Penguin's Transformative Summer Reads

A novel

BY

ALLY CONDIE

dutton children’s booksAn imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

Dutton Children’s Books Penguin Young Readers GroupAn imprint of Penguin Random House, LLC375 Hudson StreetNew York, NY 10014

p

Copyright © 2016 by Allyson Braithwaite Condie

Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

CIP data is available.

Printed in the United States of America

978-0-399-18719-3

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Design by Vanessa Han

Edited by Julie Strauss-Gabel

Text set in Adobe Caslon Pro

For my hometown, Cedar City, Utah, and in memory of my grandparents

Alice and Royden Braithwaite

Our new house had a blue door. The rest of the house was painted white and shingled gray.

“Isn’t it beautiful?” my mother asked.She climbed out of the car first and then my younger

brother, Miles, and then me.“Don’t you think this is the perfect place to end the summer?”

Mom wanted to know.We were spending the rest of the summer in Iron Creek, a

small town in a high desert, the kind with pine trees and snow in the winter. It got hot in the day and cold at night. When a thunderstorm, all black and gray and blue, did come rolling in, you could see it a mile away.

I knew that stars would come out and rain would fall and that the days would be hot and long. I knew I’d make sand-wiches for Miles and wash dishes with my mom. I knew I would do all of that and summer would be the same and never the same.

Last summer we had a dad and a brother and then they were gone.

We did not see it coming.

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One of the things Miles and I whisper-worried about at night was that our mom could fall in love again.

It didn’t seem like it would happen because she’d loved my father so much, but we had learned from the accident that any-thing could happen. Anything bad, anyway.

Mom didn’t end up falling in love with a person, but she did fall in love with a house. We were in Iron Creek in June, visiting our grandparents—my mom’s parents—when she saw the for sale sign while she was out for a drive. She came home and whispered to Gram and Papa, and then they went with her to see the house while Miles and I stayed with our uncle Nick and his wife. Two weeks later, Mom used some of the money from when my dad died, the life insurance money, to buy the house. Since she’s a teacher and didn’t have to go back to work until the end of August, she decided we would spend the rest of the summer in Iron Creek and all the summers after that. She planned to rent out the house to college students during the school year. We weren’t really rich enough to have two houses.

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“It will be good for us to be around family more,” she said. “Next summer we can stay for the whole time.”

We didn’t fight her about it. We liked our grandparents. We liked our uncle and our aunt. They had known our dad and our brother Ben. They had some of the same memories we did. Sometimes they even brought things up, like, “Remember when your dad went out in the kayak at Aspen Lake and he flipped over and we had to save him in our paddleboat?” and we would all start laughing because we had the same picture in our minds, my dad with his sunglasses dangling from one ear and his hair all wet. And they knew that Ben’s favorite kind of ice cream wasn’t ice cream at all, it was rainbow sherbet, and he always ate green first, and so when I saw it in my grand-ma’s freezer once and I started crying they didn’t even ask why and I think I saw my uncle Nick, my mom’s brother, crying too.

“Well,” Mom said, “let’s go inside and choose rooms before we start unpacking.”

“Me first!” said Miles.They went in the house and I sat down on the steps.The wind came through the trees, which were very old and

very tall. I heard an ice-cream truck a few streets over, and kids playing in other yards.

And then a boy rode past on a bike. The boy wore old clothes. Not worn-out old, old-fashioned. He was dressed like

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IE a peasant. He had on a ruffly blouse and pants that ended right under his knees and a hat with a feather and he was my age. He didn’t glance over at me. He looked happy.

Sad, I thought. That’s so sad. He’s weird and he doesn’t even know it.

Actually, it’s better not to know it. My brother Ben was different and he knew.

The trees sounded loud as a waterfall above me. “We’re so lucky,” Mom kept telling us when she bought the house. “The trees on the property have been there for fifty years. They’re beautiful. Not many like them in the whole town.”

I think she noticed the trees because my dad always loved trees.

We bought the house from a family who had lived in Iron Creek for generations, the Wainwrights. The kids had all moved away but one of them came back to sell the house when his mother died. He didn’t want to live in it, but he was also kind of weird about selling it. When he ran into my mother at the real-tor’s office, he told her, “It will always be the Wainwright home.”

My mother said she nodded at him like she agreed but she didn’t waste any time having the velvety green carpet torn up and the hardwood floors underneath sanded and varnished.

“I want the heart and the bones to stay the same,” she said. “Anything else, we can change. We live here now.”

She also had the front door painted blue.

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I heard that blue front door open behind me and Mom came out. “Hey, Cedar,” she said.

“Hey.”“Miles picked his room,” Mom said. “There are still two

left. Want to go next?”Shouldn’t you go next? I wanted to ask, but it didn’t matter.

Her room could be as small as ours now because she didn’t have to share.

“Sure,” I said, because I knew she wanted me to say Sure.Inside, the house was empty, no furniture yet. Living room

to the right, stairs in front of me. “Want to look around down-stairs first?” Mom asked, because Miles and I hadn’t spent time here yet, but I shook my head and started climbing. When I got to the top of the steps, I stopped.

“Isn’t it fun?” she asked. “I left these the way they were. I couldn’t help it.”

Each bedroom door was painted a different color. One yel-low, one purple, one green. The bathroom door was painted red. “Are the rooms inside the same colors?” I asked.

“No,” she said. “Only the doors. Each room has something special about it, though.”

Right then the green door opened. “I picked this one,” Miles said, sticking his head out. “It has a big, big closet. Like a hideout. For me.” Miles was eight, young enough to still care about hideouts.

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IE “So green is gone,” Mom said.I didn’t care which room I had but I knew she wanted me

to pick.“I’ll do this one,” I said, pointing to the purple door at the

end of the hall.“You can check them both first,” Mom said.“No,” I said, “I’m fine. Unless you wanted purple?”“I like them both,” Mom said. “The yellow room has a win-

dow seat. The purple room has a diamond window.”That settled it. I knew Mom had always liked window seats

and our real house, up in a suburb of Salt Lake City four hours away, was newish and beige and had no window seats anywhere.

“Purple,” I said. “It’s like a rainbow up here.”“That’s what made me want to paint the front door blue,”

Mom said. “It was the only color that was missing.”Lots of colors were missing. Pink. Orange. Brown. Gray.

But I didn’t say that.

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It turned out that a diamond window was not a window shaped like a diamond, which is what I assumed it would be. It was a big, regular-shaped window that opened outward, but instead of having two big panes of glass it had lots of small panes of glass, and those were diamond shaped. I couldn’t see out clearly because of all the shapes and that bugged me, so I opened up the window. The wind in the trees was relentless. It sounded like an ocean outside my window so I closed it again.

Because of that stupid window, it felt like the house was a fly with those eyes that have a million parts. And it was looking at me.

I’d picked the wrong room. I should have done yellow.Then, out of the corner of my eye, I saw something move.

Something big, and black, and outside my window.It was in the tree. I took a step closer. And then closer again.The thing stretched its wings and settled. I could see that

much, even though the window made it smeary and bleary and in diamonds.

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DIE I took another step.

I wanted to open the window to see what the thing was, but I also didn’t want it to fly in.

Another step. The thing outside the window turned its head.

The purple door slammed open behind me and I spun around to see Miles. “Come on!” he said. “Gram and Papa and Uncle Nick and Aunt Kate are here! They’re going to help us unpack!”

