Little Women and Me - By Lauren Baratz-Logsted Page 0,85

now that she’d mostly learned not to mangle the English language—it would be easy to picture her living a Real Housewives of Victorian New England kind of life.

I laughed then and, speaking my thoughts aloud, said, “Sometimes, it’s almost like you don’t come from this family at all!”

“That’s because—” Amy started to say, but then stopped herself as she put her pencil aside to stare at me. “What are you trying to say, Emily?”

“Only that you’re so different from the rest of us.” I shrugged, not knowing what was bothering her. “With your interest in ‘our best society,’ something no one else here is interested in, certainly not Jo”—at this Jo snorted—“you almost seem like you were dropped here from another family. The way you’re interested in money, as though you have some sense of what it’s like to have money—”

“But of course I do.” Amy cut me off. “As you well know, Papa had plenty of money, but he lost it at one point. We used to live a much grander lifestyle than we do now.” Blushing, she turned to look at Papa. “Sorry, Papa.”

“That’s quite all right, Amy,” he said.

But wait a second here. I distinctly remembered one time Meg making a big deal about being the only one of us to be old enough to remember the days when the family had been well off and Jo saying she could remember it too, the implication being that the rest of us—including Amy, who was a full three years younger than Jo—weren’t old enough to have such memories.

So where did Amy’s come from?

When I tried to ask her about it, with what seemed to me to be an innocent enough question, Amy got red in the face and replied with a huff:

“Well, I have heard all the stories, haven’t I? I mean, of course that’s the only way I could know about it—really, Emily, sometimes I think Jo is right about you!”

Twenty-Seven

One thing Jo should have had right about me was that I was competitive with her where writing was concerned, but she wasn’t even aware of that because: 1) I hadn’t worked on my book in a long time, and 2) except for that long-ago thing with the Pickwick Portfolio/Twist Times, she’d never known about it in the first place.

But that was all about to change …

Miss Crocker invited Jo to escort her to a lecture on the Pyramids that was being given as a People’s Course.

I couldn’t even remember who Miss Crocker was when Jo told us about it, but then, straining memory, I remembered she was the family friend who’d come to dine with us that time Marmee tricked us all into being bored with our leisure, the same day that Jo put salt on the strawberries and Beth’s canary, Pip, had died.

Funny thing about living in Marchville. You could meet someone who was supposed to be a close family friend and then not have them show up again for another four years.

Anyway, Miss Crocker had invited Jo to escort her, Jo had said yes, and Jo was very happy about it.

“It shall be good to do something different for a change,” Jo said.

That did sound appealing.

“Can I come too?” I asked.

“No,” Jo said, “you weren’t invited.”

I thought about fighting her on it. It was a free lecture, after all, open to the public—I was the public! But—eh—I just wasn’t up for all the dramarama.

So I let her go.

I’d planned on ignoring Jo when she got back. After all, if I wasn’t welcome, what did I care about the Pyramids anyway? Besides which, the Pyramids were just big sandy triangles in the desert; it’s not like there was anything new to say about them.

But when Jo came in, she was bouncing around like a pinball, she was so excited. “Must’ve been some lecture,” I said. “Did someone discover a fourth Pyramid or something?”

“Oh, who cares about that?” Jo said. Then she pulled something from a pocket of her skirt. It was a crumpled article that she’d torn from a newspaper. Smoothing the creases, she handed it to me. “Read this!”

I read.

The newspaper was sponsoring a contest. The winner would receive a grand prize of one hundred dollars—a small fortune around here. The only thing the winner had to do was write the most sensational story of all those submitted.

“A boy at the lecture gave me the newspaper to read while we were waiting for it to start,” Jo went on enthusiastically. “And I had the