mother.
    She bent down and hugged me; I held her neck very tightly for a minute. I could smell her Arpège perfume; then she kissed me and I let go. When she stood up, her lips and chin were trembling. She smiled, with her mouth wobbling a little.
    I got on the train and sat down next to the window, across from Lindsey Cohen;