I looked back at the window but this time it only showed me trees. Something had looked away.

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“What room would Ben have picked?” Miles asked at breakfast the next day.

Ben loved blue, he would have picked blue for sure, but there was no blue room.

And then I knew the real reason we had a blue front door.“Maybe mine,” I said. “Purple is closest to blue.”“Maybe not to Ben,” Miles said, and he was right. You

could never be sure how Ben would see things. He had his own kind of logic.

We were getting better at talking about Ben, but not much. Better because we did talk about him but also there was so much more to say and we were all still too fragile to say it.

After lunch I sat outside and I saw the boy on the bike ride by again, and he didn’t see me that time either. And he still had on the same clothes and he still looked happy.

Next day, same thing all over again. Boy, bike, clothes, happy.

In my family we never call people names because some-times people used to call Ben names and we all hated that.

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DIE When he was younger he didn’t notice so much, but when he

was nine, the year he died, he noticed every single time. You’d see his eyes flicker. He’d take it in. And then who knew what he’d do with it. Or how it made him feel.

Here is something bad about me.I call people names in my head sometimes.I don’t do it to be mean.I do it to label.But I know names-to-label are bad too. Names-to-be-

mean are worse, but both are bad.Here’s the name I called the boy in my head:Nerd-on-a-Bike.

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“Look,” Miles said. “I found this in my closet.” He dragged something into the middle of my bedroom. Outside, the wind blew and the sky had gone dark. A thunderstorm was moving in.

It was a box of old board games.“Remember,” I said, “you may play these games, but they

will always be Wainwright board games.”We spread the games out on the floor. Outside the trees

went crazy. The storm was almost here.“Your room is noisy,” Miles said.“I know,” I said. “It’s the trees.”“You could ask Mom to trade rooms,” Miles said.But he knew I wouldn’t do that. He knew I wouldn’t

ask Mom for anything I didn’t really, really need. We both tried to be good for her and she tried to be patient with us. Sometimes I thought of the three of us as pencils with the erasers scrubbed down to the end, and the next swipe across the paper would tear through the page and make a scree sound across the desk.

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DIE It turned out most of the games were missing parts. But

there was a very old version of Life that had everything in it. We played a few rounds before we got bored.

“Is there anything else in your closet?” I asked Miles.“A box of old dolls,” Miles said. “They’re all broken up.

Arms and legs sticking out. Eyes that won’t close anymore.”“Are you serious?”“No,” he said. “There’s only a box of old clothes. Like

dress-up clothes. And some shoes. The shoes are gross. They’re all curly.”

“Show me,” I said.He was right. The shoes were disgusting. They looked like

elf shoes, twisted up and pointy. And the dress-up clothes smelled musty. They all seemed like they were from our parents’ era, except one shiny blue dress that was fancier than the rest and probably older. It had fur on the cuffs and the collar. I couldn’t tell if the fur was real or fake. I hung that dress up in Miles’s closet so it wouldn’t be so wrinkled. It was kind of pretty.

“Want to walk to the gas station and get a Fireball?” Miles asked when I was done.

Miles was into Fireballs, the huge red kind that you get at convenience stores. Tears ran down his face while he ate them because he couldn’t stand how hot they were but he wanted to suck all the way through one without stopping by the end of the summer. Since the house was in the middle of town, we

Summerlost 13

didn’t have to walk far to get to a gas station, which meant that Miles had learned quickly about every kind of cheap candy, like Lemonheads and Necco Wafers and gum shredded to look like tobacco. My mom wouldn’t let him get the gum, or the candy cigarettes.

I liked Lemonheads best. They were so sour they made my nose sweat.

“It’s raining,” I said.“It doesn’t matter,” Miles said. “The rain will feel good.”I decided to stay put.I stayed put a lot, ever since last summer. My mom worried

about it because she thought it meant that I was afraid to go out, because of what happened to my dad and Ben.

I walked over and opened the window. Even with the wind. Even with the rain. I felt like I might as well let all that sound surround me. I curled up on the bed and waited to see if the house would look at me again.

The black thing came back. This time, in the daylight, I could see what it was.

It was a bird.It was a vulture.I had never seen one up close but I recognized it from mov-

ies. Or TV. I wasn’t sure how I knew, but I did.It looked at me. It probably wasn’t used to anyone living in

my room, because no one had for a while. It watched me and the house watched me.

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DIE If the vulture wanted, it could fly right inside.

“I’m not afraid of you,” I whispered.It cocked its ugly red head.It knew I lied.

After the rain cleared up, my uncle Nick brought over an old bike that someone at his work was giving away. “I thought you kids might like it.”

“We keep saying how dumb we were to leave our bikes at home,” I told him. “Thanks.”

“I stopped by Sports & More and got a helmet too. I knew your mom would want you to have one.”

“Good call,” I said. “Would you like a Fireball?” Miles had brought some back, and I had one lodged in my cheek. I almost drooled.

“Absolutely not,” Nick said. He said it in a nice way though. “I didn’t even know they still made those.” He leaned the bike against the porch. “Where’s your mom?”

“Out back,” I said. “Working on the deck.” My mom planned to build a deck while we were here. She’d never done anything like that before.

“I’ll go say hi to her,” he said.“Will you tell her I went on a ride?”“Sure. Where are you going?”

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DIE “I don’t know,” I said. That was true and also a lie. The min-

ute I’d seen the bike I’d known what I would do, even though I didn’t know where I would go.

I had decided to follow Nerd-on-a-Bike.

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I’d never had to lie in wait for someone before. It was kind of hard. I put the bike on the sidewalk that led up to our house. Then I sat on the steps wearing the helmet so that I’d be ready to go the minute he came by. I sat behind the porch pillar just in case, even though he’d never noticed me before.

It didn’t take long. As soon as he was two houses past ours I jumped on my bike and followed him.

He rode straight down the street. He stopped and waited for a light so I stopped too. I made it through after him.

He headed in the direction of the college campus. We rode past fraternities that used to be regular houses. One of them had a rope swing hanging from a tree out front, and another had a yard that was nothing but gravel.

Then we came to the best part of the campus, the forest. It was my dad’s favorite part because of the pine trees that grew there. They were almost as old as the school and stood very tall and straight. The groundskeeper put Christmas lights on the tallest one every year.

The forest was big enough to feel quiet but small enough

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DIE that it didn’t feel creepy. A waterfall and a couple of sculptures

were hidden among the trees. And outside of the forest was a grassy quad where my mom used to play Ultimate Frisbee when she was a teenager.

Nerd-on-a-Bike turned into the forest and rode down the squiggly sidewalks under the trees.

He rode past the quad.He rode toward the middle of campus to the theater, which

looked like it got picked up out of old England and set right down in Utah. And then I realized where he was going.

The Summerlost Festival.Of course.I should have known.The Summerlost Festival in Iron Creek was the third-

biggest Shakespearean festival west of the Mississippi River. It happened every year on the college campus during the summertime. A big billboard told you all about it as you came into town:

lose yourself in summer and go back in time at the summerlost festival

The Greenshow they did out on the lawn before the plays was fun and also scary because they sometimes pulled people out of the audience to be part of it, and there were always crazy

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props. One time they had my dad get up to be a prince in a skit. He had on tan shorts and a blue polo shirt like he usually did when he was on vacation. The actors in their tights and peasant dresses surrounded him. He had to wear huge wooden shoes and stomp around on the tiny stage on a quest to rescue one of the actors, who had been cast into a deep sleep by a witch’s spell. My dad had to pretend to kiss her. His face went so red. “My prince!” the princess exclaimed to my dad when she woke up.

