True Colors

by Natalie Kinsey-Warnock

  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.

  “She’s probably hidden them,” Hannah said.

  I went and got the flashlight and searched every inch of the barn, but I didn’t find any kittens. I searched the tool-shed and garage, too.

  “They may have died,” Hannah said. “She’s so small and thin she may not have had enough milk to feed them.”

  That made me feel sad.

  “I wish she’d let me pet her,” I said.

  “Give her time,” Hannah said. “She has to learn to trust you.”

  “How could someone just leave her?” I asked. It was the same question I wanted to ask the woman who’d left me in Hannah’s kettle ten and a half years ago.

  “Some folks don’t think of anything but themselves,” Hannah said. “There’s lots of glundies in this world.”

  Glundie is another word for “fool.” So are gowk, coof, dobbie, and tattie. Tattie also means “potatoes,” and we had tatties and neeps many nights for supper. Neeps are turnips. I didn’t care for turnips, and neither did Nadine, but she loved saying tatties and neeps. Nadine loved Hannah’s Scottish words (“She’s even better than ‘It Pays to Increase Your Word Power,’ ” Nadine said), and she’d giggle every morning when, instead of calling us lazybones, Hannah would holler up the stairs, “Up, you two snoofmadrunes!” I liked the Scottish words, too. Maybe it was because I didn’t have to spell them.

  Thinking about those Scottish words gave me an idea. I’d been wondering what I’d give Nadine for her birthday (not having any money meant my presents always had to be homemade). Mrs. Tilton had said she needed a Scottish dictionary to understand me and Hannah; I’d make Nadine a dictionary of Scottish words!

  chapter 10

  It was just the four of us for Nadine’s birthday. “An all-girls party,” Mrs. Tilton said, and Nadine smiled, but it was her fake smile, and I knew she was upset that her dad wasn’t there. I knew that Keith was over in Korea, but I’d thought Mr. Tilton would at least show up. He’d never missed her birthday before.

  Because Mr. Tilton and Keith weren’t there, Nadine’s birthday was more low-key than usual. Mrs. Tilton made pigs in a blanket for supper, and Hannah made vanilla ice cream. She used twelve eggs in the recipe, and cream from our cows. She added wild strawberries right at the end. Nadine seemed more like her old self as she and I took turns churning the ice cream, cranking until our arms ached, but we forgot all about the ache when we spooned the ice cream off the dasher. If there’s anything better than eating homemade strawberry ice cream with your best friend on a hot summer night, I don’t know what it is.

  “Let’s play charades,” Nadine said. We did radio shows (Nadine wanted us to do television shows, but since we didn’t have a television—no one did in Vermont—Hannah and I didn’t know any of those shows). For Jack Armstrong, first I pretended to jack up a car, and then I bent my arm and pointed to my muscle. Nadine did The Shadow by walking along and pointing to the ground behind her. Mrs. Tilton did Queen for a Day by doing a curtsy, and I thought we might die laughing when Hannah, trying to get us to say Tarzan, beat her chest with her fists and Mrs. Tilton yelled, “King Kong!”

  Hannah suggested we do some movies (“Have you seen The African Queen yet?” Mrs. Tilton asked. “Bogart and Hepburn are wonderful together.” “No,” said Hannah, “I’ve been waiting for it to get here”), but Nadi
ne was impatient to open her presents.

  Nadine opened mine first. I was surprised how nervous I was when I handed it to her. I’d spent hours on it. Hannah’d had to help me with the spellings and definitions. I’d put in all my favorites. There was grumpie (“a pig”), grumple (“to feel with your fingers”—so I guess you could grumple your grumpie!), paddock-pony (“a tadpole”), and two dog ones: snooker (“someone who smells objects like a dog”) and haisk (“to make a noise like a dog when you’ve got something stuck in your throat”). And shamble-shankit (“having crooked legs”) and glyde (“an old horse”—which meant Dolly was a shamble-shankit glyde!), glysterie (“a gusty storm”), haimart (“belonging to home”), and my most favorite of all, chyrme, which was hard to pronounce (actually, it sounded most like a cat coughing up a hairball), but I thought its definition was poetry: “the mournful sound made by birds when they’ve gathered together before a storm.”

