Little Women and Me - By Lauren Baratz-Logsted Page 0,17
the picture, we’ll probably all start acting ridiculous, fighting with one another and competing for his attentions. I don’t want that to happen to us.”
It was true, I didn’t. The one thing this world had going for it was that here my sisters all mostly got along together, not like back home with Charlotte and Anne. I didn’t want to see that all messed up.
“I’d never do that,” Beth said, obviously horrified by the idea of girls competing for a boy, while Amy instantly looked guilty.
“He’s too young for my tastes,” Meg said. “I think I favor a more mature man.”
“This is the most ridiculous thing I’ve heard from you yet, Emily,” Jo said. “The very idea … that we’d fight over a boy!”
“If you think it’s so ridiculous,” I countered, “then it should be easy for you to agree to a pact, not to let Laurie come between us.”
“Fine,” Jo said grudgingly. Then she added, “But I’ll bet you buttons to bows, if one of us should break that pact, that person will be you.”
Buttons to bows? What a bizarre thing to say! Still …
“Fine,” I said.
Four
How I missed Facebook!
If only there were a computer around here somewhere and I could log on to say, Emily March opened a book to do an English assignment and got sucked into a whole different time period—WHOOSH! My friends would comment with “LOL!” and “OMG!” and a few dozen people would simply hit the “like” button, and I’d feel like my day was off to a regular start.
But no.
The holidays were over and it was time to get back to normal life, which for me meant first having to figure out just what my normal life around here was supposed to be.
But first I had to deal with …
My period!
I’d never had to suffer through it in 1862!
I lay in my bed, sheets pulled up to my chin. What was I supposed to do? I was pretty sure there weren’t any tampons in this house!
“Get up, lazybones!” Jo cried, somehow making her words sound both cheery and admonishing all at once as she tried to rip the sheets off of me.
I clung tighter to them.
She pulled harder.
“It is time to get back to our regular lives,” she said with another tug of the sheets. “Life can’t be all plays and dances all the time.”
Excuse me? I felt like pointing out. I never got to be in the play. I never got to dance at the Gardiners’ New Year’s Eve party—that was you!
“I’m not feeling well today,” I said instead, clinging even tighter to the sheets. “I think maybe I’ll just stay home today.”
“Come on, Emily, you know the rules. Unless one is literally dying, no one gets to take a day off from their duties around here.”
“ ‘Unless one of us is dying’?” I echoed. “Well, that’s a little overdramatic, don’t you think? Why do you always have to be so—”
“Do you have a fever?” she cut me off, placing both hands on my forehead.
“What are you doing?” I cried, swatting her hands away. “You’re worse than Meg!”
“HA!” she laughed. “I saw you do that swatting thing to Meg and I just knew you’d do it to me too.” Then she reached for the sheets again, which, now that I’d removed my hands in order to swat at her, she was able to rip from my body.
“You give those back!” I lunged at her.
“No!” She laughed again, darting out of my reach. But then her expression changed, becoming a sober combination of wistful and sweet. “Oh, Emily. Your first bleeding!”
My first…? I wanted to point out that I’d been getting my period for over two years now, thank you very much, but then I realized how lucky I was. At least now I wasn’t going to have to explain why I didn’t know how to take care of my own period in 1862.
“Here,” Jo said, taking me by the hand, “let me show you what to do.”
A few moments later, it occurred to me that what was going on between us was kind of nice: Jo and I were having a real bonding moment!
“Yes, you are a woman now,” Jo said, “and now I must tell you all about the making of babies and such.”
Darn! Just when things were going so well. Sometimes she was worse than Meg.
“I don’t think that’s really necessary,” I started to say, but she just blathered on.
I listened in horror as she gave some long and yet