Little Women and Me

by Lauren Baratz-Logsted

  Dreadful in—?

  Well, that went well, I said to myself as he brusquely ushered me out of the house.

  But then I decided he was probably just acting so flustered because on some level he thought I was hot, even if he couldn’t allow himself to think that.

  At least it wasn’t a total loss.

  Seven

  Oh, what I wouldn’t give for some LOL cats right around now.

  In the wake of the me-kissing-Laurie disaster, I realized that I had finally found my place among the March sisters. If Meg was the wise older sister, Jo the rebel tomboy, Beth the gentle spirit, and Amy the vain and pretty one, I was … I was … I was …

  The family skank?

  Great, I thought. That’s just great.

  It was Thursday again, my day to attend to Amy: dressing her hair in the morning, walking her to school, picking her up afterward, helping out with homework.

  “I should like you to gather some strands in a bow at the back,” she instructed self-importantly, “but brush the rest so that it looks lush and free-flowing. Oh, and please don’t forget to leave some tendrils framing my face. Tendrils are so important in making my nose look more normal. My life was simply appalling before I discovered the finer uses of tendrils.”

  There were so many things a person could’ve said to that insane “tendrils” speech of Amy’s, but it was just too easy. Besides, I was sure I could create something more interesting than what she was describing. But then I puzzled over the incredible array of pins and bows and curling tongs. I’d never been much good with my own hair—back home, Charlotte and Anne could put their own hair into French braids or use a scrunchie and have it wind up looking perfect—and none of this made any sense to me. Perhaps simple would be best.

  Finally, I picked up the brush—grudgingly, I must add.

  “How’s this?” I said not much more than a moment later.

  She studied her reflection.

  “What have you done?” she shrieked.

  “I’ve put it all up in a ponytail,” I said.

  “A ponytail? I’ve never heard of such a thing!”

  When she put it like that, I had to admit, it didn’t sound like the most attractive idea. But I thought it looked fine, plus it was easy to do one.

  “Haven’t you ever seen a ponytail?” I was somewhat shocked at her extreme reaction.

  “Yes,” she admitted before adding, “On a horse!” She patted her hair in a fussy way. “Meg never does my hair like this.”

  “Well, I’m not exactly Meg, am I?” I countered. Then I seized on an idea, one I was sure would appeal to Amy. “I saw it in a newspaper when I was in town last Friday. They say it’s the latest, er, rage abroad. All the fashionable girls are wearing them.”

  “Abroad, you say?”

  “Oh, yes. It originated in France. They call it, um, le ponytail.”

  “Le ponytail?” She carefully formed the unfamiliar words and for once they came out just right, which was interesting, since Amy was known in the family for botching all kinds of words and phrases, which I supposed was still better than being the family skank.

  “But if you really don’t like it …,” I started to say, reaching for the hair ribbon.

  “Oh no!” Her hand flew to protect the bow holding up her ponytail. “I do like it, very much so. It only took me a few minutes to realize it.” She studied her reflection some more. “And you say it’s French?”

  “Oui,” I said, speaking the only French I knew outside of le ponytail.

  But before Amy and I could leave for school, we still had a little bit of Amy drama to get through. Something about limes.

  Apparently, pickled limes were as much the rage in Amy’s school as ponytails were in France.

  “The girls take turns bringing them,” Amy said breathlessly, as though she were talking about the most important thing in the world, ever. “You give the limes to girls you like, you eat them in front of those you don’t—never offering even so much as a suck—and you hide them in your desk so Mr. Davis won’t see.”

  Back home, my sister Anne was only a year older than Amy. It was tough to picture Anne, usually glued to whatever was on MTV, obsessing about the distribution of limes.

  “Is Mr. Davis still so stern?” Meg asked. “I remember when he banished gum.”

  “Worse,” Jo said, “I remember when he confiscated all our novels and newspapers.”

  “When I still went to school,” Beth said, “he forbade what he referred to as ‘distortions of the face.’ I swear, I didn’t even know I was distorting my face!”

  “Yes,” Amy said, “he really is still so stern. But who cares about that? I will never be caught, since I cannot afford any limes and now the other girls will all hate me and call me cheap and I will become a social outcast since I have eaten all their limes, except for those of Jenny Snow, who refused to share with me, but never once brought any of my own to share and—”

  “Here,” Meg said. “Will a quarter do?”

  Amy’s face lit up like Christmas. Better than that, she stopped talking.

  “I’m sure that all the girls will be simply entranced by my ponytail!” Amy babbled as we continued our walk to school, having first made a detour to town, where she bought a quarter’s worth of limes, twenty-four of which she now clutched in a brown paper bag. Seriously, had anyone ever heard of anything more absurd than pickled limes?

  Leave it to 1862.

  Leave it to Amy.

  I’d give Jo credit for one thing at least: I doubted she’d ever allow herself to get caught up in something so silly as chasing the latest fad, particularly if it involved something as ridiculous as pickled limes. Me, I’d succumbed to peer pressure plenty in my time and had to admit that if I still was expected to go to school here, I’d probably be competing over pickled limes with everyone else.

