Little Women and Me - By Lauren Baratz-Logsted Page 0,19

too.”

I felt the frigid cold around me intensify as the muff turned cooler in my hands. Suddenly I wanted to be back at the cozy house with Beth. I may have had to do my own laundry, but at least there were fireplaces.

“So, um,” I said, “just where exactly are we going?”

The other three stopped in the snow and turned to look at me as though I’d just landed from another planet, which, essentially, I had.

“I’m going to the King house,” Meg said. “You know—where I’m nursery governess to their four spoiled children?”

“It’s Aunt March’s house for me,” Jo said with a wrinkle of the nose.

“Josy-phine!” Meg said in a loud old-lady voice, and I remembered that this was how Aunt March spoke to Jo.

“At least I get to read in her large library whenever she’s napping,” Jo said, “although that’s hardly compensation for when she’s awake.”

“And I am off to school,” Amy said with a heavy sigh. “Oh, I do wish Beth weren’t so bashful, for then at least she could accompany me. What a wonderful life Beth has! All Beth has to do all day is play with her imaginary friends—those wretched six dolls she dresses every day, tending to them when they are sick—and take care of stray animals and practice on her piano with the yellow keys. Oh, and all the housework that Hannah doesn’t do—that’s Beth’s job too.”

I’d seen one of Beth’s dolls: a castoff of Jo’s, the thing was limbless and had no head.

“And what am I supposed to be doing?” I asked.

Meg narrowed her eyes at me as though wondering why I would be asking about what I should already know.

“Why, you are our jack-of-all-trades.”

“Your what?” She had to be joking. This sounded like it might be as bad as Marmee’s Wherever you go, dearest Emily, there you are inscription in my brown copy of Pilgrim’s Progress.

“You do a bit of everything,” Meg said. “On Mondays you go and help me at the Kings’.”

“On Tuesdays,” Jo said, “you help me with Aunt March.”

“On Wednesdays,” Meg said, “you stay home and help Beth and Hannah around the house.”

“And I suppose on Thursdays I go to school with Amy?” I said, finally catching on and not liking what I was hearing at all. What kind of family role was “jack-of-all-trades”? I knew what that meant. It meant I was a master of none. Worse, it meant I fit in nowhere. Just like at my real home.

“No,” Amy said, looking at me like I’d gone insane. “You don’t go to school with me. What sort of sense would that make, to go for just one day? And you being two years older?”

I shrugged. I had no idea. Seriously, very little of this made any sense to me.

“On Thursdays,” Amy said, sounding an awful lot like Jo at this point, “you walk me all the way to school, you meet me there afterward, and you help me with my homework and any problems that might arise, which is basically what Meg does on the other four days of the week.”

So … at fourteen years old, I never had to go to school again? At least not here? Cool!

“And on Fridays?” I wondered aloud. “What do I do on Fridays?”

Now it was their turn to look puzzled.

“Huh,” Meg said at last. “I don’t think any of us know.”

“What do you do on Fridays?” Amy asked.

“Never mind that now!” Jo said, using one hand to hold her hat to her head as a strong gust of wind threatened to blow it away. “Don’t you two realize what Emily’s been doing?” she said to Meg and Amy.

“What have I been doing?” I asked, wanting to hear this as well.

“Emily,” Jo accused, “you’ve been asking all these silly questions because it is Monday and you do not want to go to the Kings’ with Meg.”

“Oh, right.” I laughed nervously. “I guess you caught me, didn’t you?”

“Come along, Emily,” Meg said as the four of us reached a fork in the road and she pulled me toward the left.

“I do wish you hadn’t dropped me into the cold hod when I was a baby,” I heard Amy mutter at Jo as they veered off to the right. “It is all your fault my nose looks like this …”

Anyone who tells you that it’s easier not to have to go to school never had to babysit the King children, I thought, rubbing my feet by the fire that night. I’d somehow managed to