My mother could not breathe, she was laughing so hard. When Dad sat down, he shook his head. I knew he’d hated it, but he’d been a good sport. Mom hugged him and I felt proud of him even though it had been sort of awful to watch.

Another time, a few years later, we came to see the show and Ben was having one of his hard days and couldn’t stop screaming and yelling. Finally my mom took Ben away to the grassy quad and he rolled down the hill over and over, like a puppy. When he came back, happy and big-eyed and sweaty, he even sat on my lap in a kind of curly way like a puppy would have, but he was a boy.

My brother was a boy and now he’s not anything.

Wolf Hollow

a novel

Lauren Wolk

DU T T ON C H I L DR E N ’S B O OK S

An imprint of Penguin Random House, LLC

DUTTON C H I LDREN’S BO OKSPenguin Young Readers GroupAn imprint of Penguin Random House, LLC375 Hudson StreetNew York, NY 10014

Copyright © 2016 by Lauren Wolk

Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.

[CIP tk]

Printed in the United States of America

ISBN 978-1-101-99482-5

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Design by Irene Vandervoort

Text set in Harriet

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

For my mother

Wolf Hollow

PROL O GU E

The year I turned twelve, I learned how to lie.I don’t mean the small fibs that children tell. I mean

real lies fed by real fears—things I said and did that took me out of the life I’d always known and put me down hard into a new one.

It was the autumn of 1943 when my steady life began to spin, not only because of the war that had drawn the whole world into a screaming brawl, but also because of the dark-hearted girl who came to our hills and changed ev-erything.

At times, I was so confused that I felt like the stem of a pinwheel surrounded by whir and clatter, but through that whole unsettling time I knew that it simply would not do to hide in the barn with a book and an apple and let events

plunge forward without me. It would not do to turn twelve without earning my keep, and by that I meant my place, my small authority, the possibility that I would amount to something.

But there was more to it than that.The year I turned twelve, I learned that what I said

and what I did mattered.So much, sometimes, that I wasn’t sure I wanted such

a burden.But I took it anyway, and I carried it as best I could.

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CH A P T ER ON E

It began with the china piggy bank that my aunt Lily had given me for my fifth Christmas.

My mother was the one who noticed when it went missing.

“Are you hiding your piggy bank, Annabelle?” She was scrubbing down the baseboards in my bedroom while I put away my summer clothes. She must have noticed that the bank was missing because there was little else in my small room beyond the furniture itself and the windows, a comb and a brush and a book beside my bed. “Nobody’s going to take your things,” she said. “You don’t need to hide them.” She was on her hands and knees, her whole body wagging as she scrubbed, the soles of her black work shoes turned up for a change.

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I was glad she couldn’t see my face. I was folding a too-pink church dress that I hoped to outgrow by next spring, and I imagined that my face was turning the same awful color.

When I’d come home from school that day, I had shaken the china pig to get out a penny and had dropped it by mistake, breaking it into bits and spilling out the coins that I’d been saving for years and which must have added up to nearly ten dollars by now. I had buried the pieces of broken china beyond the kitchen garden and gathered the coins in an old hankie, tied up the corners, and hidden the bundle in a winter boot under my bed along with the silver dollar that my grandfather had given to me on my last birthday, from his collection.

I had never put that silver dollar in my bank because I didn’t think of it as money. It was like a medal that I imag-ined wearing someday, so beautiful was the woman on it, so splendid and serious in her spiky crown.

And I determined that I would part with a penny, maybe even more, but I would not give up that silver dollar to the terrible girl waiting on the path that led into Wolf Hollow.

Every day, to get to school, I walked with my brothers—Henry, who was nine, and James, who was seven—down

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into Wolf Hollow and then back up out of it again to return home. And that was where a big, tough, older girl named Betty had said she’d be waiting for me after school.

She had been sent from the city to stay with her grand-parents, the Glengarrys, who lived above the bank of Rac-coon Creek, just past the end of the lane to our farm. I’d been afraid of her since the day she appeared at the school-house three weeks earlier.

It was whispered that Betty had been sent to the coun-try because she was incorrigible, a word I had to look up in the big dictionary at the schoolhouse. I didn’t know if living in the country with her grandparents was meant to be a punishment or a cure, but either way I didn’t think it was fair to inflict her on us who had not done anything so terribly wrong.

She arrived at our school one morning without any fanfare or much in the way of explanation. There were al-ready nearly forty of us, more than the little school was meant to hold, so some had to double up at desks, two in a seat intended for one, two writing and doing sums on the slanted and deeply scarred desktop, two sets of books in the cubby under the lid.

I didn’t mind so much because I shared a seat with my friend Ruth, a dark-haired, red-lipped, pale girl with a quiet voice and perfectly ironed dresses. Ruth liked

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to read as much as I did, so we had that one big thing in common. And we were both skinny girls who took regular baths (which wasn’t true of all the students in Wolf Hollow School), so sitting tight together wasn’t a bad thing.

Our teacher, Mrs. Taylor, said, “Good morning,” when Betty arrived that day and stood at the back of the school-room. Betty didn’t say anything. She crossed her arms over her chest. “Children, this is Betty Glengarry.” Which sounded, to me, like a name from a song.

We were expected to say good morning, so we did. Betty looked at us without a word.

“We’re a little crowded, Betty, but we’ll find a seat for you. Hang up your coat and lunch pail.”

We all watched in silence to see where Mrs. Taylor would put Betty, but before she had a chance to assign a seat, a thin girl named Laura, apparently reading the writ-ing on the wall, gathered up her books and wedged in next to her friend Emily, leaving a desk free.

This became Betty’s desk. It was in front of the one I shared with Ruth, close enough so that, within a couple of days, I had spitballs clinging to my hair and tiny red sores on my legs where Betty had reached back and poked me with her pencil. I wasn’t happy about the situation, but I was glad that Betty had chosen to devil me instead of Ruth, who was smaller than I was and dainty. And I had brothers

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who had inflicted far worse upon me, while Ruth had none. For the first week after Betty arrived, I decided to weather her minor attacks, expecting them to wane over time.

In a different kind of school, the teacher might have noticed such things, but Mrs. Taylor had to trust that what was going on behind her back wasn’t worth her attention.

Since she taught us all, the chairs clustered at the front of the room by the chalkboard were always occupied by whatever grade level was having a lesson while the rest of us sat at our desks and did our work until it was our turn at the front.

Some of the older boys slept through a good part of the day. When they woke up for their lessons at the chalkboard, they were so openly contemptuous of Mrs. Taylor that I be-lieve the lessons she taught them were shorter than they might have been. They were all big boys who were useful on their farms and didn’t see the point of going to a school that wouldn’t teach them to sow or reap or herd anything. And they knew full well that if the war was still going on when they were old enough, school wouldn’t help them fight the Germans. Being the farmers and ranchers who fed the sol-diers might save them from the war, or make them strong enough to fight, but school never would.

Still, in the coldest months, the work they might be asked to do at home was tedious and difficult: mending

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fences and barn roofs and wagon wheels. Given the choice to spend a day snoozing and, at recess, roughhousing with the other boys instead of working in the freezing wind, the boys generally chose school. If their fathers let them.

