Hannah was.
Marmee had indeed left presents for us. Oh, yay, whoopee.
There were copies of Pilgrim’s Progress for each of us: crimson for Jo, green for Meg, gray for Beth, blue for Amy. As for mine? It was brown.
Brown? It was the Incident of the Shawls all over again!
“I’m so sorry,” Marmee explained, “but it was the only color left.”
As for the inscription?
Wherever you go, dearest Emily, there you are.
I felt a rush of frustration. Was this some kind of joke?
Hurriedly, I sneaked glances at the inscriptions in my … sisters’ books. But theirs were all inspirational, biblical even. Whereas mine was …
Wherever you go, dearest Emily, there you are.
They were taunting me! I was on the point of saying something, but then I glanced over at Marmee and saw the sweet look on her face.
“It’s … lovely,” I finally lied through my teeth. Then, thinking it would be smarter to talk like the rest of them in order to avoid detection, I added, “I shall rely on these wise words and, um, let them guide me like a beacon through life, always.”
Marmee beamed.
“Well,” Amy said, with an uncharacteristic snort in my general direction, “don’t overdo it.”
Jo was going on and on about the army shoes she’d given Marmee for a Christmas present.
And what had I bought Marmee, to go along with Jo’s army shoes, Meg’s gloves, Beth’s handkerchiefs, and Amy’s—as it turned out—big bottle of cologne? Well, even though I couldn’t remember going shopping with them, even though I’d somehow leaped from that first night in front of the fireplace to this Christmas morning, somehow bypassing the mall crawl altogether, I’d managed to buy Marmee a dollar’s worth of paper so she could write to Papa. It was nice to know I was thoughtful if hardly original.
The way Jo blathered on about how she wished she were a boy so she could fight with the men, side by side with our chaplain papa—honestly, I’d only been here a short time, but already I was sick of it.
Someone needed to set her straight about war! After all, I’d watched the news and gone to history class! However necessary the American Civil War might have been, there was nothing nice about young guys getting killed.
“Iraq!” I burst out with it. “Afghanistan!” I went on hastily when they all stared at me. “And by the way,” I mumbled, hoping to distract them from my outburst, “I’m hungry. When’s breakfast around here?”
I stared back, returning their stunned looks with what I hoped looked like firmness. Of course, they didn’t have a clue about Iraq and Afghanistan! For a moment, fear grabbed me, fear of being discovered as the … March impostor that I was. If they discovered that, they might throw me out on the streets. And then not only would I be stuck in the wrong time period, I’d be a homeless person stuck in the wrong time period. But then again, they already seemed to have accepted me as one of them. So I’d be the eccentric March, I thought with near-manic glee—I’d found my place!
“Never mind whatever it is you’re going on about, Emily,” Jo said. “Didn’t you just hear Marmee say that there’s a poor German woman living nearby with a newborn baby and six children all freezing in one bed because they have no fire and nothing to eat and that we should give them our Christmas breakfast?”
Um, no, I thought. Somehow, I’d missed that. On top of everything else, was I now suffering from story amnesia? It was like there were things that happened that the others seemed to know but I didn’t. And there were also things I didn’t remember from my many times reading the book.
“We will have bread and milk for our own breakfast,” Meg said, tying a totally ugly bonnet on her head.
“Yes, Marmee says we will make it up at dinner, so what does it matter if we starve a little now?” Amy’s words were brave considering she was, well, Amy, but I got the impression that if her sisters hadn’t been pressuring her, she’d have loved to do the wrong thing.
And so would I. What were these people, nuts? They planned to go from a breakfast of bread and milk straight to dinner with nothing in between. I couldn’t live that way. It was worse than eating lettuce every day to impress a guy!
“I’m not going.” I crossed my arms in front of my chest.
“Aren’t you feeling well?” Meg asked, placing a