  Nadine didn’t even bother looking through it, just tossed the book onto the floor and reached for another gift.

  “Nadine!” Mrs. Tilton exclaimed. “What do you say?”

  “Thank you,” Nadine said, polite as pie, but she didn’t even look at me when she said it.

  Mrs. Tilton scooped up the book and leafed through the pages.

  “Oh, how charming, Blue!” she said. “Some of these words are just precious!” Which made me feel better, until Nadine opened the presents from her mom. First there was a View-Master.

  I’d never heard of a View-Master, but Nadine knew all about it.

  “The pictures are three-dimensional,” she said. She showed me how you slid the round paper discs into the viewer and pushed a little lever on the side to go on to another picture. There were discs of the Three Little Pigs, and Robin Hood, and some of the royal family (Nadine squealed when she saw those), but the ones I liked best were of Yellowstone National Park and Yosemite, the Grand Tetons, and the Grand Canyon. As I clicked through the pictures, I felt like I was glimpsing a world I would never see for real. What would it be like to actually see the Grand Canyon or the giant redwoods? I thought the View-Master was just about the best present anybody could get for their birthday, until Mrs. Tilton handed Nadine an envelope.

  Inside were plane tickets. To London. London, England. For the coronation!

  “I know it’s not until next June,” Mrs. Tilton told Nadine. “But I couldn’t think of anything you’d like more.”

  I’m sure my jaw dropped. Even Nadine was speechless at first. Then she screamed so loud I thought all the windows would shatter.

  I wanted to take my hand-lettered, stapled, pathetic little book of Scottish words and slink home.

  Nadine clutched the tickets to her chest and danced around the room.

  “I’m going to the coronation!” she squealed. “I’m going to see the queen! Can you believe it?”

  No, I couldn’t, but I smiled and tried to look happy for her.

  “When we go through Buckingham Palace, maybe Daddy can arrange it so I could even meet the queen,” Nadine said. “I’ll have to practice my curtsy, and he’ll have to bow.”

  Mrs. Tilton didn’t answer, and a pained expression came over her face. Nadine stopped twirling to stare at her.

  “What’s wrong?” she asked.

  “Nothing,” said Mrs. Tilton. “It’s just, well, Daddy won’t be able to go. It’ll be only the two of us.”

  The joy melted off Nadine’s face, and I felt sorry for her. I knew what it was like to look forward to a trip and then have it pulled out from under you. But at least she was still going on the trip.

  “Daddy’s not coming with us?” Nadine said.

  “No,” said Mrs. Tilton.

  “But … but it’s a year away,” Nadine said. “He could take vacation.”

  “I’m afraid not,” Mrs. Tilton said. “It’s simply not possible, what with his work and all. But won’t it be fun, just you and me? Besides the coronation, we’ll go to Piccadilly Circus, and the Tower of London, and London Bridge. We’ll have a marvelous time, you’ll see.”

  It sounded like a dream to me, and I would have traded places with Nadine right then and there, but Nadine sulked the rest of the evening. I couldn’t believe she was being so bratty. She was going to England for the coronation! What more did she want? I would have been excited about a trip to New Hampshire.

  If I could get her to see she was being ridiculous, the evening didn’t have to be ruined. I waited until Hannah was in the kitchen, helping Mrs. Tilton wash the dishes, before punching Nadine lightly on the arm.

  “I’ll trade places with you,” I said. “Do you know how lucky you are? For my last birthday, I got a box of crayons.”

  Nadine shot me a look.

  “You couldn’t possibly understand how I’m feeling,” she snapped. “You don’t even have a father.”

  I was too shocked to say anything. I stared at her, open-mouthed.

  How could she have said that to me, I wondered. I was her best friend, or at least I thought I was. I was sorry I’d wasted my time making her that book of Scottish words—she hadn’t even looked at it twice. Too bad I hadn’t taken the book back and just given her a bloody nose instead.

  chapter 11

  “You got awfully quiet back there,” Hannah said as we walked home. “You two girls have a fight or something?”

  I shook my head. I was too embarrassed to tell her what Nadine had said.

