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“Boys! They are
such a pain!” Amy Levine exclaimed,
shaking her head. Her luxuriant black hair whipped back and forth, as she tried
to clear away all thoughts of anything to do with boys. She wasn’t exactly
speaking to her six-year-old younger sister, who sat on her own bed, dressing a
doll. She was saying it to the whole world, to anyone who might be listening.
Some of the boys
in the neighborhood, who were about her age, had built a clubhouse, and marked
it clearly with a sign: ‘No girls allowed!’ Amy had looked at the sign, really
hoping they had spelled it wrong. After all, they were only
boys. Nobody expected them to spell words correctly. It must have taken all
of them working together to get it right. Maybe they asked one of their sisters
for help. Amy wanted to laugh as she made her private joke.
She didn’t hate
boys. She hated that they excluded her from their fun. She wanted to have fun
and be part of the crowd.
Instead, she was
alone.
Amy picked a piece
of darker blanket fuzz from her fluffy pink sweater. Their sign did not refer
to just any girls. Of that, she was certain.
They had aimed
that message straight at her, and she knew it.
They made no secret
of the fact that they didn’t want her around. They never wanted to talk to her.
They never wanted her to play their games. They always thought what she had to
say was boring. Why? Just because she didn’t talk constantly about cars
or planes or the army or those stupid video games of theirs!
Well, she had news
for them. “I don’t want to go into their dumb old clubhouse, anyway. They are
so juvenile and I am practically an adult. I wouldn’t go in there if they paid
me fifty Loonies!” She was close to tears. She didn’t want her younger sister
to see her cry just because some other kids didn’t want to play with her. At
least she had her pretend friends: Patrixia, Nivek, and William. They really
would be best friends forever. They would never leave her. If only they
were real.
“Why do you care?”
her younger sister, Lois, asked. She was trying to button the dress-pants on
one of her dolls. “You won’t have to worry about them much longer, anyway. You
are going away and I get to have my own room. I will get to use the computer,
and I can go to Barbie-dot-com anytime I want to. I am going to sit all my Bratz
dolls over there, and my …”
Amy stared at her
red-haired little sister blankly for a few seconds. “Huh? What are you
jabbering about now, squirt?” Was that red hair a recessive gene? Grandmother
Rose said she had ‘a few red hairs’ in her head when she was younger.
“Your new school,
of course,” said Lois, as though she didn’t know why Amy couldn’t understand.
“What new school?
We go to this school until the eighth grade. I’m just finishing the sixth. I
have two more years before I change schools. You aren’t making any sense.” She
almost added, ‘as usual’ but didn’t.
“Don’t you know?” asked
the six year old, trying to sound superior. “Mommy and Daddy are going to send
you away to a new school that is a long ways from here. It’s in another country
on top of a mountain!”
“In your dreams,”
Amy remarked, as sarcastically as she dared without actually starting a fight
with her sister. Amy didn’t want to fight because Lois had a nasty habit of
tattling on her. That would bring Mommy or Daddy into it. That was not a good
idea. At least not when she was on the wrong end of it.
“Yes, I dreamed
it! So what? I know it is going to happen! It
was very real!” Why did little sisters have to
be such pains? She could be almost as much of an annoyance as those boys. Oh,
no! She’d thought about boys again, and she was trying so hard not to do that.
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