The Witch Read Online Free Page B

were doing right now, if they were out looking for us.
    Then the movie was over and Mrs. Wojo said it was time for our baths.
    We didn’t argue, though we might have said we didn’t need a bath just then, or we didn’t take baths, only showers. I don’t like to admit how quick she’d beat me down, but she had.
    There is no greater powerlessness than being a child. So Mrs. Wojo set out towels for us, and the pajamas we’d brought with us from DCFS, and ran water in the tub. She sat on the toilet and clamped first Kerry, then me, between her knees and picked through our scalps, looking for nits. Her hands were hard and practiced. Satisfied that we didn’t have lice, she pushed the plastic curtain with the seashells to one side. “All right now, get undressed and hop in.”
    I found my voice. “We don’t do that.”
    â€œDon’t do what?”
    â€œTake baths together.”
    Mrs. Wojo made a show of her exasperation. “The two of you would tax the patience of a saint. What have you got to hide? Do you think I’m going to heat up water for two baths? Does this look like the Grand Hotel? Do you want to wait until that water’s cold?”
    She was going to watch us too. And maybe it shouldn’t have been any big deal, a child’s nakedness, but it was, it felt as if wehad been stripped not only of our clothes but of some last defense against her as well. I couldn’t keep from looking at Kerry, his small, dangling parts and bare bottom, and he couldn’t keep from looking at me. We had been made helpless. We allowed Mrs. Wojo to pour some stinging shampoo over our heads and into our eyes and scrub out our ears. The water was something less than hot. By the time we were declared clean, made to stand, and wrapped in stale-smelling green towels, I was so sunk in misery, all I wanted was to hide myself away.
    Kerry started crying. His eyes hurt him, but nobody had figured that out yet. Mrs. Wojo grumbled as she got him into his pajamas, saying things along the lines of ungrateful children who didn’t have anything to complain about. But when we were dressed, she shooed me upstairs and kept him with her. “Run along,” she told me. “Don’t worry, he’s coming.”
    I climbed the stairs and waited. After a little while, Kerry came upstairs, accompanied by Mrs. Wojo’s shouted instructions from the hallway, telling us to get to sleep, no fooling around.
    The light on the stairway was left on, bright enough for a hospital. Kerry put his hand out and showed me two cookies, the packaged kind known as Fudge Ripple. “Here. She thinks I ate them.”
    I took one and Kerry the other, and we sucked the last bit of sweetness from them.
    Oh she hated me. She really did. Because I was female, or because I had a mouth on me, or a face that showed my mistrust, or all of that. The why didn’t matter. We were enemies. The next day she started in on me, giving me chores to do that I had no chance of doing right, things like going over the heavy furniture with a rag and a can of wax, or adding water to the cottage cheese cartons that fed her fussy African violets. Andevery time I did something wrong, I would be punished with an extra chore. “Why doesn’t Kerry have to do anything?” I asked, and Mrs. Wojo said it was because he had the pinkeye, though by then I had it too, or later because he complained of a stomachache, or some other invention. And because we were treated this unequally, and because we were only children, after a time Kerry began to lord it over me and behave as if I deserved no better.
    The DCFS woman came by that next afternoon with the paper sacks full of our clothing. We hate it here, I told her. We want to go home. But the DCFS woman was used to children who said such things, because of course the children hated these places they had been sent to, it was understandable.
    Kerry and I were seated at the