Little Women and Me (8 page)

Anyone who tells you that it’s easier not to have to go to school never had to babysit the King children
, I thought, rubbing my feet by the fire that night. I’d somehow managed to get through my first day as a functioning,
working
member of the March family, subsisting on just that one turnover the entire day. I was sore. I was tired. And those King children—they were monsters!

While sewing after dinner that night, each sister recapped her day. Meg complained about ours and told the others about the oldest King boy being sent away for doing something “dreadful”—neither of us had been able to worm out of the other monster King children what that dreadful something was, but I had my suspicions, even if Meg didn’t. Jo complained about her day with Aunt March. (“Josy-phine!”) Amy complained about the teacher humiliating some chick at school. Beth didn’t complain about anything, instead telling us of seeing Mr. Laurence give a fish to some beggar woman at the market who’d been about to be turned away by the shopkeeper.

That’s when Marmee told all of us a fable about four—no, make that
five
girls who always complained, always saying “If only we could do this or have that,” until an old woman cast a spell over them so that in the future, whenever they became discontented, they would think over their blessings and be grateful … or they’d lose whatever good things they had.

I was sure there must be a moral in there somewhere, but for the life of me, I could not care less.

I was too busy trying to sew—
when would I learn how to sew as
well as the others?
I wondered, pricking myself with the needle; not that I cared about sewing, but I was sick of having marks all over my hands—and my feet were still sore, my temper fried from dealing with the wretched King children.

And tomorrow I’d have to go with Jo to Aunt March’s.

Five

I settled in to my first week as the jack-of-all-trades.

On Tuesday I went to Aunt March’s with Jo. For once, Jo hadn’t exaggerated. Aunt March was as obnoxious as Jo said she was. And while whenever she bellowed “Josy-phine!” I laughed, it was substantially less amusing when she started bellowing “Emi-ly!” As my own mom used to say: “It’s always funny until it happens to you.” Still, Aunt March did nap often, and when she did, I followed Jo to the most amazing private library, where Jo showed me the one thing we really had in common: books. All those books made me itch to get back to writing.

Wednesday turned out to be the best day of the week, being at home with Beth. Yes, doing the housework was hard. There were no vacuum cleaners, no dishwashers or dryers, no laundry machines, no Dustbusters—everything had to be done by hand. My beautiful hands—honestly, I grumbled to myself, someone
should have invented rubber gloves by now. And if doing the housework was hard, watching Beth play with her six dolls could be a little odd too. That limbless castoff she’d gotten from Jo, the one with no head—it was creepy! But that was Beth: she was capable of loving anything and everything, even the most loveless creatures, even me. And that was why it was the best day of the week, even if it was the hardest work and there were those creepy dolls: because a person couldn’t be around Beth and not feel a little more peaceful, a person couldn’t be around Beth and not feel inspired to be just a little better than the person they normally were.

You’d think that Thursdays with Amy would be the easiest of my jack-of-all-trades days since all I had to really do was walk her to school and then I was free until I had to pick her up later, and help her with her homework if necessary. But you’d be wrong. Thursday wound up being a loose-ends day for me, with me spending a good deal of it staring over the low hedge at the Laurence estate—a McMansion compared to the little brown March house—and wondering what went on inside there.

As for Friday … the others had grilled me on what I did on my free Fridays, but I still wasn’t saying, in large part because I hadn’t figured it out yet!

But then Saturday finally came and everyone was home again with lots to do.

At least, there
should
have been lots to do, except there wasn’t, because it turned out to be a blustery and snowy Saturday, leaving the others happy to do totally exciting activities, like reading and sewing.

All except for Jo, of course.

Meg was lying on the sofa reading
Ivanhoe
, of all things—
bo
-ring!—while Beth played with her kittens, Amy drew pictures,
and I tried to figure out how to sew a straighter stitch. That was when Jo entered wearing rubber boots and an old sack and hood. In her hands, she carried a broom and shovel.

One thing you had to give Jo: she never cared how she looked or what anyone else thought. You’d never catch her wearing skinny jeans or eating salad just to impress a boy.

“Where are you going dressed so abominably?” Amy asked lazily. “I hope no one recognizes you as my sister.”

“I’m going to get some exercise,” Jo announced.

“But you’ve gone for two walks already today,” Beth pointed out.

Beth was right. Honestly, was there ever anyone so hardy as Jo March? It was annoying.

“Beth’s right,” Meg said, laying aside her book with an air I now knew signaled an older-sister lecture. “I would advise you—”

“Never take advice,” Jo cut her off.

That suddenly sounded so familiar, the idea of Jo being the sort of person who never took advice. No, of course
she
wouldn’t.

