True Colors (8 page)

“She’s probably hidden them,” Hannah said.

I went and got the flashlight and searched every inch of the barn, but I didn’t find any kittens. I searched the tool-shed and garage, too.

“They may have died,” Hannah said. “She’s so small and thin she may not have had enough milk to feed them.”

That made me feel sad.

“I wish she’d let me pet her,” I said.

“Give her time,” Hannah said. “She has to learn to trust you.”

“How could someone just leave her?” I asked. It was the same question I wanted to ask the woman who’d left me in Hannah’s kettle ten and a half years ago.

“Some folks don’t think of anything but themselves,” Hannah said. “There’s lots of glundies in this world.”

Glundie
is another word for “fool.” So are
gowk, coof, dobbie
, and
tattie. Tattie
also means “potatoes,” and we had tatties and neeps many nights for supper. Neeps are turnips. I didn’t care for turnips, and neither did Nadine, but she loved saying
tatties
and
neeps
. Nadine loved Hannah’s Scottish words (“She’s even better than ‘It Pays to Increase Your Word Power,’ ” Nadine said), and she’d giggle every morning when, instead of calling us lazybones, Hannah would holler up the stairs, “Up, you two
snoofmadrunes!” I liked the Scottish words, too. Maybe it was because I didn’t have to spell them.

Thinking about those Scottish words gave me an idea. I’d been wondering what I’d give Nadine for her birthday (not having any money meant my presents always had to be homemade). Mrs. Tilton had said she needed a Scottish dictionary to understand me and Hannah; I’d make Nadine a dictionary of Scottish words!

chapter 10

It was just the four of us for Nadine’s birthday. “An all-girls party,” Mrs. Tilton said, and Nadine smiled, but it was her fake smile, and I knew she was upset that her dad wasn’t there. I knew that Keith was over in Korea, but I’d thought Mr. Tilton would at least show up. He’d never missed her birthday before.

Because Mr. Tilton and Keith weren’t there, Nadine’s birthday was more low-key than usual. Mrs. Tilton made pigs in a blanket for supper, and Hannah made vanilla ice cream. She used twelve eggs in the recipe, and cream from our cows. She added wild strawberries right at the end. Nadine seemed more like her old self as she and I took turns churning the ice cream, cranking until our arms ached, but we forgot all about the ache when we spooned the ice cream off the dasher. If there’s anything better than eating homemade strawberry ice cream with your
best friend on a hot summer night, I don’t know what it is.

“Let’s play charades,” Nadine said. We did radio shows (Nadine wanted us to do television shows, but since we didn’t have a television—no one did in Vermont—Hannah and I didn’t know any of those shows). For
Jack Armstrong
, first I pretended to jack up a car, and then I bent my arm and pointed to my muscle. Nadine did
The Shadow
by walking along and pointing to the ground behind her. Mrs. Tilton did
Queen for a Day
by doing a curtsy, and I thought we might die laughing when Hannah, trying to get us to say
Tarzan
, beat her chest with her fists and Mrs. Tilton yelled, “King Kong!”

Hannah suggested we do some movies (“Have you seen
The African Queen
yet?” Mrs. Tilton asked. “Bogart and Hepburn are wonderful together.” “No,” said Hannah, “I’ve been waiting for it to get here”), but Nadine was impatient to open her presents.

Nadine opened mine first. I was surprised how nervous I was when I handed it to her. I’d spent hours on it. Hannah’d had to help me with the spellings and definitions. I’d put in all my favorites. There was
grumpie
(“a pig”),
grumple
(“to feel with your fingers”—so I guess you could grumple your grumpie!),
paddock-pony
(“a tadpole”), and two dog ones:
snooker
(“someone who smells objects like a dog”) and
haisk
(“to make a noise like a dog when you’ve got something stuck in your throat”). And
shamble-shankit
(“having
crooked legs”) and
glyde
(“an old horse”—which meant Dolly was a shamble-shankit glyde!),
glysterie
(“a gusty storm”),
haimart
(“belonging to home”), and my most favorite of all,
chyrme
, which was hard to pronounce (actually, it sounded most like a cat coughing up a hairball), but I thought its definition was poetry: “the mournful sound made by birds when they’ve gathered together before a storm.”

Nadine didn’t even bother looking through it, just tossed the book onto the floor and reached for another gift.

“Nadine!” Mrs. Tilton exclaimed. “What do you say?”

“Thank you,” Nadine said, polite as pie, but she didn’t even look at me when she said it.

Mrs. Tilton scooped up the book and leafed through the pages.

“Oh, how charming, Blue!” she said. “Some of these words are just precious!” Which made me feel better, until Nadine opened the presents from her mom. First there was a View-Master.

