Free Francie by Emily Hahn Page A

as unusually leggy, or dumpy, or curly-haired, or gray-eyed. Some of the girls wore mousy brown braids and some had bushy manes of reddish gold.
    Perhaps the thing hardest to get used to, she reflected as she had done many times before, was the youth of these girls. It was shocking to Francie that they should be such babies . Not in years: most of the girls in her own form were more or less of an age with her. It was their attitude toward life. The whole thing was so completely different from anything she had known that her pen failed her when she tried to tell Ruth or Glenn about it in a letter.
    â€œMaybe it’s partly that we oldest ones are only a handful compared to the rest of the school,” she had written to Glenn, “and that the little kids are only twelve. It’s been a long time since I spent much time in a crowd with a lot of twelve-year-olds and so forth. But they know their place; the ages don’t exactly mingle except when we play some of the games. Only I give you my word, I wouldn’t know how old some of these girls in my dorm are if I had to guess. They’re as old as I am, but they prattle like nursery-school inmates. I feel like a nurse sometimes. You ought to hear them in the dorm.”
    She chuckled to herself now as she thought of some of the bedtime conversations they had. The girls chatted freely through the flimsy walls of their cubicle curtains and often the evening air rang with eager discussions of games, history lessons, and rudimentary religious topics. There was never a word of parties or boys or dresses, or any of the topics Francie’s Jefferson crowd would have chosen.
    â€œThey’re subnormal,” said Francie to herself. “I’m spending what should be my formative years with a lot of subnormal kids.”
    Then because she didn’t want to be always whining, even to herself, she pulled up. They were nice girls—healthy, tomboy, nice girls. It was not their fault that they should remind Francie so fatally of her playmates at the summer camp she had attended when she was twelve. If the truth were known, she didn’t really mind feeling superior; she admitted that to herself wryly. “I may be compensating for the people who snub me,” she thought. “Anyway in their fashion some of them are clever. Gwen’s good at music. Heaps of them are better than I’ll ever be at tennis.”
    But it was Penelope, of course, who got on best with the American—Penelope, whose blue eyes were reflective and kind, and who was able to skip with enviable nimbleness from American to British mentality, and back again. The worst girl in the place, the only real trial, thought Francie, as she drained her mug of sweetened tea, was Jennifer Tennison. But prayers were beginning, and she must stand with the others behind her chair, with hanging head. The glow of their morning exercise was fading; she shivered. Somebody near her sniffled. Someone across the room coughed.
    Prayers finished, Miss Maitland up at the head table began to read the day’s notices. Francie’s feet were numb. Her spirits took a dive downward as her body grew colder; she forgot the girls and the new, if fleeting, feeling of comradeship. She felt too low to think about Ruth or Glenn or the hot morning sun of Jefferson. She didn’t listen to Miss Maitland’s voice, except to wait for the word of dismissal.
    She kept saying to herself, “I’m in prison. It’s no use trying to cheer up; this is exactly like a prison. Pop couldn’t have known it would be as bad as this.”

CHAPTER 5
    The girls came out the way the animals went into the Ark, two by two. In the corridor they broke ranks to disperse at a run for class. It was in the corridor that Francie, still in a mood, encountered the person she most disliked in the whole school, the person who, presumably and logically, should have been her best friend—Jennifer Tennison. She caught