Free At Home on Ladybug Farm by Donna Ball Page B

been completed to his teacher’s satisfaction. At last he tore the sheet of math problems out of his notebook and stretched across the table to hand it to her, waiting impatiently until Lindsay checked it.
    “Very nice,” she said, after what seemed like a very long time. “You transposed your variables here on number six. Try it again.”
    He erased, recalculated, and handed it back to her before she had resumed her seat. Lindsay lifted an eyebrow. “Learning comes easily for you, doesn’t it?”
    He shrugged. “Jonesie down at the Hardware says I can have a job when I get my GED. Pays nine dollars an hour.”
    “Good for you.”
    “Why can’t I take that GED test now?”
    “One, because you’re not old enough. Two, because you don’t know enough. You wouldn’t pass.” She handed the paper back to him with a 100%-Perfect scrawled across the top.
    He stuffed the paper in his notebook without looking at it and began to stack his schoolbooks out of the way to make room for the tabletop easel and paints.
    “Hold it, hotshot,” Lindsay said. She reached behind her to her own worktable and took up another stack of papers. “I read your report on the French Revolution.” She turned up the first page, which was a sketch of a man in eighteenth-century costume with the caption “Robespierre was a jerk ” and the second, which depicted a woman in jewels and powdered wig jumping out of a cake—“let them eat cake”—and the third, a drawing of the guillotine and the single line “Off with their heads.”
    “Very amusing,” Lindsay said.
    He grinned. “I thought you’d like it.”
    Lindsay gave him a stern look. “I should make you do the whole thing over.”
    His grin vanished. “Ah, come on—”
    “Except for the fact that you’ve obviously read the material.” She shook the papers at him. “Otherwise you couldn’t have made such a joke of it.”
    “It is a joke,” he returned, scowling. “Who cares about a bunch of dudes who’ve been dead three hundred years already?”
    “The French Revolution was a pivotal point in world history,” she insisted. “It changed a nation’s destiny and overthrew an entire tradition of government. It was important!”
    “It’s over ,” he replied, sounding bored. “Why do I have to study history anyhow? They’re not going to ask me about Frenchies on the GED.”
    As always, Lindsay chose her battles. “We study history,” she explained patiently, “because it tells us who we are. Because it gives us continuity from one point in time to the next. Because if we didn’t know what the people who went before us had been through, we would have to do everything in the world all over again with each new generation. And because when we study history, we understand that we are all part of something much bigger than ourselves—a story that goes on and on.”
    “Are we gonna have a drawing lesson today or what?”
    She hesitated, then said, “Come up in the loft with me.”
    Noah followed her up the ladder, and she dragged forward the box of photographic plates she and Cici had discovered earlier. Holding one up to the light, she said, “This is history.”
    He squinted at it, trying to make out the faded shapes. “Looks like this house.”
    “It is. It’s this house, the way it used to be a long time ago, and the people who lived here. They’re dead now, too, but without them we wouldn’t be living in this place, having this conversation. Do you understand?”
    He was rummaging through the box. “What are these things anyhow?”
    “They’re photographic plates from an old camera. I’m going to try to have them developed.”
    “They worth anything?”
    “I wouldn’t be surprised. People pay a lot of money for pieces of history. Why do you suppose that is?”
    “Because they’re dumb?”
    She smiled patiently. “Your homework assignment is to answer that question with a five-hundred-word essay.”
    He groaned out loud.
    “And, because I know