Free A Traitor Among the Boys by Phyllis Reynolds Naylor Page B

can your private conversation wait until recess?” the teacher asked.
    “Uh … it can wait,” said Caroline.
    But when Miss Applebaum began writing on the blackboard, Caroline leaned forward and whispered in Wally's ear, “In fact, I just may get my name in the Guinness Book of World Records for having the highest known temperature of any nine-year-old who lived to tell about it.”

Sixteen

War
    I t seemed as though January might end peacefully. Caroline, Wally noticed, was quieter than usual. Josh noticed that Beth was kinder and more polite. Eddie, Jake reported, seemed as though she might be friendly after all.
    The temperature dropped to the low twenties, and the Buckman River completely froze over, bringing out sleds and ice skates. Skaters glided down one side of Island Avenue, under the road bridge that led to the business district, and back up the river on the other side, their breath frosty in the sunny, crisp air.
    Then it snowed—wonderful snow, excellent snow, the kind that packed a powerful snowball.
    No one knew how it happened, but the peace didn't last.
    The battle didn't start with Beth and Josh.
    It didn't start with Caroline and Wally.
    It didn't even start with Jake and Eddie, and it certainly didn't start with Peter.
    All Wally knew was that he and his brothers were standing on the swinging bridge looking down at the Malloy girls ice-skating on the river below, and the next minute Caroline and her sisters were frantically building a snow fort on their side of the river as though they suspected the boys were up to no good. Every so often the girls shot suspicious glances their way.
    “What did we do?” asked Josh. “Why are they glaring at us?”
    “Who knows? Who cares? But they aren't building a fort to play house in,” said Jake excitedly. “You build a fort for war!”
    “Yeah!” said Wally. “It sure looks like war, all right.” From where he was standing, he could see Beth and Eddie rolling big balls of snow down the bank on their side of the river and stacking them one on top of the other. Caroline, meanwhile, appeared to be making snowballs.
    “Okay!” said Jake excitedly. “Let's fight!”
    The boys ran to their end of the swinging bridge, went slipping and sliding down the bank, and began building a fort on their side of the river.
    “Hey! Look what the guys are up to!” Wally heard Eddie shout. “I told you they were probably planning something back there on the bridge. We'll settle this once and for all.” She picked up a large stick and went sliding out to the center of the river, where she scratched a long line in the ice.
    “All right, you guys,” she yelled. “Everything onthis side of the line is our territory. Everything on the other is yours. Don't cross the line and you won't get—
    Plop!
    A snowball hit her on the shoulder.
    At that, Beth and Caroline shrieked like savages and came swarming out of their fort. Suddenly the air was filled with snowballs going in both directions— some hitting their targets, some smashing on the ice, all of them accompanied by whoops and yells.
    Every so often both camps retreated for a time to make more snowballs or repair their forts, and the walls grew even higher. Peter and Wally were busily making peepholes so that they could see out, in case Eddie got it in her crazy head to run over and stuff a snowball down somebody's neck.
    They stayed until dusk set in and it was too dark to see anymore. Then they went home, half frozen but eager to continue the war.
    After dinner that evening, the boys gathered as usual in Jake and Josh's bedroom, and while Peter absently ran his Matchbox cars along one windowsill, then another, the boys discussed their battle strategy.
    “Let's go out and dump boiling water on their snow fort,” said Wally.
    “Naw. That would take too long. You'd have to keep carrying kettle after kettle,” said Jake. “I think we should just go over and knock it down.”
    “Then they'll come over and knock