Read Online The Truth According to Us by Annie Barrows - Free Book Online Page B

she’d reveal the secrets of her (possibly royal) past. To me alone she’d confide the truth of her palatial home and pampered youth and how her father had come to lose his fortune in the Crash. Or maybe Miss Beck had run away from home. Anything was possible! I’d lend her my hankie if she started to cry and give her my youthful counsel and we’d be friends, at least as much as a lady like her could be friends with me. And, best of all, I for once would know something that no one else knew. I’d never tell, though. I’d be a vault.
    Miss Beck didn’t come out of her room, and my bottom went to sleep. I decided I would go downstairs and eat some breakfast while I waited for her.
    The back door was open to the morning cool, and I gobbled up my breakfast while Jottie drank coffee and read the newspaper backward, the way she did. The last of my milk gulped, I wiped my mouth with my napkin. “Think Miss Beck’ll wear that white suit again today?” I asked Jottie’s newspaper.
    A newsprint corner flapped down, and Jottie’s eye blinked at me. “No. Yellow dress with a square neck. Looked real nice.”
    She had already been and gone. Jottie didn’t know where. Or when she’d be back. I’d been thwarted. I moped around thwartedly for a little while, until Jottie said something about idle hands being the devil’s playthings, and I made tracks out the front door before she could give me some awful chore to do. I sulked a little more out on the sidewalk, because no one was up yet. Then I took myself off to Capon Street, to the headquarters of Geraldine Lee’s army.
    For how many years had I longed to be in Geraldine’s army? It must have been three or four. It seemed like hundreds. It seemed like I’d stood on the banks of Academy Creek for my entire life, watching the battalions of plum-throwing children as they advanced, retreated, and bayed like wolves, wishing with all my heart that I could join them. IfI had been offered a choice between salvation and induction, I know which I would have chosen. But I couldn’t pass muster. The rules were straightforward. There was only one: To get into Geraldine Lee’s army, you had to fight Geraldine. Fighting Geraldine was mostly symbolic; you didn’t have to beat her up—no one could do that—you only had to wrestle her to the ground. But wrestling Geraldine to the ground was no cakewalk. She was a year younger than me, but she was great big and fat, and she had six little brothers and sisters who skittered up while you were grappling and kicked you in the shins. All six of them were mean and skinny; Bird said Geraldine ate their food and it had turned them.
    I had always been puny, and I was puny still. From first grade on, children had demonstrated their muscles by picking me up and lugging me around the playground, and it did me no good to holler about it. They thought it was funny. I was taller now—I had grown four inches since January—but I hadn’t gained any weight to go along with it, and I was altogether a pitiful specimen of a twelve-year-old, according to Miss Nellie Kissining, the basketball coach at the Race Street School. She had washed her hands of me. Mae said I looked like I’d been put on the rack. Jottie said I’d fill out before I knew it, which was an unnerving idea. I was weak as a kitten from all that growing and, I suppose, from so many years of sitting on the sofa with a book in my hand. There were some days I couldn’t even hold the book up and I had to set it on the floor and drape my head over the side of the cushions to read.
    All of which explains why I had been standing for long years in the dirt while the scourge of war laid waste to Macedonia. Specifically, Geraldine’s army was scourging Sonny Deal’s army, except when they stopped fighting each other to band together against the Spurling children. I had tried to worm my way into Geraldine’s ranks by helpfully calling out the location of Sonny Deal’s troops from the