Little Women and Me (31 page)

Yeah, shaking her head angrily at an umbrella—that was sure to solve all our problems!

Still wearing her goofy look, Meg drifted out of the room. Jo took off after Meg and I tiptoed after Jo.

Well, I didn’t want to miss anything that might turn out to be big excitement, did I?

The three of us wound up in the front room.

“I wish you’d just get it over with,” Jo told Meg. Meanwhile, I took up my position as a fly on the wall. “I hate waiting for things. Just do it.”

“I can’t,” Meg said. “It’s not proper for me to speak to him about it before he brings it up first. And of course now he won’t bring it up since Papa already told him I am too young.”

It was obvious from the way she said it that Meg didn’t think she was too young.

But seriously, how crazy were these Victorian girls! Meg couldn’t talk about something to a guy unless he raised the subject first?

I actually agreed with Papa that Meg was too young to be thinking about getting married, even if that seemed to be all there was to it for these crazy Victorians: Like someone? Marry the person! Me, I couldn’t imagine getting married at seventeen. I remembered reading an article once that said people born in the twenty-first century could expect to live as much as one hundred to one hundred and fifty years. So imagine being married at seventeen—you could wind up married to the same person for eight-three to one hundred and thirty-three years! Of course, the Victorians did die a lot sooner. Everyone knew that. But wait a second. Now that I lived here, did that mean
I
would die a lot sooner?

“I’ll tell you what I’d say to him if I could.” Meg’s words cut into my thoughts. “That way, someday when you are in similar circumstances, you will know how to conduct yourself.”

“HA!” Jo said. “I will never be in similar circumstances!”

HA! Didn’t I know it! With her Peter Pan attitude, she really wouldn’t. If Jo had her way, she’d probably spend her entire life span writing bad plays and playing dress-up to act in those plays.

But before Meg could get very far into her speech, there was a knock at the door and then the man himself was among us.

“I came for the umbrella I accidentally left behind yesterday,” Mr. Brooke practically stammered. “I came to see how your father is doing.”

Well, which one is it?
I thought.

I nearly snorted out loud but kept the snort to myself, not wanting to call attention to my presence. Seriously. We all knew why he’d really come over: to see Meg.

Not that that pleased Jo, who flounced off to find the umbrella and Papa.

“Margaret,” he said when Jo was gone.

Who was Margaret?

Then I realized. He was talking to Meg.

The blush on her face told me this was the first time he’d called her anything other than Miss March.

As I stood there in my secret corner, he confessed his love to her, asking if she thought that in time she might learn to love him.

Use a girl’s first name for the first time and immediately confess your love? Sure, why not. That made sense.

He said he’d wait for her, which I admit did seem incredibly romantic. Meg looked like she thought so too, but then he blew it all by saying he’d been good at teaching her German and that he thought it would be even easier to teach her to love him.

I don’t think his self-confidence impressed Meg, who began playing games with him. She even told him that she wanted him to go away. He seemed just on the verge of doing that, hat in
discouraged hand, when there came a pounding on the door and Aunt March shouted, “Mar-ga-REET!”

So of course Mr. Brooke did what any self-respecting grown man would do at the sound of Aunt March’s voice: he ducked into the nearest closet, pulling the door shut behind him. I can’t say I blamed him. As for me, I tried to disappear even farther into the floral wallpaper.

“I’m looking for my nephew!” Aunt March announced, entering.

Her nephew? It took me a moment to realize she meant Papa. But I always assumed they were brother and sister!

“I’ll get him,” Meg offered, moving to leave the room.

“Actually,” Aunt March said, “I wanted to talk to you first. It has come to my attention that an unfortunate …
association
has sprung up between you and that man employed by your neighbors. I wish it to stop. In fact, if it does not stop, if you persist in marrying this man, you will not get a single penny from me when I die. Not one.”

Five minutes ago, Meg had been ready to send Mr. Brooke packing. Now her normally calm features became enraged and she started to go off on Aunt March. Well, good-bye, Dr. Jekyll, and hello, Mr. Hyde.

Poor Aunt March. Even I could have told her that her plan would backfire. If she didn’t want Meg to marry Mr. Brooke, she should have told Meg she
did
want her to marry him!

“Fine,” Aunt March said, changing tack. “But you must realize, I am only trying to help. And you must further realize that, as the oldest daughter, it is your duty to marry a rich man so that you can help your family.”

What?

I had to put my hand over my mouth in order to stifle the outrage that was dying to pop out.

Aunt March was a lunatic! People should marry the person they wanted. Well, unless the person they wanted was an ax murderer or something. But to marry just for money in order to help the family? What did she think this was, ancient history?

Oh, right. It was.

But again, Meg seemed to have no trouble expressing her outrage.

