True Colors Read Online Free

too.
    “Guess Raleigh took care of them himself,” Mr. Gilpin said. “I’m sure it was hard for him, dispatching them. He’s a sensitive person.”
    I wasn’t sure what
dispatching
meant, but I figured it meant that heron and its babies were goners. I couldn’t picture Raleigh dispatching them, either, but he’d taken Mrs. Wells’s hen home to eat, and he’d raised runt pigs for bacon and ham, so he must know how.
    I wished someone could dispatch the Wright brothers.
    With all the excitement, Mr. Gilpin forgot to give me a nickel, so I had to ride home without any penny candy. It was past milking time, and I knew Hannah was waiting forme, but even so, I hesitated when I came to the fork in the road. To the left, I could see our farm, the lights twinkling in the barn where Hannah had probably already started milking. To the right was the lake.
    I turned Dolly toward the lake and headed down the driveway to the Tilton camp. I’d seen a light in their window and knew they’d just arrived for the summer. If I hurried, I could get in a swim with Nadine before chores.

chapter 4

    If the Wright brothers made me see red, with Nadine I was green with envy.
    “Thou shalt not covet” was one of the commandments we’d learned in church, but it didn’t mean anything to me until Hannah told me
covet
meant “to envy.” Yes, I was guilty of that, at least sometimes, but I didn’t want Nadine’s
whole
life, just parts of it.
    I couldn’t remember a time when I
hadn’t
known Nadine, and even though I only saw her in the summer, she was my best friend. Partly, that was because there weren’t any other girls my age in school, and partly, it was because Nadine and I grew up together. Nadine was a year and a half older than me, but the Tiltons had been coming up ever since Nadine and I were babies, so we’d played together all our lives. Every summer, we just picked up where we’d left off, and every summer, Nadine remindedme that there was a whole other world out there beyond northern Vermont. She’d lived in Boston and New York, and now she lived near Washington, D.C. Nadine knew all about skyscrapers and subways and streetlights, things I’d only heard of. She’d visited the White House and the Capitol and the Washington and Lincoln monuments, and she had been to the Smithsonian about a zillion times, where she’d seen Orville and Wilbur Wright’s plane, Charles Lindbergh’s
Spirit of St. Louis
, and a plane like the one Amelia Earhart had been flying when she vanished. (I loved Amelia Earhart. She’d disappeared almost four and a half years before I was born, but even so, sometimes I dreamed that Amelia was my real mama and had left me before she headed off on her round-the-world flight.) Someday I wanted to fly round the world. Nadine had flown lots of places, like Paris and Rome. She’d even been to Hawaii!
    Hannah said Nadine was spoiled. I wished I could be spoiled, too.
    The farthest I’d ever been from home was when Hannah and I took the train up to Newport to Lake Memphremagog and I fell asleep
thinking
I’d seen the ocean.
    Nadine went to a fancy school with hundreds of kids.
    I went to Mud Island School, a one-room schoolhouse. There were only nineteen kids in the whole school, first through eighth grades. When classes started up in September, I’d be the only girl in fifth grade.
    Nadine had after-school classes in ballet, piano, and something called elocution.
    My after-school classes were milking, collecting eggs, filling the woodbox behind the stove, and shoveling snow.
    I’d shown the school to Nadine one day as we were riding Dolly past and doing circus tricks (well,
I
was doing circus tricks—standing up on Dolly’s back and then somersaulting off—but Nadine said I was just being dangerous). Nadine much preferred to pretend we were in the movie
National Velvet
(with Nadine as Elizabeth Taylor, of course). Nadine even looked a little like Elizabeth Taylor, but Dolly didn’t look anything