  Hannah wasn’t fooled.

  “You know, Nadine’s at that age where she’s going through a lot of changes,” she said. “You’ll be going through it yourself in another year or so. You just have to be patient with her.”

  I stared straight ahead. I didn’t care what Hannah said. No matter what, I couldn’t ever be as mean or thoughtless to Nadine as she had been to me.

  “She’ll be starting junior high this fall, too,” Hannah said. “I’m sure that’s making her nervous.”

  I hadn’t thought about that. But if that were true, why hadn’t she told me she was nervous? Friends were supposed to tell each other things like that.

  You haven’t told her about waiting for your mama, the little voice in my head said.

  “Well,” Hannah said, “give it a day or two and I’m sure it’ll all blow over. ‘Least said, soonest mended,’ I always say.”

  I figured Nadine would come over the next day and say she was sorry, but she didn’t. She didn’t come over the day after that, either. Who needed her anyway if she was going to be like that. I didn’t even want to see her, she’d been so mean. I had other things to keep me busy, like the cat.

  Hannah and I didn’t know where the cat spent her days, but each morning and evening she was waiting by the barn for her food. Already she’d become part of our lives and I worried about her. I wanted to scoop her up, hug her, and tell her I’d always take care of her, but whenever I got too close, she’d run. So I squatted as close as she’d let me and talked to her while she ate. I told her things I’d never told another living soul, not even Nadine: that I was scared of clowns, and that I wanted to be a cowboy when I grew up (though after Hannah and I’d seen the movie The Greatest Show on Earth, I’d started thinking about being a trapeze artist), and—the biggest secret of all—that I was waiting for my real mama to come get me.

  Sometimes, Hannah joined me out in the yard, where we watched the northern lights and listened to the frogs grumbling from the lake. Some nights, we saw the cat out in the orchard, hunting.

  “Looks like she’s planning on staying awhile,” Hannah said, and my heart sang.

  “What should we call her?” I asked.

  Hannah thought a moment.

  “Cat,” she said.

  I should have known better than to ask. Anybody who’d name a child Blue wasn’t likely to think up anything better for a cat.

  The next day, July 1, felt more like November. I put on a sweatshirt to work in the garden, but even so, I shivered. My fingers felt stiff as I picked potato bugs off the potato
plants and dropped them in the can of kerosene. I remembered Miss Paisley telling us about 1816, the Year of No Summer, when they’d had snow every month of the year. No one then had known it was caused by a huge volcano the year before. I hadn’t heard of any volcano blowing up, so I guessed we weren’t going to have another year with no summer, but it sure felt cold. I thought about digging out my mittens, but that just seemed wrong, so I warmed my hands in my armpits instead.

  Hannah was rubbing her hands, too.

  “Gracious, it feels like we could get a frost tonight!” she said. “I think we’d better cover the garden.” (That’s the thing about living in the Northeast Kingdom—you can get a frost even in July.)

  I helped Hannah carry old quilts and blankets out to the garden. I loved fall, but that didn’t mean I wanted to see it coming in July! I didn’t want to even think about fall yet; that would mean school starting and Nadine going home, and I wouldn’t see her again till next summer.

  I still hadn’t quite forgiven Nadine for what she’d said about me not having a father, and I hated to admit it, but I missed her. I didn’t want the whole summer to be ruined by some stupid words.

  “Sometimes you just have to be the bigger person,” Hannah says.

  I decided that as soon as Hannah and I were done covering the garden, I’d go over and apologize (even though I hadn’t done anything wrong) and make up with Nadine. So far, everything between us had been a disappointment, but that didn’t mean the whole summer had to be ruined. We could still save it. I just had to remind Nadine of all the fun we’d had over the years, make her remember that I’d been her best friend long before she’d ever met her other friends. We could build a fire down by the lake, and Nadine’s mom might let us make s’mores. Just the thought of Nadine and me sitting around a campfire eating s’mores made me feel better. Besides, I wanted us to make up before the July Fourth celebrations. With the parade and picnic, Nadine and I always spent the whole day at the fairgrounds and got to stay up late to watch the fireworks. It wouldn’t even seem like the Fourth of July without Nadine.