The Girls at the Kingfisher Club Read Online Free

you didn’t have one room to yourself in the whole world, you laid claim to every inch of whatever you could.
    (For them, the wide, winding town house was all narrow halls and narrow beds, in rooms that got narrower by the day, and the board in the center of the floor demarcated for each girl the line that, in honor, her sister could never cross.)
    Left to themselves they were a pack of wolves, but when Jo summoned them they filed like soldiers into Jo and Lou’s room, on the top floor, where they were least likely to be heard. They slid off their shoes and lined them up along the wall, and waited for Jo to call steps.
    Once, early on, during a fight about the waltz, Lou called Jo “General.” It stuck.
    Later, Lou would tease her about getting big ideas.
    It was more as though the name slid into the empty spaces between Jo’s fears and habits (she was young, but she was already a jailer). “General” was the mortar that let her stand in both places at once and not fall.
    By then Jo was fourteen and looked older than some of their first nannies, with the same air of being overstrict and underpaid.
    When she walked down the back stairs with Lou one afternoon, that year’s cook never even looked up. All the nannies came that way when they brought those upstairs girls for exercise—no need for them to make a spectacle of themselves, going through the front way.
    (A young maid, new to the house like the maids always were, might have looked up as they passed, and seen two girls close to her age, and thought, Poor things.)
    â€¢Â â€¢Â â€¢
    They saw a picture.
    Jo hardly remembered it; the walk to the theater on Broadway was too long by half, and the park was a wilderness, and the streets were all a rush of carriages and cars and people skittering past them, and Jo raced through the middle of it all thinking only, We have to make it safely there.
    And once they were inside the sheltering dark, she thought more about getting home than the movie, and she was watching Lou more than the screen. Lou was smiling, for the first time Jo could remember.
    She only knew to pay attention when Lou said, “Aha.”
    It was a foxtrot. The leading man was supposed to be drunk, but it was the right idea—enough for Jo.
    The leading man closed his eyes, and the heroine curled her fingers tight around his fingers.
    â€œIt’s lovely,” Jo said.
    â€œDoris will hate it.”
    â€œShe can hate it after she’s learned it right.”
    When the wedding proposal came at last and the leads kissed delightedly, Jo watched with a pang in her chest. It was over, and she’d have to take Lou back to the house, because what else in the world could she do?
    â€œIs that what women wear to get married these days?” Lou asked, making a face.
    Jo looked at the door and sighed.
    â€¢Â â€¢Â â€¢
    They snuck back into the house just before dusk, where five girls were lined up on Jo’s bed, fighting and fidgeting and waiting to dance.
    â€œFoxtrot,” Jo said, and they grinned.
    â€¢Â â€¢Â â€¢
    Jo and Lou kept it up.
    They slipped into theaters inside larger groups—harder to check tickets. Sometimes, when it was slim pickings, Lou flirted their way in. For someone who’d never really met men, she was an excellent flirt.
    They sat in the sweet, sticky heat of the cinema, toes tingling as the piano rattled the floor. They brought home ragtime, the grizzly bear, the waltz.
    (“A new waltz?” Ella sighed. “I liked the old one.”
    Doris groaned.
    â€œThat one’s out of date,” said Lou. “This one’s just like the old one, only with less dress.”
    â€œAnd more hands,” said Jo, and Ella went pink.)
    â€¢Â â€¢Â â€¢
    The nannies and the governess began to be dismissed. They had chosen the girls’ clothes and books, and with them gone, Jo decided Father would have to be convinced, somehow, to give