“This man has nothing,” Aunt March persisted. “No money, no position in society, no immediate prospects for changing either circumstance. Surely you must see that.”

Well, when she put it like that …

“He’s marrying you for
my money
!” Aunt March finally cried when all else had failed.

As far as Meg was concerned, that was the last straw. In fact, she came awfully close to using the word
love
to describe what she and Mr. Brooke shared.

It was enough for Aunt March, though, who began her tromp through the room after telling Meg she washed her hands of her.

She paused at the door, turned. Putting her lorgnette to one eye, her gaze swept the room until it at last settled on me.

“E-mi-LY! What are you doing just standing there like a bit of wallpaper? Get over here at once and open this door for me.”

My presence had been finally exposed, but once Aunt March was gone and Mr. Brooke had come out of the closet, I had as good as gone back to being wallpaper as they tentatively approached each other as though really seeing each other for the first time.

“Margaret.”

“John.”

Use each other’s names for the first time one moment and the next they’re engaged?

Yep. Talk about your crazy Victorians!

It was decided that they would marry in three years’ time.

Everyone approved of the plan. Everyone except for Jo, of course, and Aunt March.

Laurie, Jo, and I were all gathered in one corner. Laurie was there to comfort Jo, and I was there because I was nosy, plus I didn’t want to leave them alone together.

“It’ll be fine, Jo,” Laurie said. “We’ll still have fun when Meg is gone. Why, I’ll be done with college before you know it and then we can go abroad together.”

Wait a second here. He’d canceled our Washington trip, but now he was talking about the two of
them
going
abroad
?

“You don’t understand,” Jo said.

“Maybe he doesn’t,” I cut in, tired of Jo’s attempts to hold Meg back, “but I do.”

“
You
?” Jo looked shocked at the very idea.

“Yes, me,” I said, trying not to feel offended. “Look, I’ll be losing a sister too when she goes.” But would I really? I wouldn’t be here still in three years … would I? I shook the idea off, continued. “You can’t go on like this, Jo. If you really care for Meg—”

“Of course I do!” came the outraged interruption.

“Then you have to let her live the life
she
wants to live, not the life
you
want her to live. If you try to hold her back, you’ll only push her away. Who knows? You may even lose her.”

“Lose her?”

Laurie and Jo both gaped at me, shocked. If I could have, I
would have gaped at myself. Where had
that
bit of wisdom come from?

Apparently I wasn’t done yet, though, because when I opened my mouth again, the following words came out:

“If you love something, set it free. If it comes back, it’s yours forever. If it doesn’t, it never really was.”

Jo and Laurie ate it up. It was like I was the Dalai Lama or something.

Seriously. These people were made for Hallmark greeting cards.

Really?
Really?
Three years? Meg and John were supposed to marry in
three years
?

But that made no sense to me. I could have sworn that in the original book they got married not long after being engaged. So how was it possible that—

Twenty-Four

The three years that have passed have brought but few changes to the quiet family.

Three years had passed? Whoa! How the
heck
did that happen? It was like being dropped into this world all over again.

I knew it was three years later because just a few moments before, the others had burst into the parlor where I was sitting and shouted, “Happy birthday!”

“It’s my birthday again already?” I said. I couldn’t believe it. How had a year passed with me missing it? “I’m sixteen now?”

“Silly Emily.” Beth laughed. “You’re eighteen now. You know that.”

Eighteen
. That wasn’t possible! I hurried to the first reflective surface I could find, studied my image in it, saw Beth was right: I was taller now, leaner. I looked more like a young woman than a teenage girl. I looked around me. The others, except for Beth,
who still looked the same, were visibly older too. Meg looked more proper than ever. Jo, whose hair had been cropped short the last time I saw her, now had hair cascading down her back once more. As for Amy, she looked downright sophisticated. She must be sixteen now. If she lived in my era, she’d be getting her license soon, probably tooling around town in a sports car before long. Amy was definitely the sort of girl who’d be given a sports car as a present on her sixteenth birthday. Not that I was jealous or anything.

Eighteen
.

I’d been here four years and somehow I’d missed three of them.

Go with the flow, Emily
, I told myself in an effort to calm my anxiety,
just go with the flow
.

Really, I’d been living in Crazy Town for so long now, what was one more stop on the road?

Before long the others tired of celebrating me and said it was time to head over to Dovecote. I had no idea what Dovecote was, but I didn’t let on, following along with the other girls and Marmee.

Dovecote turned out to be a small brown house. I wouldn’t have thought a brown house could be adorable, but this one was, the interior decorated so cozy it was as though the owners had been living there for years. By remaining quiet and simply listening in on the conversations of the others, I quickly figured that Mr. Brooke—well, John now, as the others called him—had prepared this house for Meg. Were they married then already? So many things I didn’t know—talk about story whiplash!