Free The Atomic Weight of Secrets or The Arrival of the Mysterious Men in Black by Eden Unger Bowditch

bigger than the ‘when’ and the ‘when’ went away and there was only an ‘if’ and I thought Mummy and Daddy were gone forever and I... I... I...”
    Lucy began to cry, and Miss Brett folded her into her arms and sat with her until the sobs eased into a tiny snoring noise. Then she picked up Lucy and brought her to the bedroom she had selected for her own. As she placed the little girl on the bed, she decided to wait until Lucy awoke to make another batch of biscuits. Miss Brett returned to the classroom, where she worried she might be needed to prevent Faye from biting the head off any of the new arrivals. She made sure to leave the door open between the kitchen and the classroom. The biscuits already in the oven needed only a few more minutes.

    “Look, Miss Brett,” Wallace said, pointing through the window at the dirt road on the far side of the field. “A black carriage is approaching. Do you think it’s Noah?”
    “I do believe it is, Wallace,” she said, wiping her hands on her apron. “Let’s greet our new classmate.”
    Miss Brett stepped outside as the carriage pulled up. A lanky boy carrying a violin case stepped out of the carriage. Miss Brettescorted him into the classroom. He got as far as the door before Jasper and Wallace appeared to show him in.
    Leaving them to their greetings, Miss Brett moved toward the kitchen. She had to take the biscuits out of the oven and she wanted to check on Lucy, but then she glanced over at Faye, who was writing in her notebook, ignoring the others gathering at the door.
    Miss Brett walked over to Faye and placed her hand on Faye’s shoulder. “Faye? Come join us, won’t you?”
    “You don’t need me over there. You’ve got the others.” Faye’s face felt hot, but she refused to look up at Miss Brett.
    “But I won’t have you,” Miss Brett said gently.
    “It’s already too crowded,” grumbled Faye. She didn’t look up—she couldn’t. In a few short hours, Faye had lost her place as the one and only.
    “Want to help me with the biscuits?” Miss Brett said.
    Faye shook her head, and Miss Brett walked away. Faye snapped her pencil in half, then bent under her desk to retrieve the fallen piece. She wanted nothing more than to run and run and run all the way home, back to the world she knew, back to her perfect home and perfect garden and perfect life.

F AYE’S A BSOLUTELY P ERFECT L IFE
    OR
    LITTLE MARMELO FINDS AN OVEN
    F aye may have spoken in an Indian-tinged upper-class English accent, but she was only half-Indian by birth—the other half was American. She had lived her whole life in India, had traveled through most of it, and spoke many of India’s twenty-some languages. Her Hindi, as well as her Tamil, Bengali, Urdu, Marathi, and Punjabi, was flawless, like everything else about her—as perfect as she imagined her life to be.
    Faye’s father, Rajesh Vigyanveta, was born in New Delhi, but went to college in America. It was there that he met Faye’s mother, Gwendolyn. Gwendolyn was from America—Ohio, originally. While Faye’s father, on leave from Cambridge, was becoming a star at Harvard, Gwendolyn studied at the Annex, the new college, where women could study using Harvard University facilities. Since Harvard instructors taught there, study groups were formed, and Faye’s parents fell in love over a pile of textbooks. By the time they left so her father could finish his studies at Cambridge, they were famous.
    Although they had had offers from every university in theworld, the Vigyanveta family moved to New Delhi several years before Faye was born. Her mother wanted to live abroad, and her father wanted to go back home. Faye’s father accepted a post as head of science at St. Stephen’s College, teaching chemistry and physics. He had been urged to take the job by Dr. Samuel Allnut, with whom he had studied at Cambridge. Faye’s mother was hired as chief chemist for a large British company.
    And soon, Faye Vidya Vigyanveta was