But when Betty arrived that October, the days were still warm, and so those awful boys were not regularly attending school. If not for her, the schoolhouse would have been a peaceful place, at least until everything fell to pieces that terrible November and I was called upon to tell my catalogue of lies.

Back then, I didn’t know a word that described Betty properly or what to call the thing that set her apart from the other children in that school. Before she’d been there a week, she’d taught us a dozen words we had no business knowing, poured a well of ink on Emily’s sweater, and told the little kids where babies came from, something I’d only just learned from my grandmother the spring before when the calves were born. For me, learning about babies was a gentle thing that my grandmother handled with the grace and humor of someone who had borne several of her own, every one of them on the bed where she still slept with my grandfather. But for the youngest of the children at my school, it was not gentle. Betty was cruel about it. She scared them to bits. Worst of all, she told them that if they tattled to their parents, she would follow them through

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the woods after school and beat them, as she later did me. Maybe kill them. And they believed her, just as I did.

I could threaten my brothers with death and dismem-berment a dozen times a day and they would laugh at me and stick out their tongues, but when Betty merely looked at them they settled right down. So they might not have been much help had they been with me that day in Wolf Hollow when Betty stepped out from behind a tree and stood in the path ahead of me.

When I was smaller, I asked my grandfather how Wolf Hol-low got its name.

“They used to dig deep pits there, for catching wolves,” he said.

He was one of the eight of us who lived together in the farmhouse that had been in our family for a hundred years, three generations tucked together under one roof after the Depression had tightened the whole country’s belt and made our farm the best of all places to live. Now, with a second world war raging, lots of people grew victory gardens to help feed themselves, but our whole farm was a giant victory garden that my grandfather had spent his whole life tending.

He was a serious man who always told me the truth, which I didn’t always want but sometimes asked for any-

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way. When I asked him how Wolf Hollow got its name, for instance, he told me, even though I was only eight at the time.

He was sitting in a chair near the stove in the kitchen, his elbows on his knees, hands hanging loose from his big wrists, pale feet ready for his boots. Different times of the year he looked like a younger man, open-eyed. That morning, even though it was only just June, he looked beat. The top of his forehead was as white as his feet, but his nose and cheeks were brown, like his hands and his arms, up to where he rolled his sleeves. I knew how weary he was, even though he spent a good part of every day sitting in the shade, doing small work.

“What did they want to catch wolves for?” You couldn’t milk a wolf. Or hitch it to a plow. Or eat it for dinner, I didn’t think.

“So there wouldn’t be as many running around here anymore.”

He wasn’t looking at me. He was looking at his hands. Even though they were already tough as hide, he had a weeping blister at the base of each thumb, from helping my father with the planting.

“Eating the chickens?” I asked. Sometimes I woke up in the morning to my mother screaming at a fox that had dug its way into the henhouse. I wasn’t sure even my mother would go after a wolf that way.

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“Among other things.” He sat up straight and rubbed his eyes. “Weren’t enough people hunting wolves anymore. They were getting too brave and too many.”

I thought about a pit full of wolves.“Did they kill them after they got them in the pit?”My grandfather sighed. “Shot ’em. Turned in their

ears for the bounty. Three dollars a pair.”“Their ears? If there were pups, did they keep them

for pets?”My grandfather didn’t make much noise when he

laughed. It was a matter of his shoulders shaking a couple of times. “You think a wolf would get along with dogs?”

There were always plenty of dogs on the farm. I couldn’t imagine the place without six or seven running around. Once in a while one would disappear, but after a time another would show up to take its place.

“But they could have raised the pups right. Made dogs out of them.”

My grandfather pulled his suspenders up over his shoulders and began to put on his socks. “A wolf is not a dog and never will be,” he said, “no matter how you raise it.”

When he had his boots on and laced, he stood up and put one of his big hands on the top of my head. “They killed the pups, too, Annabelle. Probably didn’t give it much thought. Don’t forget you weren’t the least bit bothered when I mashed that young copperhead last spring.”

12

The snake had kept the imprint of his boot, like it was made of clay.

“Copperheads are poisonous,” I said. “That’s differ-ent.”

“Not to the snake, it isn’t,” he’d said. “Or to the God who made it.”

13

CH A P T ER T WO

I thought about that snake as I stood on the path out of Wolf Hollow, Betty waiting ahead of me. The hair on the back of my neck rose up, and I felt a distant kinship with the wolves that had died here. Betty was wearing a ging-ham dress, and a blue sweater that matched her eyes, and black leather shoes. Her yellow hair was pulled back in a ponytail. On the whole, but for the expression on her face, she looked harmless.

I stopped when I was still ten feet away from her.“Hey, Betty,” I said. I held tight to the book cradled in

my right arm. It was a history book that was so old it didn’t even count Arizona as a state, but it had some good heft to it and I thought maybe I could throw it at her if she got too close. My lunch pail wasn’t heavy enough to be much good,

14

but I gave it a little swing with my left hand so she’d see I wasn’t completely unarmed.

“What kind of a name is Annabelle?” She had a deep voice, almost boyish. She looked at me steadily, her head down like a dog’s when he’s thinking about whether or not to bite. She was half smiling, her arms limp at her sides. She cocked her head to one side.

I shrugged. I didn’t know what kind of a name I had.“You’re the rich girl,” she said. “It’s a rich girl name.”I looked behind me to see if there was someone else on

the path. Someone rich.“You think I’m rich?” It had never occurred to me that

I might be considered rich, although my family was an old one that had given land for the church and the school and still had enough left for a good-size farm. My ancestors lay beneath the finest headstones in the graveyard, and our house was, in fact, big enough for the three generations that now lived there, albeit cheek by jowl. We had running water. A couple of years earlier, Mr. Roosevelt had sent us the electric, and we’d had the wherewithal to wire up the house. We had a telephone mounted on our sitting room wall, which we still regarded as something of a miracle. Moreover, we did eat at Lancaster’s in Sewickley maybe twice a year. But most amazing of all was the indoor privy, which my parents had recently installed, now that my

15

grandparents were old enough to deserve it. But we were not rich.

“You got a purple window,” Betty said.I didn’t know what she was talking about until I re-

membered the lilac glass in our front hall window, one of the things I loved best about our house. That and the gables and the slate roof that looked like silver feathers. The big fireplaces in every room. And the windows tall as doors.

“My grandma told me about your purple window,” Betty said. “I never heard of a purple window before, ’cept in a church or a kingdom. Nobody has a purple window un-less they’s rich.”

I didn’t know what to say to that, so I didn’t say any-thing.

Betty picked up a stick from along the path. It was dead wood, but I could tell from how she held it that it was still heavy.

“Tomorrow you bring me something or I’m going to beat you with this stick.”

She said it so calmly that I thought she was joking, but when she took a step toward me I went hot and felt my heart thumping.

“Like what?” I said. I imagined myself lugging the purple window through the woods.

“Like whatever you have.”

16

I didn’t have much. Just my piggy bank and the coins in it and my silver dollar and my books. A beaver muff my grandfather had once made for my grandmother and which she had given to me when it got ratty. A lace collar that I snapped onto my church dresses. A pair of white cot-ton gloves that were too small for me now. And a sweater frog that I had borrowed from my aunt Lily and she had not asked about since.

I catalogued these assets quickly in my head, but I was not convinced that I would give Betty anything until she said, “I’ll wait for your brothers if you don’t come.”

They were tough little boys, my brothers, but they were smaller than I was and they were mine to look after.

