True Colors (4 page)

If the Wright brothers made me see red, with Nadine I was green with envy.

“Thou shalt not covet” was one of the commandments we’d learned in church, but it didn’t mean anything to me until Hannah told me
covet
meant “to envy.” Yes, I was guilty of that, at least sometimes, but I didn’t want Nadine’s
whole
life, just parts of it.

I couldn’t remember a time when I
hadn’t
known Nadine, and even though I only saw her in the summer, she was my best friend. Partly, that was because there weren’t any other girls my age in school, and partly, it was because Nadine and I grew up together. Nadine was a year and a half older than me, but the Tiltons had been coming up ever since Nadine and I were babies, so we’d played together all our lives. Every summer, we just picked up where we’d left off, and every summer, Nadine reminded
me that there was a whole other world out there beyond northern Vermont. She’d lived in Boston and New York, and now she lived near Washington, D.C. Nadine knew all about skyscrapers and subways and streetlights, things I’d only heard of. She’d visited the White House and the Capitol and the Washington and Lincoln monuments, and she had been to the Smithsonian about a zillion times, where she’d seen Orville and Wilbur Wright’s plane, Charles Lindbergh’s
Spirit of St. Louis
, and a plane like the one Amelia Earhart had been flying when she vanished. (I loved Amelia Earhart. She’d disappeared almost four and a half years before I was born, but even so, sometimes I dreamed that Amelia was my real mama and had left me before she headed off on her round-the-world flight.) Someday I wanted to fly round the world. Nadine had flown lots of places, like Paris and Rome. She’d even been to Hawaii!

Hannah said Nadine was spoiled. I wished I could be spoiled, too.

The farthest I’d ever been from home was when Hannah and I took the train up to Newport to Lake Memphremagog and I fell asleep
thinking
I’d seen the ocean.

Nadine went to a fancy school with hundreds of kids.

I went to Mud Island School, a one-room schoolhouse. There were only nineteen kids in the whole school, first through eighth grades. When classes started up in September, I’d be the only girl in fifth grade.

Nadine had after-school classes in ballet, piano, and something called elocution.

My after-school classes were milking, collecting eggs, filling the woodbox behind the stove, and shoveling snow.

I’d shown the school to Nadine one day as we were riding Dolly past and doing circus tricks (well,
I
was doing circus tricks—standing up on Dolly’s back and then somersaulting off—but Nadine said I was just being dangerous). Nadine much preferred to pretend we were in the movie
National Velvet
(with Nadine as Elizabeth Taylor, of course). Nadine even looked a little like Elizabeth Taylor, but Dolly didn’t look anything like her racehorse, Velvet.

Nadine couldn’t get over how small the school was.

“It only has one room!” she exclaimed.

“I told you it’s a
one-room
schoolhouse,” I said.

“I know, but I didn’t think you meant it,” Nadine said. “Where do you go when you get sent to the principal’s office?”

“We don’t have a principal,” I told her. “It’s just Miss Paisley.”

“Where do you go to the bathroom?” she wanted to know, so I led her to the outhouse behind the school.

Nadine’s mouth dropped open.

“You have to go in there?” she whispered. “How positively provincial!”

Nadine was always throwing out big words I didn’t know. She was twelve going on twenty, as Hannah liked to
say. She was book-smart, but Nadine didn’t know the first thing about making maple syrup (she couldn’t even tell the difference between a red maple and a sugar maple), or how to milk a cow (she was too afraid of them to even
try
), or the difference between a Duchess apple and a Yellow Transparent. Nadine actually thought haying was
fun
, but that was only because she could go home when she was tired and didn’t have to stick with it till it was all done.

Our rooms were as different as could be, too. Walking into Nadine’s room was like being swept up into a swirl of cotton candy. Everything was pink—from the walls to her frilly bed to her closet filled with even frillier clothes—and her shelves were lined with dolls and Nancy Drew books. My room was like the outdoors: blue walls, a green braided rug, and shelves filled with birds’ nests and rocks and my baseball card collection. I had a closet, but most of the time, my clothes were scattered around on the floor.

But as different as Nadine and I were, we had things in common too. We both liked movies and animals and being outdoors. S’mores and ice cream and ghost stories. Shooting stars and fireflies.

And Shadow Lake. Hardly a day went by that we didn’t spend part of it either on or in the water: paddling the old canoe along the shoreline, fishing (though I had to put the worm on her hook and take off any fish she caught), or swimming (even though Nadine proclaimed the water to be “like ice” every time). We’d cannonball off the raft and play
leapfrog and Marco Polo in the water until our skin was shriveled and our lips were blue. Nadine was a better swimmer than I was, because she’d had swimming lessons, in a pool, but I could hold my breath underwater a lot longer than she could, one reason being that Nadine hardly ever put her head underwater.

“You never know what’s under there,” she said, meaning fish, frogs, and crayfish. Nadine yelped every time anything so much as a minnow swam past her legs.

Nadine was right about the water being cold, too. She’d inch into the water, a step at a time, squealing like a pig, but I just dove in. Better to get it over quick.

That’s how Nadine’s older brother, Keith, swam, too. He’d barrel into the water, splashing us, which only made Nadine squeal louder.

“I’m telling Mom,” Nadine shouted.

“Oh, for crying out loud, it’s just water,” Keith said. “C’mon, Blue, I’ll race you to the raft.”

