Little Women and Me - By Lauren Baratz-Logsted Page 0,5

girl next to her looked the youngest, a skinny chick with long, curly blond hair. Her eyes were a startling blue. Amy.

So where was …?

I heard a soft voice say something about not minding about the money. That’s when I saw her, almost hidden like a mouse, as she knitted away in the corner. The rosy cheeks, the flat hair, the bright eyes, and the peaceful expression. Check. Had to be Beth.

As I looked around the room, and took in the old-fashioned furniture and stuff, I tried to figure out what had happened. The last thing I remembered was opening my copy of Little Women and reading the first line, then reading more and thinking about things, and then … WHOOSH!

Had I turned on the TV while doing my homework and stumbled on an old movie version? But no, this Jo March didn’t look like an actress playing Jo March. She looked like, well, Jo March! Maybe I’d eaten a contaminated lettuce leaf at lunch and was hallucinating or someone had poisoned me? Or maybe the answer was simpler: I fell asleep while reading, and this was just a dream?

I pinched myself, hard, but after the pinch I was still in the room. In a dream, can you give yourself a specific direction like that and actually have the dream-you do the thing?

“Emily.” I jumped in my chair as Jo kicked me in the foot.

As I looked down at where she’d tapped me, I saw for the first time that I had the same seriously ugly boots on my feet as the rest of them: they were brown leather, heavily creased, and laced from the toes to a few inches above the ankle. I also took in my long brown dress, and felt something thick and binding across my midsection. My hand moved to my waist. At the feel of the narrow bonelike strips, a bizarre thought occurred to me—was I wearing a corset? This was worse than a bra! And my underpants felt … loose. Not like panties at all. They felt bloomerish! All of it—the boots, the long dress, whatever bizarre garments lay underneath the dress—felt incredibly heavy, like I would lose weight just by walking around and sweating in this stuff all day long. My hand traveled up to my head only to find my auburn hair pulled up into a loose bun with … pins? I had pins in my hair? That’s when I jumped in my chair for the second time in as many minutes. What the heck had happened to my own clothes? Why was my hair like this? What was going on???

“Emily,” Jo said again. “Why must you always daydream when we’re trying to have an important discussion?”

And how did she know my name?

It had felt real enough when she nudged my foot hard, and I suddenly needed to touch her, to see if she felt real. But as I reached, half tempted to tap her on the shoulder as hard as she’d tapped my foot, I saw my own hand. It was no longer the hand I knew. Gone were the longish nails, painted near black, and the ringed fingers I’d used to hold my salad fork while talking to Jackson. In its place was a hand that looked rougher than mine, like it had been doing some sort of work, the nails very short and very clean.

I jumped to my feet. Not seeing any mirrors in the room, I rushed to a set of windows and glimpsed what I could of my reflection in one of the panes, the night black beyond the glass. I looked like me, I saw, and yet not at all like me. Where was my makeup? My eyebrows were no longer tweezed! Suddenly I had to wonder: If I took off all these clothes—obviously not in front of everyone else, of course—would I discover unshaved armpits and hairy legs? Gross!

On a small table next to the set of windows stood a small lamp, the light glowing through a cloudy glass globe attached to the silver base. I couldn’t see any wires attached to the base, so I glanced inside the globe, saw a flame burning from a thick wick. I sniffed: oil.

First, I was hearing things from Little Women. Then I was seeing things. Now I was smelling things? What was going on?

It’s just a dream, Emily, I muttered to myself repeatedly, closing my eyes on all the confusing things, just a dream, just a dream