I didn’t say anything as Betty leaned the stick against a tree and continued up the path away from me. “And don’t tell nobody about it or I’ll use a rock on the little one.” James. She meant James. The little one.

I waited until she was out of sight and then I got my breath back and thought about what it would feel like to be hit with a stick.

A year earlier Henry had thrown a toadstool the size of a dinner plate at me and I’d stepped back out of the way and tripped over a dog and broken my arm. I’d burned my-self a couple of times, stepped on a hoe blade and snapped the handle back into my forehead, sprained my ankle in a groundhog hole. Nothing much else had done me bodily

17

harm in my eleven years on earth, but I’d been hurt enough to know that a whack with a branch wouldn’t kill me.

Still, as I passed it, I heaved the particular stick she had chosen as far as I could into the woods. There were plenty of other sticks around, but I felt a little better as I cast this one beyond her reach.

I decided, as I plodded slowly up the path, that Betty wouldn’t go after Henry or James until she tried me, so I’d wait to see if she was a barker or a biter before telling my parents anything that might make Betty a whole lot an-grier than she already was. But I confessed to myself that I was afraid in a way I hadn’t known before.

I hadn’t felt very much true fear in my life, except about the war . . . that it might still be raging when my brothers grew old enough to fight the Nazis . . . even though farm boys were often spared. Even though by that time someone would surely have won. And I was afraid of that, too—who would win, who would lose.

We girls in the 4-H club had made a flag to hang in the church, adding a blue star every time someone from the township went off to fight. When one of them died, we changed the blue star to a gold one. Just two, so far, but I had been to their funerals, and I knew that there was no “just” about it.

I sometimes sat with the grown-ups and listened to the

18

radio in the evenings after the supper dishes were done. Nobody said anything when the news came on. My mother listened with her head bowed, her hands nested and still in her mending. The talk was of concentration camps, which I thought at first meant places where people went to think hard thoughts.

“I do wish they were that,” my father said. “But they’re not, Annabelle. They’re prisons for people Hitler doesn’t like.”

I had a hard time imagining why Hitler disliked so many people.

“Who does he like?” I asked.My father thought about his answer. “People with

blond hair and blue eyes,” he said.Which made me glad to have hair that was brown.

Eyes, too.We listened to news of bombs and submarines, smiled

at the announcement that the Allies were close to retaking Italy, worried about everything else.

“No need to be afraid, Annabelle,” my mother said, running her hand down my back.

But I was.I wasn’t afraid of my mother, though, despite how

hard she could sometimes be. She had forgotten what it felt like to ride a swing up into the sky, to stop hoeing at the

19

first sign of a blister, to expect anything to be easier than it was. She had been seventeen when she’d had me, was only twenty-eight the year I learned how to lie, not much more than a girl herself, in charge of three generations and a good bit of farmwork, too. But even when she was most impatient with me, I did not fear her.

Nor was I really afraid of my aunt Lily, though she could be alarming. A tall, thin, ugly woman who might have been handsome as a man, Aunt Lily spent her days working as a postmistress and her nights praying and reading from her Bible and practicing dance steps in the small patch of floor at the foot of her bed. She sometimes invited me into her bedroom to listen to Peter and the Wolf on the phonograph, and now and then she put a penny into the china pig she’d given me, but her big, square teeth and her feverish devotion to God frightened me.

And there were times when I was afraid of my grand-mother’s ailing heart that forced her to go up the stairs backward, sitting down . . . how weak and gray she be-came sometimes, no longer the strong and able woman she’d once been. When we could, she and I sat on the porch swing, playing I Spy, remarking on the butterflies in the front garden, hoping for a pheasant to come hopping out of the woods to poach the seed that she scattered for the songbirds. She loved those birds. Loved them. Even the

20

drab little ones. Especially the drab little ones. There was nothing about my grandmother that frightened me, ex-cept the thought that she’d be gone soon.

But I shared that fear with everyone in our house.Betty was mine to fear, and I decided that she was

mine to disarm. If I could. On my own.But for now I was simply happy that she was gone, and

I followed so slowly that Betty was nowhere to be seen by the time I cleared the trees and made my way onto the field that was empty but for her footprints, which were deep and sharp and suggested that she was more freighted than she could possibly be.

DIAL BOOKS FOR YOUNG READERSA division of Penguin Young Readers Group

345 Hudson Street New York, NY 10014

www.penguin.com/youngreaders

U.S. $16.99 | CAN $18.99

KIMBERLY BRUBAKER BRADLEYthe acclaimed author of Jefferson’s Sons9 7 8 0 8 0 3 7 4 0 8 1 5

978-0-8037-4081-55 1 6 9 9

pJACKET ART © 2015 BY JOSIE PORTILLO

Jacket design by Kristin LogsdonHand-lettering by Maggie Olson

Printed in the U.S.A.

TEN-YEAR-OLD ADA has never left her one-room apartment. Her mother is too humiliated by Ada’s twisted foot to let her outside. So when her little brother, Jamie, is shipped out of London to escape the war, Ada doesn’t waste a minute—

She sneaks out to join him.

So begins a new adventure for Ada, and for Susan Smith, the woman who is forced to take the two kids in. As Ada teaches herself to ride a pony, learns to read, and watches for German spies, she begins to trust Susan—and Susan begins to love Ada and Jamie. But in the end, will their bond be enough to hold them together through wartime? Or will Ada and her brother fall back into the cruel hands of their mother?

Set during one of the most explosive periods in world history, this amazing story is equal parts adventure and a moving tale of family, identity, and the fire of self-worth that can, when fed, burn brightly in all of us.

KIMBERLY BRUBAKER BRADLEY (www.kimberlybrubakerbradley.com), a longtime Anglophile, first became interested in World War II evacuees when her mother read Bedknobs and Broomsticks out loud at bedtime. Her historical fiction has garnered great acclaim: Jefferson’s Sons received four starred reviews, Ruthie’s Gift was a Publishers Weekly Flying Start, and For Freedom was an IRA Teachers’ Choice and Bank Street College Best Book of the Year. Ms. Bradley lives with her family in Bristol, Tennessee.

PRAISE FOR JEFFERSON’S SONS

★“A big, serious work of historical investigation and imagination; the tale has never before been told this well.”

—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

★ “[An] eye-opening and powerful novel.” —The Horn Book (starred review)

★ “Bradley’s fine characterization and cin-ematic prose breathe life into this tragic story.”

—School Library Journal (starred review)

BR

AD

LE

Y

DIAL

“In Ada’s small war lies our large hope

that love cannot, will not, be overcome. I read this novel

in two big gulps.”—GARY D. SCHMIDT, author of

National Book Award finalist Okay for Now

“A moving story with an authentic voice. Beautifully told.”—PATRICIA MACLACHLAN, author of

Newbery Medal winner Sarah, Plain and Tall

“An astounding novel. Will you cry and rejoice and hold your breath? Absolutely. Will you find the book as exciting,

wise, and profound as I did? Yes. This book is remarkable.”—KAREN CUSHMAN, author of

Newbery Medal winner The Midwife’s Apprentice

“I love Ada’s bold heart, keen wit, and amazingly fresh

point of view. Her story’s riveting. I was with her every step of the way.”

