True Colors (7 page)

Instead, she picked up one of the magazines, an old
Reader’s Digest
.

“We can play school,” Nadine said. “I’ll be the teacher and see how many of the words you know from ‘It Pays to Increase Your Word Power.’ ”

I stared at her in disbelief. The old Nadine would never have suggested that; she knew how much I hated school, especially vocabulary tests.

I never did well on Miss Paisley’s vocabulary tests. We had to give both the correct spelling
and
the definition, so I was pretty much doomed from the start. I was always getting mixed up on words like
receive, niece
, and
sleigh
and all those rules to follow like “
i
before
e
except after
c
,” and those were easy compared to the ones Miss Paisley gave
us, words like
propitious
and
pernicious
and
perspicacious
, which doesn’t have anything to do with perspiration, but it should. That word made me sweat just
hearing
it!
Perspicacious
means “having keen judgment or understanding,” but I couldn’t figure out why we needed to know words like
perspicacious
. I’d never heard
anyone
use that word, and it seemed to me that if you
had
keen judgment, you wouldn’t be throwing around a word like
perspicacious
, which probably gave you a good chance of getting a knuckle sandwich. I mean, I couldn’t exactly see myself saying to Dennis or Wesley Wright, “It would not be perspicacious of you to steal my lunchbox.”

Perspicacious
had thrown me into such a panic that when I remembered how Sally Morley’s nosebleed had made Robert Perkins faint dead away and Miss Paisley had been so busy tending to both of them that she’d given us recess the rest of the afternoon, I figured I had nothing to lose and closed my eyes, leaned sideways, and landed with a thud on the floor.

Sally gasped, and little Mary Richardson started crying, but Miss Paisley didn’t even look up from her desk.

“We can do without your histrionics, Blue,” she said.

Apparently, I had not been perspicacious enough to realize Miss Paisley wouldn’t fall for that. At least she didn’t put
histrionics
on the test, but I got a C– anyway.

Miss Paisley also threw words like
ptarmigan
at us. How’s a body to know that
ptarmigan
has a silent
p
at the
start? After that, when she said
tolerant
, I thought, Aha! She’s trying to fool us. It must have a silent
p
, too.

It doesn’t. I got a D+ on that test.

I thought Miss Paisley should be more tolerant about letting me spell words the way I wanted. If the English could throw in extra letters, why couldn’t I?

So you can see why I was
not
interested in “It Pays to Increase Your Word Power.”

“Crepuscular
,
”
Nadine said. “Does it mean (a) having to do with an infection, (b) pertaining to the abdomen, (c) happening at twilight, or (d) absorbent?”

It sounded like a word Miss Paisley would give us, but I couldn’t remember ever hearing it, so I chose (a).

“Nope,” said Nadine. “Twilight. Fireflies are crepuscular insects, for example.”

The only person I could imagine
using
a word like
crepuscular
was Miss Paisley. Or Nadine. Or Mr. Gilpin.

“Okay, how about
auspicious
?” Nadine said.

I was pretty sure Miss Paisley
had
put
auspicious
on a vocabulary test, but I couldn’t remember what it meant.

“Somebody who’s guilty?” I said.

“Wrong,” said Nadine. “You’re thinking
suspicious. Auspicious
means ‘promising’ or ‘encouraging,’ like an auspicious beginning.”

“Beginning of what?” I muttered, but Nadine ignored me.

I found out that
avuncular
meant “being like an uncle,”
cantankerous
was another word for “crabby” or “cranky,” and
filch
meant “to steal something of little value.”

“Wow,” said Nadine. “I can’t believe you haven’t gotten a single one right.”

I was beginning to feel cantankerous with both
Reader’s Digest
and Nadine and didn’t want to play the game anymore, but Nadine was just getting started.

“For Christmas, I got a book on phobias,” Nadine said. “Do you know anyone with a phobia, a fear of something?”

I was afraid of the Wright brothers and vocabulary tests, but those probably didn’t count as real phobias. I’d never told Nadine about my fear of clowns, even though the old Nadine wouldn’t have made fun of me.

I wasn’t so sure about the new Nadine.

“Raleigh’s afraid of water,” I said. I didn’t really feel right telling her that, but I didn’t see how it would hurt.

“That’s hydrophobia,” Nadine crowed. “It’s another name for rabies, because animals that have rabies are afraid of water. It makes them choke. Then there’s lygophobia, that’s fear of the dark, and ophidiophobia, fear of snakes”—Nadine shuddered when she said that—“and phalacrophobia is the fear of becoming bald. Triskaidekaphobia is the fear of the number thirteen, pupaphobia is the fear of puppets, and gephyrophobia is the fear of crossing bridges. I could tell you all of them.”

She would have, too, if Mrs. Tilton hadn’t called us
down for lunch. That was another thing different about Nadine’s family. What they called lunch was our dinner, and their dinner was our supper.

As soon as Nadine turned to go downstairs, I filched one of the
Reader’s Digest
s and crammed it into my waistband. My plan was to memorize all the words in “It Pays to Increase Your Word Power,” and next time we played, I’d show Nadine she wasn’t the only one who could throw around big words.

As I turned to follow Nadine, a word on one of the crumpled-up newspapers caught my eye:
STOLEN!
I tucked the piece of paper in my pocket and went down to lunch.

Mrs. Tilton had our plates all ready at our places. I slid into my chair and picked up my fork. Nadine used hers to prod the suspicious lump on her plate.