“Anyone want to go with me?” Jo asked brusquely, giving none of us any time to answer as she hurried on with, “No, of course you don’t, so I guess I’ll just—”

“I’ll go with you,” I said, getting up so fast my sewing got dumped on the floor, which was fine: I was a lousy sewer.

I don’t know why I did it. I hated being cold, would never volunteer to go outside when I could remain in here, even if
in here
was slightly boring today. But there was something suspicious about Jo’s attitude. I got the sense she didn’t want any of us to go with her.

“No, you won’t,” Jo insisted. “You’ll hate it out there.”

“I can assure you, I’ll love it,” I said brightly.

“No, you won’t,” she insisted again. “You hate the cold and all you’ll do is complain of it all the time.”

I
knew
it! For some reason Jo didn’t want anyone to go with her.

“I’ll be a perfect soldier about the cold,” I said, still brightly. “And if I’m not? You can always send me back. Now, wait here”—I paused to check out her ridiculous outfit—“while I hunt down a pair of rubber boots. And an old sack and hood. And a broom and shovel.”

Gee, Emily, you really showed
her, I grumbled internally as I proceeded to sweep and shovel the walkway with my hardy sister.
And to think, you could have been comfortably inside, seated by the fire, even if you had to do something stupid like sewing. But instead
you
had to insist on accompanying her outside.
You
couldn’t leave well enough alone.
You
were so certain that Jo was up to no good, or at least up to something interesting, when in fact all it was is that Jo March is the most annoyingly hardy person who ever lived!

WHAP!

I felt the wetness penetrate my hood, soaking my neck beneath the fabric, before it occurred to me: I’d been struck by a snowball!

“Why, you little—” I whirled on Jo, who was holding her sides, she was laughing so hard at my outrage.

I thought for sure she’d stop laughing when I scooped up twin handfuls of snow, packed it into a tight ball, and hurled it at her head. But she only laughed harder.

Seeing her laughing, in spite of the cold her big nose must be feeling with the snow dripping off it, I began to laugh too.

Suddenly, we were laughing together, scooping up snow and flinging it at each other, using our brooms to sweep even more snow at each other. I couldn’t believe it, but I was actually having fun.

Now,
this
was a Jo March I could get along with: impulsive, vibrant, full of life,
zingy
.

Of course I’d been wrong to suspect she had something up her sleeve because she wanted to go outside by herself for the third time on a blustery and snowy day. She was merely a spirit too big to be caged indoors. There was nothing underhanded about her behavior, nothing nefarious—ooh! good PSAT word!—about it.

I’d just thrown a snowball at her and she was bending down to scoop up some snow to return the favor when she saw something that brought her up short. “Oh, look,” she said.

I followed her gaze across the expanse of snow separating our house from the Laurence estate.

Of course
, I thought.

“Mr. Laurence is driving away,” Jo went on, as though she couldn’t stop herself. “And look, Laurie is up there in that window.”

She turned to me, as though snapping out of her trance. “You can go back into the house, Emily,” she said hurriedly.

“Not on your life,” I said.

“But you always hate the cold,” she objected, “and we’ve already been out in it so long.”

“I’ve changed my mind.” I laughed. “Now I love the cold!”

“Do not.”

“Do so.”

“Do—” She shook her head in exasperation. “Never mind
that now.” Then she raised her old sack and, vaulting the low hedge that separated our property from our neighbors’, began trudging as quickly as she could through the snow toward the Laurence house.

“Hey!” I shouted after her. “Wait for me!” Then I raised my own sack and began to run too.

That low hedge turned out to be higher than it looked.

“You can’t just throw snow at his window,” I started to say. Now it was my turn to be exasperated, five minutes later, as we stood beneath Laurie’s window.

I had to hand it to Jo, though: she had one heck of an arm. And her snow-throwing thing had worked because a guy had appeared in the window.

This was the first time I was seeing Laurie in person, even if it was only through a window. Before I’d only ever heard him described by Jo or Amy or the book.

Woo-hoo! He was a hottie.

“I’ve been sick for a week with a cold,” he shouted down to her, having finally forced the window open. The way he talked to only her, it was as though I wasn’t even there. “I can’t go out,” he added, “and it’s awfully boring in here with no one to read to me or amuse me. I can’t, after all, be asking Brooke all the time.”

In the time it took me to puzzle over who Brooke might be, and failing to remember, due to my problems with story amnesia, Jo shouted up to Laurie, “I can take care of that.”

“
We’ll
take care of that,” I muttered under my breath, hurrying to keep up with her as she raced for the front door.

“Remember your pact,” she reminded me.

Did she mean that time I made her swear that we wouldn’t let that “Laurie boy” come between us March girls?

Just when I’d seen what a hottie he was, she had to remind me of that
now
?

She’s got nerve
, I thought, watching as she waltzed into the unfamiliar house as if she owned the place.