—SHEILA TURNAGE, author of Newbery Honor Three Times Lucky

Title: The War That Saved My Life 5.625 × 8.5 SPINE: 1.0625Editor: JG Designer: KL Pass; Final REV Page count: 320

Date: 9/29/14 9780803740815_WarThatSavedMyLife_JKREV.indd 1 9/29/14 12:56 PM

1

Chapter One

“Ada! Get back from that window!” Mam’s voice,

shouting. Mam’s arm, grabbing mine, yanking me so

I toppled off my chair and fell hard to the floor.

“I was only saying hello to Stephen White.” I knew

better than to talk back, but sometimes my mouth

was faster than my brain. I’d become a fighter, that

summer.

Mam smacked me. Hard. My head snapped back

against the chair leg and for a moment I saw stars.

“Don’t you be talkin’ to nobody!” Mam said. “I let

you look out that window out a’ the kindness of my

heart, but I’ll board it over if you go stickin’ your nose

out, much less talkin’ to anyone!”

“Jamie’s out there,” I mumbled.

“And why shouldn’t he be?” Mam said. “He ain’t a

cripple. Not like you.”

I clamped my lips over what I might have said next,

and shook my head to clear it. Then I saw the smear

FNL_WarThatSavedMyLife_9780803740815_TX.indd 1 8/19/14 12:17 PM

2

of blood on the floor. Oh, mercy. I hadn’t cleaned it all

up from this afternoon. If Mam saw it, she’d put two

and two together, fast. Then I’d be in the soup for

sure. I slid over until my bottom covered the blood-

stain, and I curled my bad foot beneath me.

“You’d better be making my tea,” Mam said. She

sat on the edge of the bed and peeled off her stock-

ings, wiggling her two good feet near my face. “I’m

off to work in a bit.”

“Yes, Mam.” I pushed my window chair sideways

to hide the blood. I crawled across the floor, keeping

my scabbed-over bad foot out of Mam’s line of sight.

I pulled myself onto our second chair, lit the gas ring,

and put the kettle on.

“Cut me some bread and dripping,” Mam said.

“Get some for your brother too.” She laughed. “And,

if there’s any left, you can throw it out the window.

See if Stephen White would like your dinner. How’d

you like that?”

I didn’t say anything. I cut two thick slices off the

bread and shoved the rest behind the sink. Jamie

wouldn’t come home until after Mam left anyhow,

and he’d always share whatever food there was with

me.

When the tea was ready Mam came to get her

mug. “I see that look in your eyes, my girl,” she said.


3

“Don’t start thinking you can cross me. You’re lucky

I put up with you as it is. You’ve no idea how much

worse things can be.”

I had poured myself a mug of tea too. I took a deep

swallow, and felt the hot liquid scald a trail clear down

to my gut. Mam wasn’t kidding. But then, neither

was I.

There are all kinds of wars.

This story I’m telling starts out four years ago, at

the beginning of the summer of 1939. England stood

on the edge of another Great War then, the war we’re

in the middle of now. Most people were afraid. I was

ten years old (though I didn’t know my age at the

time), and while I’d heard of Hitler—little bits and

pieces and swear words that floated from the lane to

my third-floor window—I wasn’t the least concerned

about him or any other war fought between nations.

You’d think from what I’ve already told you that I

was at war with my mother, but my first war, the one

I waged that June, was between my brother and me.

Jamie had a mop of dirt-brown hair, the eyes of an

angel, and the soul of an imp. Mam said he was six

years old, and would have to start school in the fall.

Unlike me, he had strong legs, and two sound feet on

the ends of them. He used them to run away from me.


4

I dreaded being alone.

Our flat was one room on the third floor above

the pub where Mam worked nights. In the mornings

Mam slept late, and it was my job to get Jamie some-

thing to eat and keep him quiet until she was ready

to wake up. Then Mam usually went out, to shop or

talk to women in the lane; sometimes she took Jamie

with her, but mostly not. In the evenings Mam went

to work, and I fed Jamie tea and sang to him and put

him to sleep, and I’d been doing all that for as long

as I could remember, from the days when Jamie still

wore diapers and was too small to use the pot.

We played games and sang songs and watched the

world out the window—the iceman and his cart,

the rag-and-bone man and his shaggy pony, the

men coming home from the docks in the evenings,

and the women hanging out wash and talking on the

stoops. The children of the lane skipping rope and

playing tag.

I could have gotten down the stairs, even then. I

could have crawled, or scooted on my bottom. I wasn’t

helpless. But the one time I did venture outdoors,

Mam found out, and beat me until my shoulders bled.

“You’re nobbut a disgrace!” she screamed. “A mon-

ster, with that ugly foot! You think I want the world

seeing my shame?” She threatened to board over my


5

window if I went downstairs again. That was always

her threat to me.

My right foot was small and twisted, so that the

bottom pointed skyward, all the toes in the air, and

what should have been the top touched the ground.

The ankle didn’t work right, of course, and it hurt

whenever I put weight on it, so for most of my life

I never did. I was good at crawling. I didn’t protest

staying in one room so long as it held both Jamie and

me. But as Jamie grew older he wanted to be with the

other children, playing in the street. “Why shouldn’t

he?” Mam said. “He’s normal enough.” To Jamie she

said, “You’re not like Ada. You can go wherever you

like.”

“He can’t,” I said. “He has to stay where I can see

him.”

At first he did, but then he made friends with a

gang of boys and went running out of sight all day.

He came home with stories about the docks on the

River Thames, where big ships unloaded cargo from

around the world. He told me about trains, and ware-

houses bigger than our whole block of flats. He’d seen

St. Mary’s, the church by whose bells I marked time.

As the summer days grew longer he stayed out later

and later, until he came home hours after Mam left.

He was gone all the time, and Mam didn’t care.


6

My room was a prison. I could hardly bear the heat

and the quiet and the emptiness.

I tried everything to make Jamie stay. I barred

the door so he couldn’t get out, but he was already

stronger than me. I begged and pleaded with Mam.

I threatened Jamie, and then one hot day I tied his

hands and feet while he was sleeping. I would make

him stay with me.

Jamie woke up. He didn’t scream or shout. He

thrashed once, and then he lay helpless, looking at me.

Tears slid down his cheeks.

I untied him as quickly as I could. I felt like a mon-

ster. He had a red mark on his wrist from where I’d

pulled the string too tight.

“I won’t do it again,” I said. “I promise. I’ll never

do that again.”

Still his tears flowed. I understood. In all my life

I’d never hurt Jamie. I’d never hit him, not once.

Now I’d become like Mam.

“I’ll stay inside,” he whispered.

“No,” I said. “No. You don’t need to. But have

some tea before you leave.” I gave him a mug, and a

piece of bread and dripping. It was just the two of us

that morning, Mam gone I don’t know where. I patted

Jamie’s head, and kissed the top of it, and sang him a

song, and did all I could to make him smile. “Pretty


7

soon you’ll be going to school anyhow,” I said, aston-

ished that I hadn’t fully realized this before. “You’ll

be gone all day then, but I’ll be okay. I’m going to fix

things so I’ll be okay.” I coaxed him into going out to

play, and I waved to him from the window.

Then I did what I should have done to start with.

I taught myself to walk.

If I could walk, maybe Mam wouldn’t be so ashamed

of me. Maybe we could disguise my crippled foot.

Maybe I could leave the room, and stay with Jamie,

or at least go to him if he needed me.

That’s what happened, though not the way I

thought it would. In the end it was the combination

of the two, the end of my little war against Jamie, and

the start of the big war, Hitler’s war, that set me free.


