Don't You Know There's a War On? by Avi

Author:Avi
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3, mobi
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2015-11-27T05:00:00+00:00

PART TWO

THURSDAY, MARCH 25, 1943

Eighth Army Artillery Smashes

Nazi Tank Waves Without Yielding.

U.S. Wounded Stick to Guns to Beat

Off German Thrusts.

Ration Points Set for Meat,

Canned Fish, Fat, Cheese.

Director of the Office of

War Information Reveals

U-boat Toll in Recent Convoys.

24

OKAY, NEXT DAY, Thursday, plenty of stuff happened.

First off, even though I walked with Denny to school, I still didn’t tell him what happened the night before. He never asked. The truth was, I was keeping it to myself. I didn’t want to share.

After checking headlines at Teophilo’s, Denny and me talked about the war. What was going on in North Africa. Where his father was. The Pacific news. And my father, wherever he was, dodging Nazi U-boats.

In school I kept watching to see if Miss Gossim would act different to me. She didn’t, except once. Sort of. It was at family news time. Gladys Halflinger announced to the class that her mother was expecting. When she did, I thought Miss Gossim took a quick look over at me. Maybe I was only wishing it.

Then, it being Thursday, we did war stamps.

War stamps went like this: The U.S. government had to buy all kinds of stuff for our soldiers. Guns, ammo, airplanes, ships, tanks. So what did they do? They borrowed money from people by getting them to buy war bonds. The thing was, they borrowed from kids too by getting us to buy war stamps.

When you bought a stamp, you pasted it in a special book. Fill your book and you’d get a twenty-five-dollar war bond. The government promised to give the money back with extra. Soon as peace came. Most of us bought only one or two stamps a week, so it took a long time to fill a book. Almost as long as it took to win the war.

You could buy stamps for ten cents or twenty-five cents. I liked the ten centers best. They were red with a picture of a minuteman on them.

Thursday, Billy Wiggins was war-stamp monitor. If you were war-stamp monitor, you stood in front of the class and made a speech about why it was a good thing to buy stamps and support our boys in the war. Then we kids would line up. As Miss Gossim watched, we’d buy stamps from the monitor. Stick them in our books.

That time, Billy made a speech about how bad Hitler was. Nothing I didn’t know. Then, as the kids paid their coins, making a little pile on Miss Gossim’s desk, I noticed she was looking at the money. Looking upset, actually. Then I remembered her saying how little money she had, being a teacher and all.

I was thinking, Holy moley, how am I going to help her? I mean, she only had a couple of days left. Maybe she had a plan for her life, but I didn’t. It was what the movie serials—like in Dick Tracy Against Crime Inc.—called “a desperate situation.” If something didn’t happen, there wasn’t going to be a next week. It was gonna be “The End.

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