Free Dust Devil by Rebecca Brandewyne

you’d rather not.”
Sarah’s beaming face grew crestfallen at the thought that he
was making fun of her and her tree house and her offer of friendship,
after all. “Besides, my hair isn’t golden. It’s
only plain old mud brown.”
    To
her surprise, Renzo reached out and gently tugged a thick strand of
her long hair, which Mama had never yet permitted her to cut, so it
hung down her back, past her waist.
    “ Now,
where did you ever get a dumb idea like that?” he inquired, not
missing the disappointment on her piquant face and determined now to
join in her game, even if he did think
it was girlish nonsense. “That hissing little cat Evie, I’ll
bet. Don’t you believe it—not for one minute! Your hair’s
not the color of mud. It’s the color of a dark old oak tree,
and your eyes are the green of its leaves. You’re a woodland
fairy princess, as anyone with eyes in his head could see. So you go
on up, and I’ll wait here. And when you hear me call out to you
from below, you’ll know it’s me, and that will be our
secret password from now on.”
    “ All
right,” Sarah said slowly, half afraid, nevertheless, that
despite his words, Renzo intended to trick her, that he
meant to run off, laughing at and taunting her for her foolishness,
once she had reached the
tree house. Still, she climbed up into the sycamore’s spreading
green branches, anyway, opening the trapdoor to the tree house and
hoisting herself inside. “I’m here,” she called
timidly, now wishing she had never mentioned her tree house, had
never told the boy of her secret daydreams. She waited nervously for
the sound of his mocking laughter.
    What
she heard instead was her heart singing in pure joy when, from below,
in response, Renzo shouted in his best knight-in-shining-armor voice,
“Sarah, sweet Sarah, let down your oak-brown hair!”

    Those
years of Sarah and Renzo's childhood and early adulthood were
turbulent ones for the world. For they were the years of the ending
of the war in Vietnam; of Watergate and the resignations first of
Vice President Spiro Agnew and then of President Richard Nixon; of
the Grey Panthers and the Black Panthers—‘‘Say it
loud: I’m black, and I’m proud!”—and the
trial of Angela Davis; and of the American Indian revolt at Wounded
Knee. They were the years of ongoing wars between the Israelis and
the Arab nations in the Middle East; of skyjackings and terrorist
attacks and of metal detector being installed at airports; of the oil
embargo and the energy crises; and of the kidnapping of publishing
heiress Patty Hearst by the Symbionese Liberation Army. The years of
the continuing troubles in Northern Ireland; of Karen Silkwood and
the Kerr-McGee plutonium plant; of the election of a grocer’s
daughter, Margaret Thatcher, to the British Parliament and then the
prime ministry; and of the Israeli raid on Entebbe. The years of the
birth of the world’s first test-tube baby, Louise Brown; of
Reverend Jim Jones and the mass suicide of his followers at
Jonestown, Guyana; of the deposing of the Shah of Iran and the rise
to power of the Ayatollah Khomeini; and of the Soviets in
Afghanistan. The years of the deaths of many world leaders, among
them America’s Lyndon Baines Johnson, France’s Georges
Pompidou, Argentina’s Juan Per6n, Spain’s Francisco
Franco, Israel’s David Ben Gurion and Golda Meir, and
Nationalist China’s Chiang Kai-shek and the People’s
Republic of China’s Chou En-lai and Mao Tse-tung.
    But
of all this, only Watergate touched Sarah and Renzo in the quiet,
small town where they lived—and only because the resulting fame
of Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward fueled Renzo’s own dreams of
becoming a journalist. Every day after school, he went to work for
Joe Martinelli at the Tri-State Tribune. At first, Renzo did the very
same chores for which he had ridiculed Bubba Holbrooke that day upon
the commons: sweeping up, emptying wastebaskets and the like. But
gradually, as the years