The Daring Game by Kit Pearson

Author:Kit Pearson [Pearson, Kit]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: PENGUIN GROUP (CANADA)
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

11

Solitary Saturday

E liza began to feel a leaden pride in the way she managed to shove her homesickness deep inside her. Saturdays were the most difficult days. Uncle Adrian looked so much like her father that she felt a pang every time she looked at him. And Aunt Susan was so fussy, it made her long for her easygoing mother all the more.

Every Sunday she had to struggle with herself before writing to her parents. She yearned so badly to pour out her misery to them that she forced herself, instead, to write long cheerful accounts about every detail of school life.

She discovered a trick to keep the awfulness from rising: Each time she felt it she made herself contemplate starting a new school somewhere in Toronto. This was so horrifying an alternative that it pushed the longing for her family away for a while. Gradually she became resigned to carrying the heaviness around inside her, like an unwelcome guest who wasn’t going to leave. And, as the half-way point in the term approached, it didn’t seem so interminably long until she could return to Toronto for Easter.

By contrast, Helen was becoming more high-spirited every day. Giddy with energy, she ran everywhere, knocking things over and earning exasperated scoldings from the matrons, which she shrugged off carelessly. Behind her glasses her eyes glittered with charged excitement. It was difficult to see what she could find so stimulating about these dull days, but her exuberance cheered up Eliza.

The last dare had cemented their friendship. The two of them spent much of their free time, when they could get out of games in the gym, in the cape cupboard by the front door: a perfect hiding place Helen had discovered two years ago. “No one else knows about this,” she confided. “Not even Linoleum—she’d just tell everyone.”

Huddled at the end of the narrow cupboard, they were totally concealed. Even if someone opened the door, it was too dark to notice them, and they’d strung an extra cape from one wall to the other to make sure. The space behind it was as snug as the inside of a tent. They sat on the dusty floor and pursued the endless topic of everyone else at school.

Helen did most of the talking, and Eliza was glad to be distracted from her depression by the other girl’s stories. “We really fooled Fidget,” she said with satisfaction one day. “She always sits on the edge of her desk with her feet dangling in the wastepaper basket. Nancy put an alarm clock in it and Fidget’s foot set it off! She was furious! But she didn’t know who’d done it, so she just yelled at us for a while and gave us extra homework.”

Eliza shuddered. Mrs. Fitch’s tirades were famous and she felt lucky to have Miss Clark as a homeroom teacher. “Does she still pick on you?” she asked Helen.

“Not as much. Although she really blew up at me when we had to write something about Churchill.

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