Free How I Live Now by Meg Rosoff Page B

you not to. I didn't really understand The Occupation because it didn't seem like the kind of War we all knew and loved from your average made-for-TV miniseries.
    When I heard how it happened I was pretty impressed by the cleverness of the guys who planned it, who as far as I understood, basically waited for most of the British Army to be lured into crises on the other side of the world and then waltzed in and cut off all the transportation and communications and stuff so basically they were DEFENDING Britain against its own returning armed forces rather than attacking it.
    Major McEvoy said Think about it as a Hostage Situation with Sixty Million Hostages so I did.
    I've probably missed some important parts of the explanation but that seemed to be the gist of it and whenever anyone went into more detail I found my brain wandering to things like I wonder if he dyes his hair and Whatever possessed them to choose that color wallpaper?
    There were obviously a few military types still left in England, mostly part of the Territorial Army, which sounds pretty impressive until you realize they're a bunch of moonlighting guys who spend a few weekends a year doing basic training and wishing they were one of the Dirty Dozen. Major McEvoy said it was more or less a Known Fact that the whole situation was temporary and by the time the British Forces could get organized again it would all be over and the Occupiers would be History i.e. dead, but I guess the invaders were trying to Make a Point and had never really expected it to turn out happily ever after for them.
    What impressed me was how simple it seemed to be to throw a whole country into chaos by dumping a bunch of poison into some of the water supplies and making sure no one could get electricity or phone connections and setting off a few big bombs here and there in tunnels and government buildings and airports.
    We also found out that The Enemy was one reason there was no gas for anyone, since Major McEvoy told Piper and me that Petrol was one of the first things they took over when all the trouble started. The other reason was that you needed Guess What to pump it out of the ground and into the tank of your car.
    Eleven letters, starts with E.
    I guess it shows the importance of having your own army, even a small leftover piece of an army, because although the Bad Guys snatched up everything they could get their hands on, at least the Good Guys seemed genuinely dedicated to distributing what was left around the place so as few people as possible died from neglect or outright stupidity.
    All in all I felt a little guilty about the fact that while us kids had been living the Life of Riley, a whole bunch of other people had been scurrying around like lunatics trying to keep the Social Fabric from Unraveling and my personal belief was there were too many problems to think about and not enough people to sort them out.
    In other words, they were desperately short of people to get things done and that gave us a chance to GET OUT and eventually get back to where we belonged. This was obviously our goal, but in the meantime we figured that actually doing something might stop us from dying of boredom, which I was starting to realize was a major killer in a modern war.
    So for all our making fun of Osbert and his passion to join the War Effort I could see now that this was our ticket to getting back home.
    Or at least that was the plan.

18
    D uring all this time I was in touch with Edmond. Strange as it sounds, he visited me, not exactly like god visiting Moses or angels telling Mary she's knocked up with the Christ Child, but come to think of it not completely unlike that either.
    I had to be in a certain state of mind—quiet, distracted, sometimes half asleep—and then I might feel a kind of aura, a lightening of the space behind my eyes and I'd know he was there. I could smell his smell of tobacco and earth and something radiant and spicy like amber; could feel the smooth glide of his