Free Needle and Thread by Ann M. Martin

Lydia.
    â€œFlora! Flora! Can you sew me a flame hat?” cried Alyssa as she ran out of Olivia’s house. “Ruby said you’re really good at sewing.”
    â€œCan you sew a penguin head?” asked Travis.
    â€œI’m going to need a tail,” said Jack.
    â€œI’ll try anything,” said Flora.

When Ruby Northrop entered a room, people usually noticed. Ruby was used to this and made the most of her entrances. On the day of the auditions for the school play, Ruby strode through the door of her classroom, smiling.
    â€œHi, Ruby! Hi, Ruby!” called several voices.
    â€œHello!” Ruby waved to her classmates.
    Ava Longyear, who was already seated at her desk, jumped up and ran to greet Ruby. “The auditions are today. Are you really going to try out for the biggest part?”
    â€œYup,” said Ruby. “I definitely want to be Alice Kendall.”
    â€œOoh, the worst witch,” said Ava.
    â€œBut that’s just the thing. She wasn’t a witch at all,” said Ruby, who had read the script for the play several times and had listened carefully when Mr. Lundy talked to her class about witches and witchcraft in New England in the 1600s. A handful of women and a couple of men, Ruby learned, had been tried and even executed as witches for nothing more than talking in their sleep, making an unfortunate comment, or being in the wrong place at the wrong time. And this had happened right here in Camden Falls! Alice Kendall wasn’t one of those people, since she was a made-up character. But the things that happened to her in the play were the sorts of things that happened to people accused of practicing witchcraft in colonial Camden Falls. In the play, Alice Kendall is the neighbor of a man named John Parson, whose two young children have recently died of the flu. When Mr. Parson’s cow also dies, and he then recalls that one day he dropped and broke a china plate just as Alice was walking by his window, he begins to suspect that she’s a witch.
    His suspicions grow when he passes Alice in her garden one day and hears her talking to herself. John then notices a large crow, which he calls a “familiar,” perched on the roof of the Kendalls’ house. This is the beginning of Alice’s troubles. Her family is shunned, and eventually Alice is executed after a supremely unfair trial, to Ruby’s way of thinking. One witness says he saw a crow follow Alice Kendall across her yard. Another says that one day when her husband was ill, she asked to borrow some grain from the Kendalls. Alice Kendall said they had no grain to spare and the next day the woman’s husband took a turn for the worse. These incidents are cited as further evidence of witchcraft.
    Ruby’s mind wandered as she lost herself in the world of seventeenth-century Camden Falls.
    â€œRuby?” said Ava. “Earth to Ruby.”
    Ruby blinked. “Sorry. I was thinking about Alice Kendall.”
    â€œWhy would you want to play a witch?” asked Ava. “That’s not a good character.”
    â€œYes, it is. It’s the best kind,” said Ruby. “Alice was accused of something she didn’t do. That’s a great role for any actor.”
    â€œBut in the end she dies.”
    â€œI know. I’ve always wanted to do a death scene.”
    Ruby sensed that if her sister could hear her, she wouldn’t approve of what Ruby was saying. Not at all. Flora’s mind was a complicated muddle of experiences and memories and thoughts that swirled around like the whirlpool above a drain. If Flora heard the words “death scene,” her mind would immediately turn to the car accident and the death of their parents. But Ruby was able to put things in separate compartments in
her
mind. The death of her parents was sorted into one spot, the death of a fictional witch into another. And Ruby desperately wanted the chance to cough and gag and fall down