Real Girls Don't Rust by Jennifer Carson

Author:Jennifer Carson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Real Girls Don’t Rust
ISBN: 9781937053871
Publisher: Spencer Hill Press
Published: 2013-11-22T16:00:00+00:00

“Give it up, girl! Only room for one of us to be great ‘round here!” Silas’s voice faded into the night as she grabbed a water pail that always sat at the ready, flinging it on the flames.

Her life’s work was going up as smoke into the night sky. Everything she’d been working on for the past five years. The project that had been nearing completion, hoping to show at the World’s Fair in one year’s time, sat smoldering and melting. Not only that, she thought, but what would Mr. and Mrs. Martinbok say? They’d taken a chance on her. They’d let a single young woman move into their ground floor apartment and turn the back room into a workshop. Of course, she’d fixed anything that had gears, cogs, or ran on steam free of charge for them and the other tenants. But that would hardly matter now, with people screaming and running out to the street, and their homes going up in smoke. She grabbed the only things that really mattered—a small box of mementos and Zedock the mechanical bulldog. Of course, that cursed night she’d not wound Zedock. He had sat stone silent as Silas Skink skulked around her workshop and torched their home. Oh, how she rued that day.

Over the sounds of falling timbers and small explosions, the fire alarm box had been activated; soon one of the neighborhood’s fire engines would arrive, along with questions. Ellie backed away across the street, shielding her eyes from the heat and light with one arm and cradling Zedock under the other. Angry voices surrounded her, but she couldn’t focus. Instead, she sank to the ground and buried her face in her knees. Mr. Clarence from the apartment above hers spit daggers as he ran toward her. “Aye girl, what have ye done? I knew you weren’t nothin’ but trouble from the day you moved in!”

After that, the Martinboks asked her to leave, and no one in the area would rent to the young girl who spent too much time in a workshop and not enough time being a proper young woman and settling down to marriage. What was she going to do now? The Columbian Exposition was a year away. For two years, she’d spent time on the weekends walking down to 56th Street and the lakefront to the construction area, watching as the land was sculpted before her eyes. Ellie felt it in her bones that she would be a part of the World’s Fair. She would find a place in the machinery building alongside her brightest male counterparts. Hopefully she would become an apprentice to one of them. After the fire, however, it seemed like someone else’s life she’d been dreaming about.

Therefore, it seemed almost serendipitous when a package arrived on the day Ellie was picking through the ashes to see if there was anything she could salvage.

“Ellie Cole?”

Ellie ignored the man’s voice behind her; she continued bending and picking through the black tangled mess.

“’Scuse me, miss, but I’ve got a package for a Miss Ellie Cole.

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