8

Chapter Two

I began that very day. I pulled myself up to the seat of

my chair, and I put both feet onto the floor. My good

left foot. My bad right one. I straightened my knees,

and, grasping the back of the chair, I stood.

I want you to understand what the problem was.

I could stand, of course. I could hop, one-footed, if

I wished to. But I was far faster on my hands and

knees, and our flat was so small that I didn’t bother

to stand straight very often. My leg muscles, particu-

larly in my right leg, weren’t used to it. My back felt

weak. But all that was secondary. If the only thing I’d

had to do was stand upright, I would have been fine.

To walk I had to put my bad foot to the ground. I

had to put all my weight on it, and pick my other foot

off the ground, and not fall down from my lack of

balance or from the searing pain.

I stood by the chair that first day, wobbling. I


9

slowly shifted some of my weight from my left foot to

my right. I gasped.

Maybe it wouldn’t have been so bad if I’d been

walking all along. Maybe the little curled-up bones in

my ankle would have been used to it. Maybe the thin

skin covering them would have been tougher.

Maybe. But I’d never know, and none of this stand-

ing business was getting me any closer to Jamie. I let

go of the chair. I swung my bad foot out. I pushed my

body forward. Pain stabbed my ankle like a knife. I

fell down.

Up. Grab the chair. Steady myself. Step forward.

Fall down. Up. Try again. Good foot forward first

this time. A quick gasp, a swinging of the bad foot,

and then—crash.

The skin on the bottom of my bad foot ripped. Blood

smeared across the floor. After a while, I couldn’t take

it anymore. I dropped to my knees, shaking, and I got

a rag and wiped up the mess.

That was the first day. The second day was worse.

The second day my good foot and leg hurt too. It was

hard to straighten my legs. I had bruises on my knees

from falling, and the sores on my bad foot hadn’t

healed. The second day all I did was stand, holding

the chair. I stood while I looked out my window. I


10

practiced moving my weight from one foot to the

other. Then I lay down on the bed and sobbed from

the hurt and from exhaustion.

I kept it secret, of course. I didn’t want Mam to

know until I was good at walking, and I didn’t trust

Jamie not to tell her. I suppose I could have shouted

the news down to the street, but what good would that

have done? I watched people out my window every

day, and sometimes I did speak to them, but while

they often waved, and even said, “Hello, Ada!” they

almost never really tried to speak to me.

Maybe Mam would smile at me. Maybe she’d say,

“Aren’t you clever, then?”

In my mind I went further. After a hard day, when I

was holding my leg on the bed and shaking from the

effort of not crying more, I thought of Mam taking

my hand to help me walk down the stairs. I thought

of her leading me out on the street, saying to every-

one, “This is Ada. This is my daughter. See, she’s not

so hopeless as we thought.”

She was my mother, after all.

I imagined helping with the shopping. I imagined

going to school.

“Tell me everything,” I said to Jamie, late at night.


11

I held him on my lap near the open window. “What

did you see today? What did you learn?”

“I went into a shop like you asked me,” Jamie said.

“Fruit shop. Fruit everywhere. Piled up on tables,

like.”

“What kind of fruit?”

“Oh—apples. And some like apples, but not quite.

And round things that were orange and shiny, and

some that were green—”

“You’ve got to learn the names of them,” I told

him.

“Can’t,” Jamie said. “When the shop man saw me

he chased me out. Said he didn’t need dirty beggars

stealin’ his fruit, and he ran me off with a broom.”

“Oh, Jamie. You’re not a dirty beggar.” We had

baths sometimes, when Mam got to disliking the way

we smelled. “And you wouldn’t steal.”

“’Course I would,” Jamie said. He put his hand

inside his shirt and pulled out one of the not-quite-

apples, lumpy and yellow and soft. It was a pear,

though we didn’t know it then. When we bit into it,

juice ran down our chins.

I’d never tasted anything so good.

Jamie swiped a tomato the next day, but the day

after that he got caught trying to take a chop from a

butcher’s shop. The butcher walloped him, right on


12

the street, and then marched him home to Mam and

told her off. Mam snatched Jamie by the neck and wal-

loped him herself. “You idiot! Stealin’ sweets is one

thing! What were you wanting with a chop?”

“Ada’s hungry,” Jamie sobbed.

I was hungry. Walking was so much work, I was

always hungry now. But it was the wrong thing to say,

and Jamie knew it. I saw his eyes widen, afraid.

“Ada! I should have known!” Mam wheeled toward

me. “Teaching your brother to steal for you? Worth-

less runt!” She backhanded me. I had been sitting on

my chair. Without thinking, I jumped up to dodge

the blow.

I was caught. I couldn’t take a step, not without

giving away my secret. But Mam stared at me with a

glittering eye. “Getting too big for your britches, ain’t

you?” she said. “Get down on your knees and get into

that cabinet.”

“No, Mam,” I said, sinking to the floor. “No.

Please.”

The cabinet was a cubby under the sink. The pipe

dripped sometimes, so the cabinet was always damp

and smelly. Worse, roaches lived there. I didn’t mind

roaches out in the open so much. I could smash them

with a piece of paper and throw their bodies out the

window. In the cabinet, in the dark, I couldn’t smash


13

them. They swarmed all over me. Once one crawled

into my ear.

“In you go,” Mam said, smiling.

“I’ll go,” Jamie said. “I nicked the chop.”

“Ada goes,” Mam said. She turned her slow smile

toward Jamie. “Ada spends the night in the cabinet,

any time I catch you stealin’ again.”

“Not the whole night,” I whispered, but of course

it was.

When things got really bad I could go away inside my

head. I’d always known how to do it. I could be any-

where, on my chair or in the cabinet, and I wouldn’t

be able to see anything or hear anything or even feel

anything. I would just be gone.

It was a good thing, but it didn’t happen fast

enough. The first few minutes in the cabinet were the

worst. And then, later on, my body started hurting

from being so cramped. I was bigger than I used to

be.

In the morning, when Mam let me out, I felt dazed

and sick. When I straightened, pain shot through me,

cramping pains and pins and needles down my legs

and arms. I lay on the floor. Mam looked down at

me. “Let that be a lesson to you,” she said. “Don’t be

getting above yourself, my girl.”


14

I knew Mam had guessed at least part of my secret.

I was getting stronger. She didn’t like it. As soon as

she went out I got to my feet, and I made myself walk

all the way across the room.

It was late August already. I knew it wouldn’t be

long before Jamie started school. I wasn’t as afraid of

Jamie leaving as I had been, but I was dreading being

alone so much with Mam. But that day Jamie came

home early, looking upset. “Billy White says all the

kids is leaving,” he said.

Billy White was Stephen White’s little brother, and

Jamie’s best friend.

Mam was getting ready for work. She leaned over

to tie her shoes, grunting as she sat back up. “So they

say.”

“What do you mean, leaving?” I asked.

“Leaving London,” Mam said, “on account of Hit-

ler, and his bombs.” She looked up, at Jamie, not me.

“What they say is that the city’s going to be bombed,

so all the kids ought to be sent to the country, out

of harm’s way. I hadn’t decided whether to send you.

Suppose I might. Cheaper, one less mouth to feed.”

“What bombs?” I asked. “What country?”

Mam ignored me.

Jamie slid onto a chair and swung his feet against

the rungs. He looked very small. “Billy says they’re


15

leaving on Friday.” That was two days from now.

“His mam’s buying him all new clothes.”

