Little Women and Me - By Lauren Baratz-Logsted Page 0,34

the unfamiliar skates, it was all I could do to keep my balance.

Amy turned to call over her shoulder to me impatiently, “If you’re going to come, come!” Then she began to head toward the precarious middle of the ice.

“Wait!” I called after her.

“What is it, Emily?” she asked in exasperation. “I’m in a hurry here.”

I knew I had to stop her, had to keep her close to the shore where I still was, so I did the only thing I could think to do: I forced myself to fall.

I remembered a line from an old television commercial. “I’ve fallen and I can’t get up!” I shouted, sprawling around on the ice as though I really couldn’t. Okay, I’ll admit it: I really couldn’t.

It’s hard to stand up on ice when you have nothing to hold on to, no real sense of balance, and you don’t know how to skate.

“Oh … fine.” She shook her blond locks and headed in my direction.

She was halfway to me when the crack came.

C-RACK!

It was so loud, like a gunshot, I don’t know how it was possible that people in the next town didn’t hear it.

I looked across the ice in time to see Amy’s arms shoot up into the air, and then her body disappeared into the black water that filled the space where the ice had cracked open, her little blue hood bobbing on the surface.

This is still fine, I said to myself, forcing a note of calm into my internal voice. So I didn’t stop her from falling through the ice. So what? This will be just like the book. Jo will have turned in time to see Amy fall through and Laurie will lie down flat and grab Amy while he sends Jo to go fetch a rail from that fence over there.

Only it wasn’t still fine. When I looked up in the direction Jo and Laurie had been just a minute ago, they weren’t there, so Jo hadn’t seen Amy fall through the ice.

Oh no, I realized with an even greater horror. This meant that the only person left to save Amy was … me???

Oh shoot.

“Amy! Hang on!” I called to the bobbing blue hood.

Then, still unable to rise in my skates, I dragged myself along the ice.

After much heaving and pulling, I finally edged up on the black hole. I’ll admit, I was a little scared to get close. What good would it do the world—any world—if I fell in too and we both drowned?

But then I realized that this was all my fault. In my misguided effort to avert disaster for Amy, I’d managed to make things worse. Now, instead of simply suffering a scary dunk in the water as she’d been meant to do, she could drown.

I had no choice. I had to save her.

Like the Grinch, my sometimes-ten-sizes-too-small heart grew three sizes that day.

I inched up all the way to the edge, not caring about my own safety anymore.

“Grab on to my hand, Amy!” I urged her.

But she didn’t seem to hear me, struggling as she was to keep her head above water, to keep it from disappearing beneath the surrounding ice.

If she didn’t hear my voice, did she hear the much louder crack that soon followed?

Because there it was—C-RACK!— and the ice beneath me was giving way and now I was in the black water beside her.

It was the coldest I’d ever been in my life, but I didn’t care. Somehow, I got my arms around her waist and with one enormous heave I threw her out of the water and onto the ice, like landing a really big fish. Then I tried to heave myself out too, using the ice border like I would the side of a swimming pool to leverage my body, but every time I bore down on another section of ice, it gave way beneath me.

And I was getting cold. So cold.

My hands became ice, my breathing shallow, and then suddenly I began to feel warmer even though I was still in the frigid water.

Was this how my life was going to end, I wondered, far from my real life, stuck in the middle of blasted Little Women?

And then there was Jo’s voice, yelling, “Emily March! What have you gotten yourself into? Get out of there this instant!”

And then there was Laurie, lying down on the ice, reaching out a hand until he could grasp on to my wrist tightly, keeping me above water while he yelled to Jo