CHAPTER 1

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Nazis!

Bernadette and I scream and duck. Crouching behind the wall of our fort, we both grab a snowball in each hand and wait for the attack.

Silence.

Bernadette peeks over the top of the fort and drops back down. It’s taken us two hours of rolling and stacking snow boulders and smashing handfuls of snow between the cracks to set the stage for our war. Scarves snake around our heads and mouths, but we still manage to exchange glances.

“Where’s Artie?” I ask, pulling my scratchy scarf down over my raw cheeks so I can talk like a normal person and not someone who’s being gagged. The red scarf is wrapped around my head three times. My face is probably red, too. Even my lips are chapped. I put the scarf back over my mouth gently.

“I don’t want to be a Nazi,” Artie screams from behind the garage.

“You have to be a Nazi,” Bernadette screams back. “You’re the enemy.” Bernadette has no trouble talking through her scarf. Her voice would stab through steel.

“I want to be Al Capone,” Artie screams.

“You need to be badder than Al Capone,” Bernadette yells. “You need to be a Nazi.”

“I don’t want to.”

“You have to.”

Artie is Bernadette’s little brother. He’s only in fourth grade, and we’re in sixth, so she thinks she can boss him into anything she wants. Well, the truth is, Bernadette can practically boss anybody into anything. Bossy goes in Bernadette the way gas goes in a car. It’s what makes her run and what makes others run out of her way.

Except it looks like Artie doesn’t want to be bossed into being a Nazi.

Artie and Bernadette are different in every way. Bernadette’s tall for her age and slim with a perfect blond ponytail that never falls. Artie has brown hair that constantly drips into his eyes. Dad says he looks like a fireplug on wheels. About the only thing they have in common is that neither one of them likes to be bossed around.

I am not as tall or as blond as Bernadette, or as stocky as Artie. Basically, I am medium. I rock back on my rubber boots and realize my toes are like stones inside the layers of my socks. No feeling at all.

Artie and Bernadette hurl arguments back and forth at one another. Yes. No. YES! NO!

As the fighting continues, I notice a man standing with his hands in his pockets, watching us. It’s not Mr. Anderson or Mr. Papadopoulos. On my knees, I crawl to the side of the fort and sneak a look around the side. I squint through my breath clouds. It is not Mr. Ferguson or Mr. Henry. The man is wearing a jacket zipped up to the neck and a black cap with a button on top. It’s pulled down so I can’t see his eyes. He stands with one hand on his hip, and then he drops it and clasps both hands behind his back.

He’s not Mr. Schwartz. Mr. Schwartz has a belly like a beach ball. I would know him a thousand miles away. This man isn’t shaped like anyone I’ve ever seen before. He’s thinish and not too tall. The wind blows against his pants, and I can almost see the outline of his legs. A man in a black cap. Just standing and staring.

I know everyone in our neighborhood, and I have never seen this man before. “Hey, Bernadette,” I reach to tap her leg, trying to get her attention. “Who’s that?”

But Bernadette can’t hear me because she’s too busy hollering at her brother. I’ve known Artie and Bernadette my entire life, so I know they can fight like this for hours, even though she usually wins.

“Bernadette!” I whisper-scream.

“Look,” I say, and she finally does, but the man’s gone. Vanished. Without pausing to even look at me, she hollers, “Artie, you better listen to me, or else.”

“No!” Artie screams.

My fingers are cold. I drop my snowballs and clap my hands together.

Bernadette climbs up on one of the fort walls. “Al Capone never had a fort, dumbhead. This is war. We’re the good guys. You’re the bad guy. That makes you a Nazi.” She puts her hands on her hips.

Artie shows himself from his hiding place behind the garage. He pitches a snowball straight at nothing.

“You promised to be the bad guy and you’re going to be a Nazi. I said so,” Bernadette yells.

“I’m cold,” I say. This argument is going nowhere, and I’m molding into an ice cube. I can feel myself getting crispy around the edges. I peer over the fort’s wall, my head like a periscope with a pink pom pom on top. But the man’s still gone, disappeared as if aliens snatched him up.

“You can’t be cold.” Bernadette looks down at me. “We haven’t even started yet.” Frost forms a circle on her scarf in front of her mouth. It jumps up and down when she talks, like a bouncing ball in a sing-along cartoon. She’s also wearing earmuffs, and a pointed hat tied in a tight bow beneath her chin. The only part of Bernadette I can actually see are her eyeballs. I know I look exactly the same. Artie, too. In fact, if you lined us up against the wall, you couldn’t tell us apart unless you knew our hats.

“Look.” I point. Artie is stamping snow off his boots on the Fergusons’ back porch and pulling the door open. “Artie’s going in.” Without saying so, I am glad he’s quit because I want to go in, too. I don’t tell Bernadette this. It’s easier to just let her be mad at Artie.

“Fine,” says Bernadette, with a hard clomp of one foot on the soft white snow. “Commie!” she yells at her brother.

“Commies aren’t Nazis,” I say as I stand up and try to slap away the teeny snowballs grabbing onto my woolen pants as if they’ve grown roots.

Most commies are Russians. Nazis are German. Commies are communists. Reds. Pinkos. They’re all the same thing. Except when the communists are Chinese. Then they’re the red devils. But wherever they come from, commies are definitely not Nazis.

“What do you know?” Bernadette asks. “Big zero, that’s what. Why am I friends with you?”

“Uh-oh,” I say, looking past Bernadette.

