Little Women and Me (7 page)

“I’d
never
do that,” Beth said, obviously horrified by the idea of girls competing for a boy, while Amy instantly looked guilty.

“He’s too young for my tastes,” Meg said. “I think I favor a more mature man.”

“This is the most ridiculous thing I’ve heard from you yet, Emily,” Jo said. “The very idea … that we’d fight over a boy!”

“If you think it’s so ridiculous,” I countered, “then it should be easy for you to agree to a pact, not to let Laurie come between us.”

“Fine,” Jo said grudgingly. Then she added, “But I’ll bet you buttons to bows, if one of us should break that pact, that person will be you.”

Buttons to bows?
What a bizarre thing to say! Still …

“Fine,” I said.

Four

How I missed Facebook!

If only there were a computer around here somewhere and I could log on to say,
Emily March
opened a book to do an English assignment and got sucked into a whole different time period—WHOOSH!
My friends would comment with “LOL!” and “OMG!” and a few dozen people would simply hit the “like” button, and I’d feel like my day was off to a regular start.

But no.

The holidays were over and it was time to get back to normal life, which for me meant first having to figure out just what my normal life around here was supposed to be.

But first I had to deal with …

My period!

I’d never had to suffer through it in 1862!

I lay in my bed, sheets pulled up to my chin. What was I
supposed to do? I was pretty sure there weren’t any tampons in this house!

“Get up, lazybones!” Jo cried, somehow making her words sound both cheery and admonishing all at once as she tried to rip the sheets off of me.

I clung tighter to them.

She pulled harder.

“It is time to get back to our regular lives,” she said with another tug of the sheets. “Life can’t be all plays and dances all the time.”

Ex
cuse
me? I felt like pointing out.
I
never got to be in the play.
I
never got to dance at the Gardiners’ New Year’s Eve party—that was you!

“I’m not feeling well today,” I said instead, clinging even tighter to the sheets. “I think maybe I’ll just stay home today.”

“Come on, Emily, you know the rules. Unless one is literally
dying
, no one gets to take a day off from their duties around here.”

“ ‘Unless one of us is dying’?” I echoed. “Well, that’s a little overdramatic, don’t you think? Why do you always have to be so—”

“Do you have a fever?” she cut me off, placing both hands on my forehead.

“What are you doing?” I cried, swatting her hands away. “You’re worse than Meg!”

“HA!” she laughed. “I saw you do that swatting thing to Meg and I just knew you’d do it to me too.” Then she reached for the sheets again, which, now that I’d removed my hands in order to swat at her, she was able to rip from my body.

“You give those back!” I lunged at her.

“No!” She laughed again, darting out of my reach. But then her expression changed, becoming a sober combination of wistful and sweet. “Oh, Emily. Your first bleeding!”

My
first
…? I wanted to point out that I’d been getting my period for over two years now, thank you very much, but then I realized how lucky I was. At least now I wasn’t going to have to explain why I didn’t know how to take care of my own period in 1862.

“Here,” Jo said, taking me by the hand, “let me show you what to do.”

A few moments later, it occurred to me that what was going on between us was kind of nice: Jo and I were having a real bonding moment!

“Yes, you are a woman now,” Jo said, “and now I must tell you all about the making of babies and such.”

Darn!
Just when things were going so well. Sometimes she was worse than Meg.

“I don’t think that’s really necessary,” I started to say, but she just blathered on.

I listened in horror as she gave some long and yet vague explanation that had dogs and horses and, I’m fairly certain, chickens in it.

Was this really the 1862 view of sex?

“Here.” Jo handed me my nightgown. “Here.” Jo stripped the sheets from my bed, shoved them into my arms.

“What?” she asked, when I only gaped at her, stunned. “Well, you can’t very well expect Beth to do your laundry, can you? Honestly, Emily!”

So much for our bonding moment.

I swore, if I ever made it back to my real life, if I ever heard
anyone yak about the “good old days” again, I’d punch them. On the surface, things may have been sweeter and simpler in 1862, but doing laundry by hand sucked.

The holidays over
and
my first period attended to, now it really was time to get back to normal life around here.

Amy was doing math or something on a slate while Beth lay on the sofa, the cat and three kittens around her.

“Hurry along, Amy,” Meg said briskly. “Mustn’t be late for your first day back at school.”

“Are you sure it’s just a headache?” Jo said, placing a hand on Beth’s forehead. “You do feel a little warm.”

While the sisters did many things together as a group and some activities were split into the two youngest and two oldest, with me roving between the two duos, Meg was Amy’s confidante, while Jo was Beth’s.

So where did the middle March fit into all this? Seemed to me, I was odd man out here. Or at least odd girl out.

“Come on, muffs are getting cold,” Hannah called to us from the kitchen as Meg and Jo and Amy hurried into their outdoor clothes: cape-like cloaks, a bonnet for Meg, a wide-brimmed hat for Jo, and no hat for Amy, who simply took a few strands of hair from each side of her face and tied them neatly in the back with a blue ribbon.

What Hannah had called “muffs” turned out to be turnovers fresh from the oven. There were four of them, and since Beth was still on the sofa, I assumed I was supposed to go out with the others and that one of these turnovers was for me.

Suddenly I realized how hungry I was. Bringing the turnover
to my mouth, I was about to take a bite when Jo shrieked, “What
are
you doing, Emily?”

I raised my eyebrows at her. “Eating?”

