Blow Out the Moon Read Free Page A

am. But I’m strong. I can beat Kenny at wrestling and most of the boys in my class, too.
    My hair is as straight as hair can be, and it’s cut in a straight line across my forehead and straight along the sides. In pictures, my eyes look straight at the camera; they’re blue. I am not the kind of child grown-ups ever call “cute” or “just darling.”
    Emmy can be that kind of child. She has curly blonde hair and she likes to be cuddled and to sit on grown-ups’ laps.
    The mothers talked — it was pretty boring, except when Mrs. Grant said, “What is peanut butter?” I’d never met a mother who didn’t know that.
    The cookies were gone, so I asked if I could be excused, and she said Emmy and I could take Neil upstairs. That really meant that we could only go if we brought him with us.
    Neil was taller than I was, too; but I bet I was stronger. On the way up, I said, “It’s lucky that you or your mother didn’t pour the tea.”
    “Why?”
    “Because you’re English and we’re American. If you’d given me a cup of tea, I’d have had to dump it out — in honor of the Boston Tea Party.”
    I was about to tell him what the Boston Tea Party was when he said, “Rubbish.”
    I was too surprised to say anything. Then he said, “My mother has given tea to lots of Americans before and THEY never poured it on the floor.”
    “Well, maybe other people don’t do it, but it’s what I would do if an English person offered ME tea,” I said.
    Pouring the tea on the floor WOULD be like the Boston Tea Party. In case you haven’t heard of it: In Boston, at the beginning of the Revolution, a crowd of grown-ups disguised as Indians sneaked onto English ships and dumped all the tea into the harbor. I think it’s neat that our country had such a fun start — grown-ups dressing up like Indians and throwing things overboard! And I like the name Boston Tea Party, too. I didn’t say any of that to Neil, though.
    We brought him into our room and he stood in the middle of it, with his back very straight, turning his chin around and looking at everything quite coolly.
    I was looking out the window at the rain when the front doorbell rang. I ran down, and it was Henry!
    “My mother said I could only come in if your mother said it was okay with her,” he said. “And she said to give your mother this note when you asked.”
    “Okay,” I said.
    I ran in. The two mothers were still just sitting there, talking — that’s all my mother ever does when her friends come over: talk.
    “It’s Henry. Can he come in?”
    I gave her the note.
    “Excuse me,” she said to Mrs. Grant.
    She read it quickly, and then the two mothers looked at each other — I don’t know if they used the secret code or whatever it is ladies use to tell each other things privately. I know they have one. (Once I called my mother and asked her to come get me at a friend’s house. I told her NOT to tell them why. When she came, I listened to every word my mother said, and she didn’t say anything about the reason; but at the end, the other mother said, looking relieved, “So THAT’s what it was!” So I knew my mother told her, but I’d heard every word she said and I don’t know
how
she told her.)
    My mother said Henry was “a nice boy” and Mrs. Grant said Neil wasn’t shy and then she laughed and said something I didn’t quite understand.
    “All right,” my mother said (to me). “As long as all four of you play together, and ask before you go outside.”
    I ran back.
    “She said yes!”
    We ran upstairs. Neil was talking to Emmy, looking a little nicer than he had before. And when Henry and I were listing things we could do and trying to choose, he looked really interested, and after a while he said, “In England on rainy days people go down the stairs on trays. It’s called indoor tobogganing.”
    That sounded fun to me.
    “Let’s try it!” I said. “We don’t have any big trays — except the one my mother is using — but what