Free The War that Saved My Life by Kimberly Brubaker Bradley

looked at me over her mug of tea. “Caught in a storm,” she said. “Wind and rain and lightning, and if you’re in a boat, at sea, you get tossed from side to side. You’re all thrown about, because of the storm.”
    I looked at Jamie. “That’s us,” I said. “All thrown about. We’re tempest-tossed.” He nodded.
    I turned back to Miss Smith. “What’s ‘educable’?”
    She cleared her throat. “Able to be educated,” she said. “Able to learn. You are plenty able to learn, Ada. You are educable. I know you are. That teacher is wrong.”
    A plane zoomed overhead. Jamie jumped up. We heard and saw planes all the time now, because of the airfield, but Jamie never tired of watching them. I got up to go out too.
    “Ada,” Miss Smith said, “if you like, this morning I’ll start to teach you to read.”
    I edged away. “No, thank you,” I said, using the manners she taught me. “I want to go look at the planes.”
    She shook her head. “That’s not true.”
    “I want to talk to Butter.”
    Miss Smith leaned forward. “You’re perfectly capable of learning. You mustn’t listen to people who don’t know you. Listen to what you know, yourself.”
    What I knew, I’d learned looking out a single window. I knew nothing. Words she used— capable, tempest-tossed . Even little words, sea . What was a sea? Boats came down the River Thames. Was a sea the same as a river? I knew nothing, nothing at all.
    “I need to see the pony,” I said.
    She sighed. “Suit yourself,” she said, and turned away.
    I’d found a brush in the storage room and I used it all over Butter’s yellow coat. Dust and loose hair flew up. I could tell he liked it. “Good, isn’t it?” I asked him. “Gets the itches out.”
    My skin didn’t itch the way it used to. The stinky lotion cleared up the rough patches on my skin, and my head felt better now that Miss Smith brushed my hair for me every morning. She braided it for me into a single plait down my back, so it stayed neater, out of my way in the wind, and wasn’t as tangled at night. She brushed me the way I brushed Butter, which was odd no matter how I thought about it.
    “Look,” Jamie cried, pointing to the sky. “It’s a different one!” He ran across the pasture, trying to get a better view of the plane.
    I rode Butter twice around the field before he got me off.

    At lunch Miss Smith said she would walk Jamie to school for the first day. “You’ll be all right by yourself, Ada?” she asked. “Or you could come.”
    I shook my head. I wasn’t going near the school. And that turned out to be lucky. The minute Miss Smith left with Jamie I climbed back onto Butter, and so I was there when the strange horse jumped into our field.

It happened like this. I was walking Butter in circles, practicing making him turn. I heard a sound like hoof beats coming from the road, and I stopped to look, but couldn’t yet see anything through the trees. A plane took off from the airfield and screamed straight over our heads just as a horse and rider came into view. Butter didn’t mind the plane—he saw dozens of planes take off every day now—but the other horse, a big brown one, wheeled in fright. His rider pulled the reins sharply to keep him from bolting, but he wheeled again, and then jumped forward, off the road and onto the verge, nearly chesting the stone wall into our field. The rider bounced loose in the saddle, and the horse, frantic, made a sudden leap up and over the wall. The rider tumbled sideways and disappeared.
    The strange horse galloped straight for Butter, reins flying, loose stirrups walloping his sides. Butter spooked and spun, tossing me, and together both horses ran to the far side of the field. They galloped about for a bit, the idiots, but I wasn’t paying attention to them. I ran for the fallen rider as fast as my bad foot would let me. I’d recognized her: the little iron-faced girl. The one who’d called me out.
    She lay facedown in the