  “Of course, the other girls will want a ponytail just like mine,” Amy babbled on, “but they will no doubt be excited about it, while Jenny Snow will probably be green with envy.”

  I had no idea who Jenny Snow was, but with a name like that, she seemed like she might be a frosty person and someone to look out for.

  “Probably,” I agreed, “Jenny Snow will be green as a pickled lime.” We were nearing the schoolhouse and I saw some of the girls entering. None of them wore their hair up, let alone in a ponytail. “Hey,” I said, “how many girls are in your school?”

  “Silly Emily!” Amy laughed an oddly sly laugh like she knew something about me that I didn’t. “How do you not remember? You went here yourself until not long ago!”

  I did? I wondered what I’d learned there. Was I considered a smart student? Slow? “Humor me,” I said.

  “Half a hundred,” she replied.

  “Half a hundred? Why can’t you ever say anything simply? Why can’t you just say ‘fifty’?”

  “I don’t know.” Amy shrugged, seemingly as perplexed as I was. “It’s just how people talk. Somehow it’s more complicated to say ‘fifty.’ ”

  We were at the door now, she was ready to go in, and I felt it was time for me to say something inspirational.

  I placed a hand on her shoulder.

  “So, um, study hard,” I said, “and one day you may grow up to be president.”

  “Of what?” she said.

  “Duh—of the United States, of course.”

  Her eyes widened and then she threw back her head and laughed, right in my face.

  “Oh, Emily!” she cried, struggling to recover herself. “You really are the strangest creature, aren’t you?”

  “Good luck with those pickled limes,” I said, turning away and leaving her to it.

  Once Amy was in school, she was supposed to stay there until I went to get her. And yet for some reason, she arrived home late morning. Did they not like her ponytail?

  “What happened?” I asked, seeing how upset she looked. “How did the ponytail go over?”

  “It doesn’t matter right now about th
e stupid ponytail—Mr. Davis struck me!” she burst out, shoving her hands up under my nose for inspection. I could see the red welts on her palms where some object had done the damage.

  “But that’s awful!” I said, outraged on her behalf.

  What kind of world was this? At Wycroft we had a zero-tolerance policy about kids hitting other kids, but we also had a zero-tolerance policy about teachers hitting kids. This was child abuse!

  “I know!” Amy said, still plenty outraged herself. “No one has struck me in all of my twelve years! I have only ever been loved!”

  “Why did he hit you?” I asked.

  “Because of the limes! Because of Jenny Snow and the limes!”

  I knew that Jenny Snow was trouble.

  “Jenny got mad because I wouldn’t share mine with her, so she told Mr. Davis I had them in my desk and then he made me … he made me throw them out the window two by two! And then he made me stand on the platform for fifteen minutes until he called time for recess! But do you know what the worst part was?”

  I didn’t have a clue, but this all sounded awful to me, at least in a twelve-year-old-girl sort of way.

  “As I threw the limes out the window, I could hear … laughter from down below!”

  “Laughter?” I echoed dully.

  “Of course laughter! Children were catching my limes as they fell and extruding over their good fortune.”

  Extruding? That didn’t make any sense. But then I realized it was probably just another instance of Amy garbling her vocabulary. She probably meant exulting.

  “I shall never go back to that school,” Amy declared. “When Mr. Davis called recess, I left, vowing never to return.” All of a sudden her face took on a worried expression. “Do you think Marmee will be upset with me?”

  But no one was upset with Amy.

  Meg, whose special pet Amy was, exclaimed over our youngest sister as though she’d been waterboarded at Guantanamo.

  Jo strode up and down the room manfully, demanding that Mr. Davis be arrested at once.

  Beth, who’d been at home all along but had been too busy playing with her cats and weird dolls to notice Amy’s early arrival, was horrified. “I knew no good could ever come from going to school!” she said.

  Marmee’s response, arriving home later, was slightly more tempered. First she sent Jo with a note for Mr. Davis, informing him that Amy would no longer be attending his school and that Jo was to clean out Amy’s desk.

  I almost felt sorry for Mr. Davis, in spite of what he’d done, since I knew what a termagant—another PSAT word!—Jo could be.

  Marmee explained that until she had the chance to discuss the matter through letters with Papa, Amy would study at home with Beth.

  Oh great, I thought, more of Amy. She was almost as bad as Jo, but for entirely different reasons.

  Amy was suddenly looking extremely pleased with herself. Well, who could blame her? Twelve years old and she didn’t have to go to school anymore, at least not for the time being—I’d had to wait until the ripe old age of fourteen before quitting school!

  But Marmee shut that down pretty quickly.

  She pointed out that the only reason she was taking Amy out of Mr. Davis’s school was that she didn’t believe in corporal punishment but that Amy had broken the rules and deserved to be punished for her disobedience. In fact, Marmee was glad she’d lost the limes.

  Then came what I’d begun to think of as An Edifying Marmee Lecture—yawn—in which she lectured Amy on the perils of conceit: how Amy had lots of talents and virtues but was too inclined to show them off; how much better she would be were she more like Laurie, who had many accomplishments but no conceit.

