Rainbows & Fireworks by Susan Beth Pfeffer

Author:Susan Beth Pfeffer
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781497682733
Publisher: Open Road Media

CHAPTER SEVEN

When the cavalry came to rescue Meg, I was glad.

I’d spent those days getting to know Toby and Paul and others from Donnell’s Corners, and getting to know Meg as well. I’d always known her, of course, but this time I tried to learn things that I’d never learned before; redeeming features I’d chosen to ignore, interesting sidelights, amusing anecdotes, anything that might have passed my attention in the sixteen years we’d been sisters. And Meg tried to do the same with me, although a little less zealously. I was very open to things right then, and I guess Meg wasn’t, so she was less inquisitive. But she answered all my questions in our nightly talkathons. When we were little and liked each other a lot more, we used to talk ourselves to sleep. But around the time we both started wishing we had separate bedrooms, we stopped talking in bed. We read instead, or listened to the radio (or radios, since for our fourteenth birthday, Mom and Dad gave us each a transistor radio with earplugs so we could listen to whatever we wanted without bothering each other. It worked out very well) or just went to sleep. I did a lot of homework then, studied for tests I hadn’t gotten around to before, since I’d been busy practicing. Meg translated. We seldom talked.

But ever since deciding we ought to be friendlier, we indulged in nightly conversations. We swapped stories of Donnell’s Corners, and I passed on any information I had gotten about the socially prominent members of the junior and senior classes. Meg, in turn, told me about various teachers’ foibles. Meg has a way of learning things about teachers that nobody else has. I don’t know whether she eavesdrops, or if they confide in her, or if she makes it all up. But she has a way of knowing extremely personal details, like who’s pregnant, and who’s messing around with one of his students, and who used to belong to a communist front organization and got the job because he lied. Amazing things for a student to know. In a matter of weeks, Meg had learned all about the more scandalous involvements of the Donnell’s Corners’ teachers and she told me what she’d learned. I told nobody else, since that’s a good way to get everybody in trouble.

We talked about other things, too, ourselves mostly, and how we felt about things. We confided in each other, which may seem perfectly ordinary to other people but was quite something for us. We giggled for the first time in years. Mom even had to come in to tell us to quiet down; we were bothering her and Dad in their bedroom. She seemed pleased, though, when she scolded us. Once, Meg even cried. She didn’t smother her sobs in the pillow either (I told her later about how completely ineffective that was, and she didn’t seem the least bit surprised. I guess if she hadn’t wanted to bother me, she would have cried in the bathroom).

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