Mam said, “I ain’t got money for new clothes.”

“What about me?” My voice came out smaller than

I liked. “Am I going? What about me?”

Mam still didn’t look at me. “’Course not. They’re

sending kids to live with nice people. Who’d want

you? Nobody, that’s who. Nice people don’t want to

look at that foot.”

“I could stay with nasty people,” I said. “Wouldn’t

be any different than living here.”

I saw the slap coming, but didn’t duck fast enough.

“None of your sass,” she said. Her mouth twisted into

the smile that made my insides clench. “You can’t

leave. You never will. You’re stuck here, right here in

this room, bombs or no.”

Jamie’s face went pale. He opened his mouth to say

something, but I shook my head at him, hard, and he

closed it again. When Mam left he launched himself

into my arms. “Don’t worry,” I said, rocking him. I

didn’t feel frightened. I felt grateful, that I’d spent

my summer the way I had. “You find out where we

have to go and what time we have to be there,” I said.

“We’re leaving together, we are.”


2 3

Ugh, There’s only

Astrid Here. I told

you, only babies hang

out at the park.

Come on, let’s go

to the mall. I don’t

know why you

wanted to come

here anyway.

click

4 5

Dial Books for Young R

eaders an im

print of Penguin Group (US

A) LL

C

4 5

Better call

mall security,

you jerks!

AAAAAAAAGH!

OMG, I chipped

a nail!

6 7

Dedication

Copyright

DI AL BOOKS for young re aders

Published by the Penguin Group • Penguin Group (USA) LLC, 375 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014

USA | Canada | UK | Ireland | Australia | New Zealand | India | South Africa | China

penguin.com

A PENGUIN RANDOM HOUSE COMPANY

Copyright © 2015 by Victoria Jamieson

Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a

vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by

not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers

and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Jamieson, Victoria. • Roller girl / by Victoria Jamieson.

pages cm • Summary: “A graphic novel adventure about a girl who discovers roller derby right as she

and her best friend are growing apart”-Provided by publisher. • ISBN 978-0-8037-4016-7 (paperback)

1. Graphic novels. [1. Graphic novels. 2. Roller derby-Fiction. 3. Roller skating-Fiction.

4. Best friends-Fiction. 5. Friendship-Fiction.] I. Title.

PZ7.7.J36Ro 2015 741.5’973-dc23 2014011310

Manufactured in China on acid-free paper • 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Designed by Victoria Jamieson and Jason Henry

The artwork for this book was created with ink and colored digitally.

The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility

for author or third-party websites or their content.

6 7

sigh

Many thanks to skaters around the world who

let me borrow their derby names for some of my

characters. This book is dedicated to them, and to all the skaters, officials, volunteers, and fans who bring roller derby to life. I’m so proud

to be part of this incredible community.

8 9

. . .tonight, we are

having an Evening

of Cultural

Enlightenment!

This did not bode well for our

Friday night. We’d experienced one

or two of Mom’s ECEs before.

If you really want to know,

it all began back in fifth grade.

Back when Nicole and I were

still best friends.

Ok, you two.

In the car.

Nope, it’s a

surprise.

C’mon, Mom,

can’t you tell

us where we’re

going?

Then Mom uttered the words that never failed

to strike fear and dread into my heart. . .

11How it all began

8 9

Poetry readings. . .

the opera. . .

and the modern art gallery, to name

a few. And those were the GOOD trips.

HAHA

HA

HA

HA

!? ?

10 11

On the other hand, maybe tonight

was starting to shape up.

We got in a long line of strange-looking people.

Hey, are we

going to the

amusement park? Not exactly...

Mom, are you

selling us to

the circus?MRs. V., I’m

too young to

be a carnie!

Keep it up,

you two.

10 11

TICKETS, PLEASE.

WE WENT IN THIS HUGE BUILDING THAT

LOOKED LIKE AN AIRPLANE HANGAR.

Just as we sat down in the bleachers. . .

. . .the lights went out.

Hey, what IS this place?

I want to be the

tattooed lady.

No way-I

want to be the

Tattooed Lady!

You can be the

Bearded

Lady.

MOM, CAN I GET

A TATTOO? I WANT TO DYE

MY HAIR PINK!

CAN I GET A

NOSE RING?CAN I GET A

LIP RING?

12 13

Ladies and

gentlemen...

are you

ready for

some...

14 15

Whatever this is . . . it’s

a lot better than the

art museum!

Introducing your two teams . . . Please welcome

our visiting skaters, the Oregon City ROllergirls!

See? Your

old mom is

all right

from time

to time.

And of course, Portland’s hometown

heroes . . . the Rose City Rollers!

14 15

The emcee

announced

the players,

and they all

had crazy

names like . . .

They all looked really tough-sort of like the inmates

in that documentary about women’s prisons Mom made me

watch a few ECEs ago.

tattoosweird hair creepy

makeup

strange

outfits

SCALD EAGLE THE BLAST UNICORN

YOGA NABI SARI

SCRAPPY GO LU

CKY

ROARSHOCK TESS

16 17

Then the players lined up,

the refs blew a whistle . . .

and they were off!

At first I couldn’t tell what

was going on-just a bunch of

skating, hitting, and falling.

TWEET!

16 17

1 1 1 1 4=+ + +points

Mom, lemme see

your program!

I can’t

watch!

. . . “please .”

Mom’s program explained some of the rules.

Basically there is this

jammer, who wears a

star on her helmet.

She tries to pass the

blockers on the other

team. For every blocker she

passes, she gets a point.

Of course, the blockers don’t want

her to score points. That’s where all

the hitting and falling comes in.

Take that,

speedy!

18 19

Geez, Nicole . . . you can be

such a baby sometimes.

There was this one

jammer, Rainbow Bite. You

could always tell who

she was because she

wore rainbow socks.

She looked

like a

superhero.

Isn’t this the

best thing you’ve

ever seen?

Well, it’s

a little. . .

scary.

18 19

At halftime we asked Mom if we

could go sit on the floor by

ourselves. . . and she said yes!

This is how close we

were to the action:

us*

foam

barrier

skaters

* note that Nicole is happy in this drawing. This is known as

“artistic license.”

Maybe we’ll sit

next to some

cute boys!

You’re kinda

missing the

point, Nicole.

Awesome.

See, they’re

laughing and

having fun. . .

it’s a GAME!I guess

so. . .

20 21

Gasp! Gasp!Gasp!

Ooh, and Rainbow

Bite takes a BIG

hit in turn two!

Ladies and gentlemen, As we start the

second half, we’ve got Rainbow Bite on the

jammer line. She’s up against Illegally Blonde,

and these two are FIERCE competitors!

20 21

And with a wink and a smile, she’s back on her

skates and back in the game! And that, ladies

and gentlemen, is what I call . . .

. . . a true champion!

WINK

22 23

And then, before I knew

it. . .the game was over!

Five dollars

for a

pencil?!?

You’ve got

to be kidding

me!

And here, something special

for you ladies. On the house!

Whoa! A poster

of Rainbow Bite!

Why don’t you ask her to sign it? Look, she’s

right over there!

Mom even let us get

T-shirts from the gift shop!

Pink!

Black!

THIS WAS A REAL MIRACLE,

BECAUSE MOM USUALLY AVOIDS

GIFT SHOPS LIKE THE PLAGUE.

C’mon, it’s time

to go, weirdo!

Aack! No!

No way!

What?! No!

I can’t!

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