Little Women and Me (34 page)

But that was all about to change …

Miss Crocker invited Jo to escort her to a lecture on the Pyramids that was being given as a People’s Course.

I couldn’t even remember who Miss Crocker was when Jo told us about it, but then, straining memory, I remembered she was the family friend who’d come to dine with us that time Marmee tricked us all into being bored with our leisure, the same day that Jo put salt on the strawberries and Beth’s canary, Pip, had died.

Funny thing about living in Marchville. You could meet someone who was supposed to be a close family friend and then not have them show up again for another four years.

Anyway, Miss Crocker had invited Jo to escort her, Jo had said yes, and Jo was very happy about it.

“It shall be good to do something different for a change,” Jo said.

That did sound appealing.

“Can I come too?” I asked.

“No,” Jo said, “you weren’t invited.”

I thought about fighting her on it. It was a free lecture, after all, open to the public—
I
was the public! But—eh—I just wasn’t up for all the dramarama.

So I let her go.

I’d planned on ignoring Jo when she got back. After all, if I wasn’t welcome, what did I care about the Pyramids anyway? Besides which, the Pyramids were just big sandy triangles in the desert; it’s not like there was anything new to say about them.

But when Jo came in, she was bouncing around like a pinball, she was so excited. “Must’ve been some lecture,” I said. “Did someone discover a fourth Pyramid or something?”

“Oh, who cares about that?” Jo said. Then she pulled something from a pocket of her skirt. It was a crumpled article that she’d torn from a newspaper. Smoothing the creases, she handed it to me. “Read this!”

I read.

The newspaper was sponsoring a contest. The winner would receive a grand prize of one hundred dollars—a small fortune
around here. The only thing the winner had to do was write the most sensational story of all those submitted.

“A boy at the lecture gave me the newspaper to read while we were waiting for it to start,” Jo went on enthusiastically. “And I had the chance to read one of the stories they regularly print before I even knew about the contest. The story was positively dreadful! I know I could do better than that. But the boy said the author was extremely popular.”

“Who was the author?” I asked. If the author was extremely popular, maybe I’d heard of him or her in my previous life. I strained to recall popular authors from the late 1800s, but the only one I could think of at the moment was: “Louisa May Alcott?” I guessed.

“Who?” Jo’s puzzled expression quickly turned to typical annoyance as she shook her head at me. “No, it was Mrs. S.L.A.N.G. Northbury.”

“Of course,” I said, as though I’d known all along. It was crazy the strange names people came up with around here. Mrs. Northbury’s first name was as bad as Blank Hospital when Papa was sick down in Washington. But then I realized that Evelina Massachusetts, the pseudonym I’d chosen to be published under in
The Eagle
that one time, was right up there.

“You can’t possibly have ever heard of Mrs. Northbury,” Jo began to object, “when
I
have never even heard of her before tonight!” She shook her head again. “But never mind that now. I am going to enter this contest
and
I am going to win it.”

“Oh?” I asked innocently. “And have you decided yet what your winning sensational story is going to be about?”

“
Yes
.” Jo’s eyes shone. “It will be about romance and despair, there will be an earthquake,
and
”—here she paused dramatically
as though waiting for an invisible drummer to add a roll—“it will all take place in …
Lisbon
.”

“My, that does sound sensational,” I said.

But inside I was thinking:

Bring. It. On.

Jo completed her sensational story about romance, despair, an earthquake, and Lisbon, and sent it off with a prayer. Meanwhile I brushed off “A Woman from the Future”—the story I’d originally written for
The Eagle
—adding to the original story about a teenager who time travels from the twenty-first century to the 1800s. Then I sent mine off too, and I even used my real name this time, but without the prayer.

I figured I didn’t need it because I had the most sensational story going.

We waited six long weeks to hear the results of the contest. Jo waited loudly, because everyone knew she’d entered—even the milkman had to listen to her go on about it!—while I waited in silence, because no one knew I had.

At last, after we’d both given up on winning—Jo loudly, I silently—an envelope arrived.

“
Emily
won the writing contest?” Amy all but shrieked.

I couldn’t believe it—my story chosen as the best! It was the most excited I’d felt about anything in a long time. One hundred dollars? Around here, I could probably buy my own house for that kind of money!

“Here,” Amy said as the others gathered around, “let me see that story.”

She read, moving her lips, as the others read over her shoulder, not moving theirs at all.

“But this is that story that appeared in
The Eagle
years ago!” Amy all but shrieked again. “
You
were Evelina Massachusetts?”

I nodded modestly.

“You never should have done this,” Amy said, thrusting the sheets back at me.

“Ex
cuse
me?”

“Writing about time travel, giving people all sorts of crazy ideas—it’s dangerous.”

What an odd thing to say. “What are you talking about?” I demanded.

“Never mind that now,” Jo said, her face solemn as she took a step toward me. “Congratulations, Emily,” she said, thrusting her hand out. “I didn’t even know that you
could
write, but apparently the best woman won. And that’s as it should be.” Her expression turned to sad puzzlement then. “Funny, though. I was almost certain I would win.”

That’s because you were supposed to
, I was tempted to say, remembering how it went down in the book.

I took Jo’s hand then and gave it a firm shake, but all the excitement at winning had gone out of my body. Somehow I’d altered the story of
Little Women
just enough to steal victory from her.

I should never have won that stupid contest. Jo should have.

Once the moment had passed and everyone had congratulated me, people wanted to know what I would do with my winnings.

Everyone had ideas.

Me, I wasn’t so sure. There were so many possibilities!

“New things for my wardrobe so that I can be more fashionable like Amy?” I mused aloud, completely forgetting my earlier conclusion that Jo’s attitude was the superior one, that surfaces didn’t matter. Then I grew really excited. “I could buy a lot of new books!”

“New books would be wonderful,” Jo said, but for once she didn’t sound enthusiastic, even though books were usually her favorite material thing in the world.

“Well, what would you’ve done with the money if you’d won?” I asked.

She didn’t even have to think about it, which told me she’d already thought this out in advance. “I’d give the money to Beth and Marmee so that they could go to the seaside for a month or two. It would do them both a world of good.”

Beth and Marmee immediately made noises about how they couldn’t possibly accept such a thing, even though Jo had no financial power to offer it, but I saw Jo was right. I may have interfered with who won the contest, but the same good stuff could still come from the winnings.

“Yes,” I said. “That’s exactly the thing to do with the money.”

“I’m giving up writing,” Jo announced as Beth and Marmee packed the next day. Back home, going on vacation took some real planning, but here, apparently, you could decide you were going away and—poof!—you were gone.

Too bad it didn’t work that way for time travel.

“What do you mean, give up writing?” I said in a more scornful voice than I’d intended. “You can’t give up writing. You’re Jo March. It’s who you are! It’s what you do!”

“It’s who I
was
and what I
did
,” Jo said. “But not anymore. Why, if I can’t even win a simple contest against
you
…”