Free The Truth According to Us by Annie Barrows

branches of the red oak in our backyard, but her soldiers would have none of it. They told me to shut up. It only increased my longing to be one of them.
    I had to bag Geraldine first. Geraldine was real nice about it—she was always willing to let me try. She’d stand there, big as a shed, and I’dleap at her, thinking that if I could just get going, I could push her over. A couple of times, she tottered a little, but I think she was only doing that to make me feel better. Mostly, she shrugged me off like a horsefly.
    In former days, I had despaired. But since the parade—since the birth of my ferocity and devotion—I’d devised a cunning stratagem. The cunning part was the element of surprise. Frank and Joe Hardy and Mr. Sherlock Holmes were all of them big believers in the element of surprise, and I guessed what was good enough for them should be good enough for me. My plan was to sneak up behind Geraldine and knock her flat.
    On Capon Street, I approached Geraldine’s house with caution, but I needn’t have. Mr. and Mrs. Lee were too worn out from all those children to trim their hedges. I crouched low inside a rhododendron and waited. Sure enough, Geraldine came out, smacking her lips and burping, and then began to stroll about. The other children must have been eating her scraps, because she was alone. All at once, she did the strangest thing: She began to dance. Not a real dance like the fox-trot, nor even a tap dance, which you couldn’t do on dirt, anyway, but a swaying, whirling dance. I guessed it was a ballet dance, and for a moment or two I was just thunderstruck, but then I realized that this was a fine time to employ the element of surprise. I got myself ready, and the next time Geraldine spun by with her back turned, I burst whooping out of the rhododendron and pounced on her. She fell pretty heavy, but I had my legs around her middle and my arms around her neck, so it didn’t hurt much.
    “Gotcha!” I hollered, and that Geraldine was such a nice girl, she didn’t take a swipe at me. She agreed that I had knocked her down fair and square and welcomed me into her army. She’d been pulling for me all along, she said, and she was glad I’d finally made it, because she needed a spy and she knew I’d be fine at that. How do you know, I asked. She said the way I’d snuck up on her showed natural talent. I had to agree that it did.
    We did a lot of talking, there in the rhododendron. It turned outthat the war with Sonny Deal’s army was just to keep in practice for the real war, which Geraldine said Mr. Lee said was against the Reds. According to Geraldine, the Reds were running Washington, and that was only four hours away on State 9, which meant we needed to get ready. I thought that if the Reds were in Washington, I would have heard about it, and when Geraldine told me that American Everlasting was full of Reds, I said I didn’t think so, because I knew folks who worked there and they weren’t Reds. How do you know they aren’t, Geraldine asked, and it occurred to me that this could be yet another matter the grown-ups had not seen fit to reveal to me. I fell silent, and Geraldine said it didn’t matter if I didn’t believe her about American Everlasting, as long as I took a vow to fight the Reds. So I did, and then we got down to the business of training, which was mostly creeping around in the bushes to spy on Mrs. Lee. She didn’t do anything except hang sheets on the line, but Geraldine thought highly of my creeping and promoted me to officer on the spot. She said I was a born sneak.
    When I heard the noon whistle down at the mill, I zipped home for lunch. I wouldn’t have if I’d known it was hash. We all despised hash, every last one of us, but Jottie felt obliged to make it because it stretched leftover roast to two meals.
    “Is this enough, Jottie?” said Bird. She had eaten two bites.
    “No. Two more.” Jottie clamped her mouth shut to get her hash down. “It’s good for