I’d never heard of a View-Master, but Nadine knew all about it.

“The pictures are three-dimensional,” she said. She showed me how you slid the round paper discs into the viewer and pushed a little lever on the side to go on to another picture. There were discs of the Three Little Pigs, and Robin Hood, and some of the royal family (Nadine squealed when she saw those), but the ones I liked best
were of Yellowstone National Park and Yosemite, the Grand Tetons, and the Grand Canyon. As I clicked through the pictures, I felt like I was glimpsing a world I would never see for real. What would it be like to actually
see
the Grand Canyon or the giant redwoods? I thought the View-Master was just about the best present anybody could get for their birthday, until Mrs. Tilton handed Nadine an envelope.

Inside were plane tickets. To London. London, England. For the coronation!

“I know it’s not until next June,” Mrs. Tilton told Nadine. “But I couldn’t think of anything you’d like more.”

I’m sure my jaw dropped. Even Nadine was speechless at first. Then she screamed so loud I thought all the windows would shatter.

I wanted to take my hand-lettered, stapled, pathetic little book of Scottish words and slink home.

Nadine clutched the tickets to her chest and danced around the room.

“I’m going to the coronation!” she squealed. “I’m going to see the queen! Can you believe it?”

No, I couldn’t, but I smiled and tried to look happy for her.

“When we go through Buckingham Palace, maybe Daddy can arrange it so I could even
meet
the queen,” Nadine said. “I’ll have to practice my curtsy, and he’ll have to bow.”

Mrs. Tilton didn’t answer, and a pained expression came over her face. Nadine stopped twirling to stare at her.

“What’s wrong?” she asked.

“Nothing,” said Mrs. Tilton. “It’s just, well, Daddy won’t be able to go. It’ll be only the two of us.”

The joy melted off Nadine’s face, and I felt sorry for her. I knew what it was like to look forward to a trip and then have it pulled out from under you. But at least she was still
going
on the trip.

“Daddy’s not coming with us?” Nadine said.

“No,” said Mrs. Tilton.

“But … but it’s a year away,” Nadine said. “He could take vacation.”

“I’m afraid not,” Mrs. Tilton said. “It’s simply not possible, what with his work and all. But won’t it be fun, just you and me? Besides the coronation, we’ll go to Piccadilly Circus, and the Tower of London, and London Bridge. We’ll have a marvelous time, you’ll see.”

It sounded like a dream to me, and I would have traded places with Nadine right then and there, but Nadine sulked the rest of the evening. I couldn’t believe she was being so bratty. She was going to England for the coronation! What more did she want? I would have been excited about a trip to
New Hampshire
.

If I could get her to see she was being ridiculous, the evening didn’t have to be ruined. I waited until Hannah was in the kitchen, helping Mrs. Tilton wash the dishes, before punching Nadine lightly on the arm.

“I’ll trade places with you,” I said. “Do you know how lucky you are? For
my
last birthday, I got a box of crayons.”

Nadine shot me a look.

“You couldn’t possibly understand how I’m feeling,” she snapped. “You don’t even
have
a father.”

I was too shocked to say anything. I stared at her, open-mouthed.

How could she have said that to me, I wondered. I was her
best friend
, or at least I thought I was. I was sorry I’d wasted my time making her that book of Scottish words—she hadn’t even looked at it twice. Too bad I hadn’t taken the book back and just given her a bloody nose instead.

chapter 11

“You got awfully quiet back there,” Hannah said as we walked home. “You two girls have a fight or something?”

I shook my head. I was too embarrassed to tell her what Nadine had said.

Hannah wasn’t fooled.

“You know, Nadine’s at that age where she’s going through a lot of changes,” she said. “You’ll be going through it yourself in another year or so. You just have to be patient with her.”

I stared straight ahead. I didn’t care what Hannah said. No matter what, I couldn’t ever be as mean or thoughtless to Nadine as she had been to me.

“She’ll be starting junior high this fall, too,” Hannah said. “I’m sure that’s making her nervous.”

I hadn’t thought about that. But if that were true, why
hadn’t she told me she was nervous? Friends were supposed to tell each other things like that.

You haven’t told
her
about waiting for your mama, the little voice in my head said.

“Well,” Hannah said, “give it a day or two and I’m sure it’ll all blow over. ‘Least said, soonest mended,’ I always say.”

I figured Nadine would come over the next day and say she was sorry, but she didn’t. She didn’t come over the day after that, either. Who needed her anyway if she was going to be like that. I didn’t even
want
to see her, she’d been so mean. I had other things to keep me busy, like the cat.