“You can’t eat your muff now!” she said to me with scorn.

“I can’t?”

“If you do,” Amy said, “how will you keep your hands warm on the long walk?” She laughed. “Sometimes, it’s as though you don’t know anything about how we do things around here.”

Oh no! Was Amy on to me?

“Oh, right,” I said with a nervous laugh, “the long walk. What was I thinking?”

Then I hurried into my own cape-like cloak and followed the others out the door, muff in hand.

I was happy the muff was so warm as we walked—stupid cold New England winters!

But where were we going? I wondered as we looked back at the house one last time to see Marmee at the window—nodding and smiling and waving at us, reminding me of a creaky mechanical toy or the queen of England—before we turned the corner.

“Oh, I do wish we could live lives of leisure as other girls do,” Meg said with a put-upon sigh.

“And we don’t
because
…?” I asked the leading question.

“Why, because we don’t have enough money, you know that,” Meg said. Another sigh. “Of course, we once had money.”

“And we lost that …?”

“Why, Papa lost the money trying to help an unfortunate friend, which is why we older girls have to work.”

Was I included in that “older” too? Did I work in some sort of factory? Was I a salesgirl in a shop? I’d bet anything if I
was
a salesgirl, I was a really rude one.

“You know all this, Emily.” Meg sounded exasperated, but then her tone softened as she looked self-pitying again, a faraway look in her eyes. “Or maybe you don’t remember what it was like when we had money. I suppose that
I
am the only one who remembers what things used to be like because
I
am the oldest and therefore
I
am the only one who ever—”

Jo yawned with such deliberate loudness, she snapped Meg right out of her self-pity party.

“I know you like to go on and on about being older than the rest of us,” Jo said to Meg, “but you are only one year older than me and
I
remember a few things too.”

I felt the frigid cold around me intensify as the muff turned cooler in my hands. Suddenly I wanted to be back at the cozy house with Beth. I may have had to do my own laundry, but at least there were fireplaces.

“So, um,” I said, “just where exactly are we going?”

The other three stopped in the snow and turned to look at me as though I’d just landed from another planet, which, essentially, I had.

“I’m going to the King house,” Meg said. “You know—where I’m nursery governess to their four spoiled children?”

“It’s Aunt March’s house for me,” Jo said with a wrinkle of the nose.

“Josy-phine!” Meg said in a loud old-lady voice, and I remembered that this was how Aunt March spoke to Jo.

“At least I get to read in her large library whenever she’s
napping,” Jo said, “although that’s hardly compensation for when she’s awake.”

“And I am off to school,” Amy said with a heavy sigh. “Oh, I do wish Beth weren’t so bashful, for then at least she could accompany me. What a wonderful life Beth has! All Beth has to do all day is play with her imaginary friends—those wretched six dolls she dresses every day, tending to them when they are sick—and take care of stray animals and practice on her piano with the yellow keys. Oh, and all the housework that Hannah doesn’t do—that’s Beth’s job too.”

I’d seen one of Beth’s dolls: a castoff of Jo’s, the thing was limbless and had no head.

“And what am I supposed to be doing?” I asked.

Meg narrowed her eyes at me as though wondering why I would be asking about what I should already know.

“Why, you are our jack-of-all-trades.”

“Your what?” She had to be joking. This sounded like it might be as bad as Marmee’s
Wherever you go, dearest Emily, there you are
inscription in my brown copy of
Pilgrim’s Progress
.

“You do a bit of everything,” Meg said. “On Mondays you go and help me at the Kings’.”

“On Tuesdays,” Jo said, “you help me with Aunt March.”

“On Wednesdays,” Meg said, “you stay home and help Beth and Hannah around the house.”

“And I suppose on Thursdays I go to school with Amy?” I said, finally catching on and not liking what I was hearing at all. What kind of family role was “jack-of-all-trades”? I knew what that meant. It meant I was a master of none. Worse, it meant I fit in nowhere. Just like at my real home.

“No,” Amy said, looking at me like I’d gone insane. “You
don’t go to
school
with me. What sort of sense would that make, to go for just one day? And you being two years older?”

I shrugged. I had no idea. Seriously, very little of this made any sense to me.

“On
Thursdays
,” Amy said, sounding an awful lot like Jo at this point, “you walk me all the way to school, you meet me there afterward, and you help me with my homework and any problems that might arise, which is basically what Meg does on the other four days of the week.”

So … at fourteen years old, I never had to go to school again? At least not here? Cool!

“And on Fridays?” I wondered aloud. “What do I do on Fridays?”

Now it was their turn to look puzzled.

“Huh,” Meg said at last. “I don’t think any of us know.”

“What
do
you do on Fridays?” Amy asked.

“Never mind that now!” Jo said, using one hand to hold her hat to her head as a strong gust of wind threatened to blow it away. “Don’t you two realize what Emily’s been doing?” she said to Meg and Amy.

“What
have
I been doing?” I asked, wanting to hear this as well.

“Emily,” Jo accused, “you’ve been asking all these silly questions because it is Monday and you do not want to go to the Kings’ with Meg.”

“Oh, right.” I laughed nervously. “I guess you caught me, didn’t you?”

“Come along, Emily,” Meg said as the four of us reached a fork in the road and she pulled me toward the left.

“I do wish you hadn’t dropped me into the cold hod when I
was a baby,” I heard Amy mutter at Jo as they veered off to the right. “It is all
your
fault my nose looks like this …”