I liked feeling I was part of Nadine’s family, even if it was just for the summer. I especially loved the nights when I got to sleep over. Mr. Tilton would build us a campfire by the lake, and Nadine and I roasted marshmallows for s’mores and watched for shooting stars zipping across the sky. We lay tucked into musty army sleeping bags, slathered with bug repellent, whispering and giggling and telling ghost stories to each other until we were both too scared to sleep. One night, while Nadine was telling the story about
the escaped murderer with a hook for an arm, Keith snuck up on us, and just as Nadine got to the part where the woman hears the
scrape, scrape, scrape
of the hook on the roof of the car, Keith tapped both of us on the shoulders. Nadine screamed so loud I thought they’d hear her in Canada, and I almost peed my pants. It was a long time before we forgave Keith, and an even longer time before we dared tell ghost stories again. Nadine was forever saying how she
wished
she were an only child, but I often wondered what it would be like to have a brother like Keith. He was tall and handsome, and told even scarier ghost stories than Nadine.

So I rode down the Tilton driveway, my stomach tumbling with excitement, and looking forward to a summer of swimming, picnics, camping out, baseball, and tons of talking and laughing with my best friend.

If I’d known how the summer was really going to turn out, I would have wheeled Dolly around and galloped in the other direction.

chapter 5

Mrs. Tilton and Nadine were just finishing supper when I arrived. Right away, I knew things were different.

For one, I hardly recognized Nadine; not only had she shot up about a foot, but she’d done something funny with her hair. She’d always had a ponytail; now she looked like she had a Pekingese perched on her head. Second, Nadine didn’t squeal and hug me the way she always did. Third, she and Mrs. Tilton were the only ones at the table.

Mr. Tilton wouldn’t be here for the summer, Mrs. Tilton said, what with the war and work he had to do for the government. Keith wouldn’t be coming up, either. He’d joined the army and was over fighting in Korea.

I could hardly imagine a summer without both of them, but I tried not to show how disappointed I was. It wouldn’t be the same without Keith telling ghost stories, or scaring
us, or racing me to the raft, but at least Nadine and I would have a good time together.

“Sit down and join us,” Mrs. Tilton said. “You must be starved.”

“Yes, ma’am,” I said. “Feels like my belly button’s trying to shake hands with my backbone.”

Mrs. Tilton laughed and shook her head.

“You Vermonters have such quaint expressions,” she said. I didn’t know what
quaint
meant, but I just smiled and sat down while Mrs. Tilton fixed a plate for me.

“I hope you like chicken divan,” she said.

I hoped I did, too. Mrs. Tilton served a lot of food I’d never even heard of, things like artichokes and Roquefort cheese and eggplant Parmesan. Nadine swore they even ate snails, but thank goodness Mrs. Tilton had never put any of those in front of me.

Mrs. Tilton wasn’t like anybody I’d ever seen in real life. She was more like a movie star, tall and willowy and glamorous, like Lana Turner, and she talked with a French accent. She painted her fingernails and wore makeup, even during the week! She wore clothes that no one around here wore, like scarves (not wool ones, either) and pants that weren’t overalls but were made out of some whispery fabric that shimmered when she moved.

“Not very practical,” Hannah’d say, and I’d nod. They weren’t practical at all, and that’s what I loved about them.
All my clothes were either handmade or hand-me-downs, stained and mended, and I always bit my lip when I saw Nadine and Mrs. Tilton wearing matching mother-daughter outfits.

Nadine seemed to fit right in at our house, but I always felt embarrassed to have Mrs. Tilton over, seeing our shabby furniture, the worn linoleum on the kitchen floor, and the peeling wallpaper, and I felt uncomfortable having her eat with us. Hannah was a good cook, but she made things like tuna pea wiggle, dried beef gravy, and shepherd’s pie (I just couldn’t see Mrs. Tilton eating tuna pea wiggle, on crackers, off a chipped plate), and Hannah didn’t get all worked up if there happened to be a hair in the mashed potatoes (“Just pick it out, it won’t kill you,” Hannah’d say). Seeing Mrs. Tilton and Hannah side by side was like sitting a sleek, shiny barn swallow next to a hen. Nadine complained about her family, but I didn’t see what she had to complain about. To have a mother like that, and a dad,
and
a brother … some people are just plain lucky.

I dug into the chicken divan. Mrs. Tilton wasn’t the cook Hannah was (though you knew you’d never find a hair in your food, either), but it tasted good just the same. I drank three glasses of water too (at home, Hannah and I always drank milk, but I felt funny asking Mrs. Tilton for milk instead of water).

“My goodness, you’re thirsty,” Mrs. Tilton said, filling my glass again.

I nodded.

“I feel completely rizzared,” I said.

She stopped pouring.

“Rizzared?” she said.

“It means ‘all dried up’—you know, like a raisin,” I said.

Mrs. Tilton smiled.

“I’ll have to tell Keith that, in my next letter,” she said.

Her mentioning Keith reminded me how strange it seemed not to have Mr. Tilton and Keith eating with us. That’s one of the things I’d always loved about being at Nadine’s, all of us eating together, Mr. and Mrs. Tilton talking about politics, or an art exhibit they wanted to see, or places I’d never heard of, like Naples and Machu Picchu, and Keith would be cracking us up with knock-knock jokes. At home, meals were awfully quiet with just me and Hannah. Mrs. Tilton seemed quieter than usual, too, but it was probably because she was worried about Keith.

Mrs. Tilton wasn’t the only one being quiet. I kept glancing at Nadine, wondering why she wasn’t talking a mile a minute, like usual.

“A lot of deliveries today?” Mrs. Tilton asked.

I nodded, and swallowed quick so’s I wouldn’t have to talk with my mouth full.