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 already shaken Amy so much,