“Don’t pull tricks on me, Marjorie. Your tricks are as dumb as you are.”

There’s no use talking to Bernadette when she gets like this, so I just start walking. When I notice that Mrs. Fisher isn’t even wearing a sweater, I start to run.

The winter sun, which was bright white all afternoon, is starting to dim. It’s been one of the coldest winters since weathermen started measuring snowflake piles and temperatures. Even though it’s almost March, it’s still cold enough to freeze your eyelashes off. There had been just enough warmth in the sun to make good packing for our snow fort, but clouds are beginning to pull a shade down in the sky. A whiff of night air sneaks inside my coat and down my spine as I hurry.

“Didn’t your mother ever teach you that it’s rude to walk away when someone is talking to you?” Bernadette calls after me. Then she sees why I’m running, and she starts running, too. We both catch up to Mrs. Fisher at the same time. Her short gray hair is whipping around in the wind and she’s wearing a pink, flowered housedress that hangs almost to her ankles. In the clear, cold air, she smells sour, like yesterday’s unwashed lunchbox.

“Cheese and crackers, Mrs. Fisher! What are you doing out here in your slippers? Where’s your coat?” Bernadette tries to take Mrs. Fisher’s arm, but she jerks it away.

“Don’t touch my baby,” Mrs. Fisher cries, hugging her bundle so close to her chest that it almost disappears.

“Nobody wants to take your baby, Mrs. Fisher. We just want to take you home,” I say. I pull my scarf away from my face, “See, it’s me, Marjorie.”

Mrs. Fisher used to call me her little blond angel when I was young. That was before my hair turned the color of playground dirt and she started wandering around cuddling a baby doll. Still, I’m sure she remembers me.

“Have you seen my Tommy?” Mrs. Fisher asks.

“Tommy’s not here,” Bernadette says. “You have to go in.”

“Mom!” We hear Sandy Fisher calling her mother from their front porch.

“Viola! Viola!” Mr. Fisher calls, as he runs up to us from behind. He’s carrying an afghan in his hands, and he throws it around his wife’s shoulders as soon as he reaches us.

“Where’s Tommy?” Mrs. Fisher asks in a soft, crying voice.

“Tommy’s gone, Viola,” Mr. Fisher says, patting her shoulder.

“Tommy’s gone?”

“Thank you, girls,” Mr. Fisher says to us. “I’ll take her home now.”

The snow and dimming light quiet the world so completely that even after we turn toward our houses, we can hear Mr. Fisher talking quietly with his wife.

“Tommy’s in heaven, Viola, you know that.”

“Can’t we go get him back?” Mrs. Fisher asks. She is finally letting herself be led home. “Soldiers with guns, can’t they go and bring him back?”

Their voices soften into the deepening shadows.

“She’s never going to get any better carrying that stupid rubber doll around with her all the time,” Bernadette says, and she’s not talking under her breath.

“Shh,” I say. Even though we are headed away from the Fishers, I’m afraid they can hear us.

“My mother says she’s as crazy as a squirrel on gasoline, and it doesn’t help that her family just lets her believe that worn-out doll is her Tommy and that he didn’t get killed in the war.”

“It’s not good that Mrs. Fisher just walked outside like that in this weather,” I say. Luckily, everyone in the neighborhood keeps an eye out for her. “Last summer when Mom found her sitting on our porch, they had coffee. Mom said Mrs. Fisher might be coming around to be more like her old self.”

“Wasn’t that the time she went outside in just her slip?”

I shrug. I want to think that Mrs. Fisher is coming around, so I don’t answer Bernadette because I don’t want to argue. I just want to picture Mrs. Fisher smiling and waving from the porch instead of wandering the neighborhood in a slip, cradling a naked baby doll.

“I’m still mad at you, Marjorie,” Bernadette says when we arrive back at the fort.

“Why?”

“You took Artie’s side, that’s why.”

I don’t understand why Bernadette’s so mad at Artie or me. Russian, German, Chinese. They’re all enemies. Italians can be enemies, too, but only if they’re Mafia guys like Al Capone. Otherwise, Italians are nice, like Mrs. Lotenero, the secretary at school who keeps butterscotch candy in her top drawer.

Bernadette’s mom is Irish Catholic and she has big opinions about people, especially Italians and Lutherans. According to her, Italians are nothing but nasty, ripe olives who smell like garlic. I’m not sure what she has against Lutherans, but she likes to put her foot down about them coming over to her house. We are holidays-only Presbyterians, so she’s never put her foot down on me.

As far as I’m concerned, Nazis, commies, or Mafia Italians are all bad enough to have a snowball fight with. Maybe not Lutherans, but the rest are, for sure.

“It’s just a snowball fight,” I say.

Bernadette’s looking at me with skinny eyes.

“This is our best fort ever,” I say, not to just change the subject, but because it’s true. The snow is packed so solid it’s going to be standing until the tulips come up and it shrinks to a white U with green grass all around it. But Bernadette is in no mood for standing around admiring our fort.

“You think you’re so smart,” she says. Bernadette gives the fort a whopper of a kick, but it doesn’t move or even crack a little. It’s like ice. I can tell Bernadette is even madder now that she’s slammed her toe into a frozen wall.

“Ouch,” I say. “You okay?”

She is not okay, but she won’t admit it. She growls, hands in fists, and limps toward her house and then turns back and points her snow-covered mitten at me.

“You better watch it with your red scarf, Marjorie. People are going to think you’re a commie, too.”