Keep Smiling Through Read Free Page B

Where?" I asked. I knew a war had started. I knew the Japs had bombed Pearl Harbor the day before. I didn't even know where Pearl Harbor
was.
At first I thought it was on the river on the way to Waterville.
    Is this what happens when a war starts? Immediately, they take the little kids away?
    They loaded us onto yellow buses that day and took us on a two-mile ride to a strange school. Later on I found out they closed our school because it was across the street from the arsenal.
    When we got to the new school, I knew there was a war on, all right. The kids there were lined up, waiting for us, in their schoolyard.
    They all looked as mean as weasels. And they acted worse. They pushed, pinched,
and shoved us, and said such terrible things that I began to wonder if the war hadn't really started a few miles away on the river.
    Martin and Tom told my father, of course. And within weeks he took us out of that new school and put us in St. Bridget's.
    I never did find out why those kids were so mean. I have discovered, since, that some people don't need a reason to be mean. That in itself is very scary.
    "You'll have to wear a uniform now, Kay," my brothers told me when I started St. Bridget's.
    I was glad for that. I pictured the uniform as being smart and sassy. I'd wear trousers with a stripe down the side. And a hat with a brim, like kids do in military school.
    But my uniform is not smart and sassy. All it ended up being was dull and drab. A navy blue serge jumper and a white blouse. I hate it.
    The kids in St. Bridget's are better, all except for the girls in the Golden Band. Whereas the kids in the last school were weasels, the girls in the Golden Band are only prigs.
    I got through two years. I'm in fifth grade now. And Sister Brigitta runs the fifth grade like Hitler runs Germany.
    ***
    In school Jennifer Bellows is my best friend.
    At home there are no girls in the neighborhood to play with. I play with my brothers. I'm a fair hand at Cowboys and Indians. I can shoot marbles. I know to bump a player off the track and win an extra shot, and how to guard my puries in a marble game. And I'm right there helping Martin and Tom dam up the brook in summer.
    At home I'd give my pea shooter for a girl best friend. So Jennifer is important to me.
    We both have dark hair in a school that seems to be full of blond, blue-eyed girls who wear Mary Jane shoes and have lisps.
    Jennifer is kind of a tomboy, too. We both wear brown oxfords, have older brothers, and bring lunch from home. All the other girls buy their lunches in the cafeteria, heaping plates of mashed potatoes with puddles of brown gravy, roast beef, and peas for ten cents a day. Chocolate milk is three cents.
    My lunch is a peanut-butter sandwich in winter and tomatoes on soggy bread in spring and fall. To save money, the sandwich is wrapped in paper from Wonder bread.
    I don't care that the other girls buy chocolate milk. Or that afterward they have
money left to buy a Dixie cup. And they sit in front of me and lick ice cream off the photo of Judy Garland or Deanna Durbin inside the lid. But I'd give anything to have my sandwiches wrapped in real wax paper. Everybody stares at my Wonder-bread wrapping. And I feel poor.
    Jennifer has sandwiches, too. Cream cheese. I think we became friends because neither of us is worthy enough to belong to the Golden Band.
    They're the townie girls. They
walk
to school on tree-shaded streets. They live in identical two-story houses with wide porches. They listen to the same music, go to the same movies, and all wear their hair the same way: short and curled, with a little wave on top. They go to the same parties on weekends and wear Mary Janes.
    My house is bigger than any of theirs, if you want to talk about houses. But that isn't the point. My house is five miles away, out in the country.
    I don't belong. Neither does Jennifer, who also takes a bus to school, but from another direction.
    To not-belong is bad. We're smart enough to know