Little Women and Me - By Lauren Baratz-Logsted Page 0,14

things to think about!

Like the color of my hair.

Okay, I do realize that sounds lame, but the other girls all had hair ranging from the various browns of Meg, Jo, and Beth to Amy’s yellow, while mine was auburn. Didn’t the others notice how different I looked compared to them? What did our father, the vaunted Papa, look like? Had I gotten my coloring from him? Perhaps dearly beloved Marmee had had an illegitimate child on the side—me! But I could hardly ask the others about all that, could I? “Oh, by the way, what is Papa’s hair color?” They’d lock me away!

Didn’t the others notice, given my looks and the odd things I tended to say, that I didn’t fit in? And yet, no one seemed to think that at all.

On the contrary. On returning to this bedroom after my barefooted attempt in the snow to break the seam between this world and my real one, I’d discovered a wardrobe where some of the clothes were supposed to be mine. (Well, I discovered which ones were mine after first mistakenly trying to put on one of Jo’s things—she quickly put an end to that!) With two older sisters to provide me with hand-me-downs, I had more clothes here than I had back home! Yes, I had clothes here, and a family—a family who seemed to have memories of everything I’d done for the last fourteen years, going back to when I was first born into this house, as if the story had been preadapted for my entrance, and yet they were memories that I had no knowledge of. What were those memories? What did they all know about me? What had I been like at age two? At ten? And what about their lives—what did I need to know about them?

Again, more questions I couldn’t ask.

Was I a different person in this world than in my own world?

My own world!

Ever since arriving here, I’d been in defensive mode, only really able to react to all the newness of the strange life surrounding me, so I’d had little time to think about what was going on back there.

What was I supposed to have been doing back home today? Or tomorrow? Had I been invited to any New Year’s Eve parties? Was I at one right now with Kendra and even having a good time there? Did I still exist back home, living on two planes at once, or did I just live here? And if only here, there must be things I had to get back there for. School. Homework assignments. Parties—real parties, not like this silly cookies-and-punch gig that Meg and Jo were going to. Wouldn’t people miss me and start looking for me?

But wait a second. Did life still go on out there? Did the clock still go on ticking in my real life even while I was in here?

I. Had. No. Idea.

“So, tell me about the Laurence boy,” I said. “Jo made such a big deal about speaking to him over the fence. Have either of you ever seen him?”

In spite of my initial reluctance to stay at home with my … younger sisters while the older two went off to the dance without us, it was turning out to be a bizarrely fun evening, just as Beth had promised.

Without the other two around to boss us, we were free to act like, well, silly gooses if we wanted to. We’d already found some munchies and had laughed over how Jo was dealing with her nineteen pins as we huddled in our white nightshirts and nightcaps in front of the fire.

I caught sight of my image in a reflective surface. Huh. Not bad. The nightcap looked kind of cool on me, sort of like a floppy French beret. Maybe I’d start a trend when I got back home?

Of course, being the oldest of us, I was the first to bring up the topic of boys. It was satisfying for a moment to have them look at me as though I were worldly on the subject. In my whole life, no one had ever pegged me as being worldly on the topic of boys! But these girls? Except for Papa, it was as though boys were aliens to them.

“I did see him once,” Amy said, seeming oddly shy for her. Well, I guessed, guys could have that effect on some girls. Me, I certainly hadn’t been shy when I tried to hijack Jackson’s attentions from Charlotte. Darn, I