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Show 108 When all our shoes and stockings were off, Ada and her followers just sat and stared at Rozina's deformed feet. The party was over. They all dressed their feet and left. I stayed with Rozina, sick at heart. "They just wanted to see my feet, " she said sadly. Leonard did not stop persecuting me, though. One day as I was going home for lunch he started throwing rocks at me from his corner across the road. Naturally, I never went up their side of the street. I stopped dead still and faced him, instead of running as he expected me to do. For the whole noon hour I stood rooted to the spot and he threw rocks at me. I hadn't been late or absent the whole year, but I knew I would be if he didn't stop of his own accord. I wouldn't have moved if he had blinded me. Neither one of us got any lunch that day, and finally he began veering his rocks as if all the time he had been aiming at something else than at me. That wasn't enough for me. I still stood until he desisted altogether, picked up his cap and ran for school. I didn't reason it out then, but it worked. He never teased me again and I think I was the one girl in town he came to like. I really came to feel sorry for him, both because his mother teased him so cruelly and because his father beat him so hard we could hear the blows a block away at our house, and him begging: "Oh Pa! Don't'.' In her way Ada had an impact on me, too. She and Emmy Lott, who was almost as old as Eldon, but small and pretty, with spit-fire ways. "Do you always have to take your little sister along?" Emmy complained. She was speaking of Rachel, our prettiest baby since Macel. |