“Don’t poke at your food, Nadine,” Mrs. Tilton said. “It’s not polite.”

“What is it?” Nadine asked.

“Waldorf salad,” Mrs. Tilton said. “I thought we’d have something nice and light.”

I’d never heard of Waldorf salad, and even though it didn’t look like any salad I’d ever seen, I liked salads, so I took a bite. I’d only chewed twice before I realized I was in trouble. Not only was I going to have a hard time
getting
the food down, I was going to have a hard time
keeping
it down.

Apples, celery, grapes, and walnuts, all together in one
dish. I loved fruit, and I loved vegetables; I just didn’t like them mixed together, and to make it even worse, they were covered with mayonnaise.

Mrs. Tilton chattered on, not noticing my distress.

“I’m fixing sautéed sweetbreads for dinner,” Mrs. Tilton said. “Have you had them before, Blue?”

I gave my head a little shake, afraid of spewing Waldorf salad all over her.

“Well, I hope you’ll join us later and try them,” Mrs. Tilton said. “I think it’s important to try new things.”

Mrs. Tilton went into the pantry to get a pitcher of ice water, and I spit the Waldorf salad into my napkin. I’d worry about how to dispose of it later.

Nadine looked at me, her eyebrows arched.

“I bet you don’t know what sweetbreads are, do you?” she said.

No, I didn’t even know what sweetbreads were, but if they were like Hannah’s cinnamon bread or her currant scones, I was sure they would be good. I wished I were home right now, having some of those scones with Hannah.

“It’s the organs of an animal,” Nadine said, “heart, pancreas, and throat.” And she watched with satisfaction as the taste of Waldorf salad came back up in my throat. Hannah ate chicken giblets and cow’s tongue (being Scottish, she didn’t like to waste anything), and it sometimes seemed to me that she would have eaten every scrap of animal if she could, right down to the hide. Maybe that’s
why she liked tripe, which was cow’s stomach. She’d made me take a bite once, just to try it. It tasted like a wet leather shoe. I would rather have eaten the shoe. But as far as I knew, Hannah had never eaten sweetbreads.

The Waldorf salad lunch was bad enough. I knew I was going to dream up a good excuse as to why I couldn’t come to supper.

That night, I carried a saucer of milk out to the cat. She was waiting by the barn. I took a step toward her, but she ducked behind the hay rake and wouldn’t come out until I set the saucer down and backed away. I could tell she didn’t like me being there, but hunger made her brave (or intrepid, as I’d learned from “It Pays to Increase Your Word Power”). She crept toward the bowl.

“Just be glad it’s not sweetbreads,” I told her, though when I thought about it, it made sense to feed sweetbreads to cats. Or dogs.

Just not humans.

I squatted down beside the cat, as close as she’d let me, and tried out my other new words on her while she ate. If she already knew that
contumacious
meant “rebellious,” or that
anserous
was “being silly like a goose,” she didn’t let on.

When I stood up, a crinkly sound in my pocket reminded me of the piece of newspaper I’d stuffed there. I pulled it from my pocket and smoothed it out.

It was just the corner of one page, only part of the story, about a camel and monkey missing from the small traveling circus that had come through town.

I remembered that circus—I was five when Hannah had taken me (that’s where I’d seen the woman doing acrobatic tricks on a horse)—and I remembered seeing a monkey and the trapeze artist, but I didn’t remember hearing anything about any missing animals.

I slipped the piece of paper back into my pocket.

chapter 9

I didn’t get to try my new words on Nadine the next day because the rain stopped and Hannah and I cut more hay. Hannah let me do the mowing. I was nervous at first, but Dolly knew what to do, and we went round and round the upper field until my backside was numb from being bounced on the hard iron seat of the mower. My hands were stiff from holding the reins all afternoon, too, but milking helped work the soreness out of them.

“Move over, Daisy,” I said, slapping her on the rump. I’d named the cows after flowers in Hannah’s garden. Besides Daisy, there was Rose, Iris, Peony, Tulip, Daffodil, and Chrysanthemum (the way her hair swirled in the middle of her forehead reminded me of a chrysanthemum). So far, Miss Paisley hadn’t given us
chrysanthemum
on one of our spelling tests, but I was sure she would. I’d be in trouble,
too, when she did, because I didn’t have any idea how to spell it. But I thought it made a nice name.

For a cow.

Sitting there milking, my head resting against the cow, listening to the sound of the milk hitting the pail, I almost fell asleep, but then I felt a prickly sensation come over me, a feeling that I was being watched. I glanced over my shoulder and saw the cat in the open doorway. I stood up, and she turned and ran. I poured some milk into a bowl and set it by the doorway, just in case she came back later.

By the time I’d finished milking Chrysanthemum, the sun was setting, and Hannah and I were so tired we had just crackers and milk for supper. I knew Mrs. Tilton would never serve crackers and milk for supper, and Nadine said it was something only
prisoners
would eat, but I liked it. All you had to do was crush up saltine crackers in a bowl and pour milk on them. I carried my bowl out to the porch and sat on the steps to eat.

Across the yard, I could see the cat lapping milk (no crackers) out of the bowl I’d left for her. She picked her head up and stared at me. I could see drops of milk on her whiskers.

“You know, I was left, too,” I told her.

Hannah came out and stood behind me.

“She’s awfully skinny, poor thing,” she said. “Looks like she had kittens recently, too.”

I wondered how Hannah could tell that.

“I haven’t seen any kittens,” I said.