  Well, I thought, he may not have been conceited before he met me, the March family skank, but now that he had and now that he knew he was thought by at least one March girl to be exceedingly kissable—

  All of a sudden I had a premonition. There was going to be some kind of fallout from this silly lime incident, something more serious than Amy being homeschooled and me having to put up with her around the house. And yet, try as I might, I couldn’t remember anything from the original book that might tell me what that serious something might be. It made me crazy sometimes, this occasional story amnesia.

  Still, I told myself, when the moment came, I’d do my best to prevent disaster.

  Eight

  It didn’t take long for that fallout I’d anticipated, that “something more serious,” to materialize.

  Meg and Jo were preparing to go to the theater with Laurie to see something called The Seven Castles of the Diamond Lake that Jo boasted had fairies, elves, red imps, and gorgeous princes and princesses. Amy, who’d had a cold, was angling to go too, but Jo dismissed her request because: one, the show would hurt her eyes; two, she could go with Hannah and Beth the following week; three, she hadn’t been invited.

  I wondered why no one mentioned the possibility of me going to the show, either with Meg, Jo, and Laurie then, or with Hannah, Beth, and Amy the following week. Was I not known to like the theater? I debated whether I wanted to go or not. On the one hand, it would be a new form of entertainment here, plus, if the play was good, I could tease Jo about how much better it was than the one she and Meg had performed soon after my arrival; it was always fun to tease Jo. But on the other hand, I didn’t really like fairies, elves, red imps, and gorgeous princes and princesses—it all sounded so Disney.

  But I didn’t get to debate the pros and cons of staying versus tagging along because suddenly Amy was screaming, “You’ll be sorry about this, Jo March!”

  Did I miss something?

  Maybe I should have been clued in about what was to come based on what I knew about my sisters: that both Amy and Jo were hotheads, but that Jo had the least self-control and was always sorry afterward. Well, maybe it wasn’t accurate to say that she had the least self-control, since I was fairly certain Jo had never tried to slip Laurie the tongue.

  But I should have been clued in when Amy disappeared, and I could have sworn I heard her rooting around in the room I shared with Meg and Jo.

  And I really should have been clued in when I saw Amy emerge from our bedrooms, back her way over to the fireplace, and toss something in before we could see what it was, whatever she tossed in causing the flames to leap higher and flare brighter.

  But I wasn’t clued in because I’d started to write a story, one about a girl at a bad time in her life who finds herself mysteriously sucked into a favorite book. Back home, being a reader and writer were two of the things I’d always loved so why not do it here?

  So it wasn’t until the next morning that we all became aware of Amy’s unpardonable crime.

  When Meg and Jo had returned from the play the day before, they told us stories of fairies, elves, red imps, and gorgeous princes and princesses—enough so that I wasn’t sorry I missed it, particularly when Meg declared Jo to be a superior playwright to the one who created that awful-sounding theatrical mess. Meanwhile, Amy adopted an air of nonchalance as though she’d never been interested in the play in the first place.

  Now Jo discovered that while she was at the play, Amy had burned Jo’s story—a half-dozen fairy tales she’d been working on with the intent of finishing it as a book before Papa got home. That copy, Jo said, had been the only copy.

  How could I have forgotten! In the original book, Amy burned Jo’s writing after the lime incident. It was such a mean-girls thing to do to someone else—I’d thought that even at eight years old when I’d read it for the first time. It was worse than little boys pulling the wings off flies. Was Amy some sort of sociopath?

  And oh, the awful look on Jo’s face when she said it was her only copy.

  “I’m sorry,” I said to Jo, feeling as though I alone in that room could understand what she was going through. It would be terrible to lose the only copy of something I’d written.

  “I’ll hate you forever, Amy March!” Jo cried, giving Amy one last box on the ears—she’d alr
eady shaken Amy so much, her teeth had nearly chattered out of her head—before huffing off in the direction of the garret.

  Overdramatic? Sure. But for once I couldn’t blame her.

  Even Meg, Amy’s usual champion, couldn’t blame Jo for her anger.

  Nor could Marmee, although as she tucked us in that night, I heard her lecture Jo softly about the inadvisability of letting the sun go down upon her anger. But Jo wasn’t ready to forgive.

  The next morning Jo announced that she was going skating with Laurie.

  Somehow overnight Amy had convinced herself that she was the injured party. Hey, she’d already apologized, hadn’t she? So no matter what she’d done to make Jo mad in the first place, if Jo wasn’t willing to forgive her instantly, then Jo was now in the wrong.

  Amy informed any who would listen that the last time Jo had gone skating, she’d promised to take Amy the next time, and this was the last ice of the season. Spring would soon be here.

  The last ice? Spring?

  Just how long had I been here already? And what was going on back home? Would I ever get back home again? I almost wished things would move along quicker with Beth, so that I could do something heroic to save her, and finally return to my real life. Not that I didn’t like it here—I’d grown used to the unpasteurized milk, and then there was Laurie—but it wasn’t my real life. Not that my real life was so hot anyway, come to think of it.

  Meg, in all her eldest-sister wisdom, advised Amy that she should go skating; that she should follow Jo and Laurie at a discreet distance, waiting for the golden opportunity to make friends with Jo again. Everyone knew Jo’s moods changed like the weather.