Slap Your Sides by M. E. Kerr Read Free Book Online

fascination with Daria Daniel. I was the only one who never called her Darie. I vowed that I wouldn’t that first night we met, after we hurried away from the police and the paint bucket and the yellow stripe on our store window. We went to The Sweet Creek Diner, where she ordered a coffee and I ordered a Coke.
    â€œNever call me Darie,” she said. “Promise? I’m trying to outgrow that name.”
    â€œI promise.”
    What was I doing promising her anything ? My loyalties should have been with my big brother, not her. My eyes and my mouth weren’t paying any attention to my thoughts.
    â€œMy father’s real name is Lucio Danelli. I can understand why he changed Lucio to Dan, because kids called him Lucy, but why did he let my mother talk him into changing our name to Daniel?”
    â€œDid she ever give you a reason?” I asked her.
    â€œYes. She claims it’s best not to be too much of one thing. Don’t be too Italian or too Jewish or too Irish.” Her eyes looked directly at me. “Or too Quaker,” she said.
    Oh, great! I thought, just great. I said, “How about too Catholic?”
    â€œSame thing.” She shrugged. “My mother’s nothing. She’s Protestant or something. Now she goes to St. Peter’s most Sundays because of the war.”
    After the waitress brought our order, I looked across at Daria, wondering why I was afraid to ask the question I was about to ask, wondering what there was about her that made me want her to like me. She was about my age, I knew, but I always felt a lot younger around her, and I didn’t have a reason for that either.
    She was putting heaping teaspoons of sugar in her coffee, her brown hair touching her shoulders, the checkered cap cocked over one eye.
    â€œDaria, why would you mark my father’s windows? Do you think my father had anything to do with Bud becoming a CO?”
    â€œI don’t know.” She looked up at me with these sea-green eyes of hers. She was blinking as though I made her nervous. That was a laugh. She said, “My mother says your father was never really religious before he met your mother.”
    â€œHe’s not really religious now.”
    â€œI guess the most religious person in your family is Bud.”
    â€œMy mother, and then Bud…. Then me.”
    â€œAre you really?”
    â€œI’m not passionately religious. Sometimes I envy people who are. But I believe in God. And I think I feelstrongly about what’s right and what’s wrong.”
    â€œI’m not that religious,” she said, “but since the war, I go to church every Sunday like my mother.”
    â€œWho put you up to painting our window, Daria? Radio Dan?”
    â€œ Daddy? Oh, my gawd, you don’t know Daddy!”
    â€œJust what I hear over the radio. You’re not supposed to clap your hands until the war’s over. You can only slap your sides.”
    â€œI wouldn’t think you’d listen.”
    â€œI don’t always listen.”
    â€œDaddy doesn’t like to make enemies, not even of slackers.”
    â€œDon’t call my brother a slacker! You don’t know anything about him!”
    â€œI know he’s letting my two brothers fight for this country, when he won’t.”
    â€œWhat Bud is doing is for this country,” I said. “He’s trying to stop sending guys like your brother off to war!”
    â€œBut that won’t stop Hitler! How do you stop Hitler?”
    â€œI don’t know,” I said. Even kids at Friends admitted Hitler was a different kind of enemy.
    â€œIt was my idea to mark the windows, Jubal! It’s the least I can do, with both my brothers risking their lives. Let me ask you something, Jubal. Suppose there was a mad dog loose on our street, foaming at the mouth, his ruff up, his teeth bared as he went after people. Would Bud just walk away and leave it up to my brothers tomake the