First Papers by Laura Z. Hobson Read Free Book Online

around her stood the whole family and their best friends, watching her grief, saying, “Poor child, the youngest, his favorite one.”
    Fee’s throat lumped and she sat up. Leaning across to the other bed she whispered, “Franny, are you awake?” There was no answer, and after a moment, she lay down again and fell asleep.
    Suddenly, that afternoon, the sun grew hot and in a day or two the whole hill was green. Outside the Ivarin house, on the three slender maples, twigs and branches swelled and thickened with pale-yellow buds; in the back yard the two fruit trees took on a paler pink. Along the sides of the house and the front porch, lilies of the valley looked out from green sheaths and the Rose of Sharon bushes burst into young leaf.
    Walking home from school with Trudy Loheim, Fee swung her books by their leather strap and slung her winter coat over her left shoulder as Trudy had done. It was Friday afternoon and on Fridays they were allowed to make fudge, taking turns at each other’s houses.
    This was Fee’s turn and she was glad. It made her happy to be going home with her best friend in such warm and sunny weather, school over for the week, and somehow the sudden feel of Easter vacation just ahead, and then the whole summer.
    A block away from her house, she stopped short, and Trudy stopped too.
    Even from that distance, she could see something queer about the house. She glanced at Trudy’s face, and then at the house once more. Her stomach tightened. The whole front of the house looked black.
    It was black, she saw a moment later. Both her parents were out on the porch, her father on a stepladder, her mother below him, feeding him lengths of cotton fabric from a bolt she held in her arms. The fabric was black and they were draping the entire front of the house with it.
    Any kind of physical work always made her father grumble, and say Chortu; the only time he ever spoke Russian was for secrets or when he cursed out loud. Yet here he was nailing the bunting over the doorway, curving it down in a swag, reaching down for the tacks her mother was passing up to him and nailing the swag up at either side. Each porch post had already been twined around with it from top to bottom, and one of the two windows had been framed in it.
    She glanced at Trudy and desperately wished today wasn’t the day to make fudge. Trudy was staring at the porch, too, not saying anything.
    “Oh, Trudy,” Fee whispered, “don’t tell anybody.”
    “What are they doing?” Trudy whispered back.
    “I don’t know—something crazy and terrible.”
    They walked onward, slowly. Step by step Fee kept thinking it was terrible to have to go forward, to have to go straight up to the house and hear what they would say, with Trudy right there to hear it too. She was used to the way they talked, but Trudy wasn’t. There was no way to stop them, no way to go right past the house as if it had nothing to do with her.
    The sound of hammering started again, and Shag’s barking with it. By now the girls were only a few feet away, but the hammering and barking covered up the sounds of their approach.
    “Hello,” Fee called out.
    Her mother heard her and spoke to her father. He stopped hammering, but stayed perched up on the stepladder, looking down at them. Shag leaped down the steps and flung himself joyously at Fee, but she ignored him and kept looking up at her parents.
    “Hello, girls,” her mother said. “Now, Fira, don’t look like that until you hear the reason.”
    “It’s a protest,” her father offered, in a strange, rather kindly voice. “Hello, Trudy.”
    “Hello, Mr. Ivarin.” Trudy blushed, and turned a little to face Fee’s mother. “And Mrs. Ivarin.”
    “Shag, you stop!” Fira cried, grabbing the dog’s collar without taking her eyes from her father’s face. “A protest?” she asked.
    “About the Triangle fire,” he said. “Trudy, do you know about it?”
    “I think so, Mr. Ivarin,” Trudy said