FIVE
When Josephine awoke, she felt a throbbing ache in her head. She was disoriented, but she knew she was lying on her back. She lifted each leg, one at a time, to make sure they still worked and bent her arms to and fro. Then she twisted her neck, first to the left and then to the right. Nothing seemed broken. She rolled over and soon forgot the pain, for she realized she was lying in an unfamiliar storage cellar. It was an enormous room made of heavy stones, with wood piled in one corner and bags of flour and salt stacked in another. There were wooden barrels full of who-knows-what pushed against one wall and a narrow slit of a window near the ceiling. It let in a paltry amount of light, and shadows, ominous and shifting, peered at her from every nook and cranny.
She had never seen this place before. Maybe she was still asleep and this was a dream? Or could this possibly be part of the shed, some level below the ground that she never knew existed?
She pressed her hands onto the cold floor. She stood, her head pulsating with pain and confusion. And she truly began to panic as she realized that this was not a dream and that she was most definitely not in her shed.
There was a stairway on the far wall that led to a door. She crept toward it, relieved to find that her legs still seemed to function. She advanced up the stairs and then heard voices emerging from behind the door. She was comforted. Surely she could find someone who would explain where she was.
She reached for the doorknob but froze. One of the voices was barking orders. So instead of opening the door, she pressed her ear against it and strained to listen.
“No, no, that’s all wrong! You’re cutting them too thick. Start over. . . . If you let that soup boil over, I’ll be using your bones for stock tomorrow. . . . Ida, if I see you lick your fingers again, I’m going to throw you down those cellar stairs!”
The cellar? Josephine nervously backed away from the door, but it didn’t open. So she pressed her ear back onto the wood and tried to hear more. She felt desperate to know where she was, but this woman sounded frightening and awful. The voice began to screech. “That’s it, Ida, you ant-brained speck of fly dung! Into the cellar!”
Heavy steps crossed the room and a child started to protest. “But I—”
Josephine scurried down the stairs and looked around, panicked, for a place to hide. At the last moment, she crouched behind the sacks of flour and salt. She heard the door open at the top of the stairs and the shrieking voice seemed to fill every pore in Josephine’s skin. “I hope you stole your share of food, Ida, because you won’t be eating again today!”
Josephine heard what sounded like someone being shoved down the stairs, tumbling and thudding, and the door slammed shut. She sat frozen in her hiding place, afraid to make a sound. There was some shuffling and Josephine imagined she was hearing the child stand up. Then the girl started to whistle. It was a happy song and reminded Josephine of something her mother might have sung.
Ida, if Josephine heard correctly, began strolling around the room. She soon neared the sacks of flour and salt. Josephine held her breath because, from what she could hear, the girl was starting to climb the pile of sacks. But her weight proved too much, and the sacks began to fall toward Josephine, who looked up just in time to see a bag of salt careening toward her head. She blocked it with an elbow, and as she did, she made a sound like “Oooaaf.”
The whistling stopped, and Josephine knew at once that the girl had heard her. There was nowhere to run, so she raised herself to full height and adopted her meanest face, gritting her teeth and bugging out her eyes. A second later, the girl came around the pile and discovered Josephine, ready to attack.
Much to Josephine’s embarrassment, the girl laughed.
She was about Josephine’s age, but smaller and thinner, and although there were dark circles under her eyes, she was still striking, with cropped black hair and sharp green eyes. She wore plain cotton clothes she had probably outgrown last spring and no gloves. Her face had an adult quality that Josephine found intimidating.
Finally, the girl stopped giggling and said, “You’re Josephine.”
Josephine was shocked. “Yes . . . but how do you know?”
“Fargus told me all about you.”
“Fargus? I don’t know anyone called Fargus.”
The girl looked at Josephine as if she were as dumb as twigs. “Of course you do. You gave him oatmeal and salty soup.”
“Oh. He never told me his name.” Ignoring the dig at her cooking, Josephine was happy to hear news of her friend. She extricated herself from her shoddy hiding place and approached the girl.
“Well, that’s no surprise. I’m Ida, by the way.”
“Nice to meet you.”
“Fargus is gonna be so mad! He thinks he’s the only one who can find you, and I sure showed him! Ha!” Ida perched herself on top of some fallen sacks. “You look different than I thought you would.”
Josephine looked down at herself. Her once-white shirt was now covered in dirt, and she knew her hair must have been bigger than a garden shrub. Her enormous rubber boots felt absurd, but when she looked back up, Ida was staring at her shiny gloves.
“Why are you wearing those?” she asked bluntly.
Since Ida didn’t know about the mandatory glove law, Josephine surmised she was no longer in her town. She took off the gloves, shoved them into her pocket, and changed the subject.
“Where am I?”
“You don’t know?” Ida crinkled her nose.
“No. I have no idea.”
“Wow. I wish I could forget where I was.”
“I didn’t forget,” she said, frustrated that this bossy little girl seemed to have no sympathy for her plight. “I’ve never been here before.”
Ida tilted her head. “Lucky you.” She raised her arms in a dramatic gesture. “Then I welcome you to the Higgins Institute for Wayward Children and Forsaken Youth, or as I like to call it, the Forsaken Institute for Unwanted Children and Wayward Lice.”
“Who’s that horrible woman who threw you down the stairs?”
“That’s Kitchen Maggie. And she’s not so bad. It’s Stairway Ruth you’ve got to look out for. She’ll beat you for burping.” Ida whispered conspiratorially, “As far as me and Fargus know, she has never gone to the bathroom. Isn’t that bizarre?” She jumped off her flour sack and began to pound a closed fist against her palm. “Kitchen Maggie’s as dense as a rolling pin, easy to play, you know? She thinks she’s punishing me but I think I just got out of kitchen duty.”
Ida then raised both fists, shuffled her feet, and began punching one of the flour sacks, like the boxers Josephine had read about in the paper. Ida smacked the bag with all her might. Josephine had never seen a girl hit anything before, and she was mesmerized.
“We have to find a good hiding place for you. Maggie will pop an eyeball if she finds you here.”
“I really just want to get home—”
Ida stopped punching. She was getting winded. “You can’t leave! Not before Fargus sees you. He’ll never believe me otherwise!”
Fargus. Josephine really did want to see him. “Okay, then. How about I say hello to Fargus and then you show me the way home?”
