Free Cartwheeling in Thunderstorms by Katherine Rundell Page B

rain; Will tore it in two, spat on it, and hurled it into a bush. “Come on, Si,” she said. “Let’s go.”

T HE NEXT SIX DAYS PASSED in loud, unhappy activity. The farm had no telephone, so frequent trips to borrow the Madisons’ were made. The school had to be contacted, and the farm itself put up for auction. Most urgently, Will had to be equipped with clothes for an English winter. She had never owned a coat and had only one sweater. It was six inches too short in the wrist, and its hood, often used for smuggling fruit, smelled of elderly banana.
    It was Cynthia who took her shopping. Will loathed it even more than she had thought she would. She had not wanted to go, being unwilling to spend a whole day of her last week away from the farm, “Look, Si,” she’d planned, “Ipromise I’ll get through it quick. I’ll come back before dark, ja , and we can roast the potatoes and we’ll ride with Peter and the boys, okay? Ja? ” But she had thought the actual shopping would be new and enticing.
    Instead, it was humiliating. Will stood in her gray underpants in bright lights, shivering in the too-powerful air conditioning, longing to be outside, longing for a drink, too bewildered to ask for one. Mrs. Browne was brisk, efficient, and businesslike. Looking neither at Will nor at the friendly women serving in the shop, she pointed one long French-manicured finger at Will, saying: “Skirts.” Or, “Cardigans. Four. One blue, three yellow.” And always pointing, pointing, as though, Will thought angrily, her mother and father had had a fit of madness and named her “Shoes, Size Six, Extra Narrow Fit” or “White Knickers.”
    Will was thrust into changing rooms and squeezed into blouses and sweaters that cost more than her entire wardrobe, and brand-new blue jeans, and nylon tops that gave her electric shocks. It was not, she told Simon later, that she hated the clothes. They were wonderful, starchy and crisp—although, she would have chosen different colors. She would have liked bright orange T-shirts against light blue denim—“To be like the sunrise, ja . Please?”—and pink trousers with grass-green sweaters, and an all-in-one denimjumpsuit like the tall, muscled mechanics wore at Tatenda Motors. But Cynthia laughed with a curled lip. “Those are for working boys, my dear.” And then, Will had been astonished by the way passing women had walked in on her, had cooed over her, calling her sweet, adorable, a pretty little dear.
    â€œPretty little dear! You? Sha , Will. . . . They don’t know you, struze fact.”
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    The hatred did not come until later. In the dim light of sunrise, Will found her wooden trunk— her trunk, the only thing she really owned, inherited from her mother—standing open outside her door, the padlock forced, and the new clothes replacing the squares of flame lily curtain she’d cut out to take with her, and replacing the plastic bags full of msasa pods and sticks for catapults and her collection of dried mangoes. They lay in a pile on the floor.
    Choking with rage, her brown eyes thin with misery, Will snatched out the now foolish clothes—blaming the clothes themselves, swearing, how dared they wipe their stiff shop-smelling newness against her mother’s love—and threw them into the kitchen fire. She added anything Cynthia Vincy had touched—the old dresses from the captain, her khaki shirt, the underwear that Cynthia hadwashed for her—until she had only the shorts, T-shirt, and sweater she was wearing. Cynthia would probably beat her. Will lifted her chin defiantly. She did not care.
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    Will was not beaten. Mrs. Browne was cold and rigid, icy hard.
    â€œYou will have to learn to control yourself, child.”
    â€œBut you broke into it !” cried Will, hugging the