Donna Tartt - The Little Friend

World Geography Alexandria Academy

Duncan Hely Hull September 4

The two continests that form a continuos land mass Eurge and Asic

The one half of the earth above the equtor is called the Northern .

Why is it standerd units of mesurament needed ?

If a theory is the best available explanation of some part of nature ?

There are four parts to a Map .

These Harriet examined with affectionate contempt. Several times she had considered tearing the page out, but over time it had come to seem part of the notebook’s personality, best left undisturbed.

She turned the page, to where her own notations, in pencil, began. These were mostly lists. Lists of books she’d read, and books she wanted to read, and of poems she knew by heart; lists of presents she’d got for birthday and Christmas, and who they were from; lists of places she’d visited (nowhere very exotic) and lists of places she wanted to go (Easter Island, Antarctica, Machu Picchu, Nepal). There were lists of people she admired: Napoleon and Nathan Bedford Forrest, Genghis Khan and Lawrence of Arabia, Alexander the Great and Harry Houdini and Joan of Arc. There was a whole page of complaints about sharing a room with Allison. There were lists of vocabulary words—Latin and English—and an inept Cyrillic alphabet which she’d done her laborious best to copy from the encyclopedia one afternoon when she had nothing else to do. There were also several letters Harriet had written, and never sent, to various people she did not like. There was one to Mrs. Fountain, and another to her detested fifth-grade teacher, Mrs. Beebe. There was also one to Mr. Dial. In an attempt to kill two birds with one stone, she’d written it in a labored, curlicued hand that looked like Annabel Arnold’s.

Dear Mr. Dial (it began.)

I am a young lady of your acquaintance who has admired you in secret for some time. I am so crazy about you I can hardly get to sleep. I know that I am very young, and there is Mrs. Dial, too, but perhaps we can arrange a meeting some evening out behind Dial Chevrolet. I have prayed over this letter, and the Lord has told me that Love is the answer. I will write again soon. Please do not show this letter to any body. p.s. I think you might know who this is. Love, your secret Valentine !

At the bottom Harriet had pasted a tiny picture of Annabel Arnold that she’d cut out of the newspaper next to an enormous, jaundiced head of Mr. Dial she’d found in the Yellow Pages—his pop-eyes goggling with enthusiasm and his head aburst in a corona of cartoon stars above which a jangle of frantic black letters screamed:

WHERE QUALITY COMES FIRST!

LOW DOWN PAYMENT!

Looking at these letters now gave Harriet the idea of actually sending Mr. Dial a threatening note, in misspelled baby printing, purporting to be from Curtis Ratliff. But this, she decided, tapping her pencil against her teeth, would be unfair to Curtis. She wished Curtis no harm, especially after his attack on Mr. Dial.

She turned the page, and on a fresh sheet of orange paper, wrote:

Goals for Summer

Harriet Cleve Dufresnes

Restlessly, she stared at this. Like the woodcutter’s child at the beginning of a fairy tale, a mysterious longing had possessed her, a desire to travel far and do great things; and though she could not say exactly what it was she wanted to do, she knew that it was something grand and gloomy and extremely difficult.

She turned back several pages, to the list of people she admired: a preponderance of generals, soldiers, explorers, men of action all. Joan of Arc had led armies when she was hardly older than Harriet. Yet, for Christmas last year, Harriet’s father had given Harriet an insulting board game for girls called What Shall I Be ? It was a particularly flimsy game, meant to offer career guidance but no matter how well you played, it offered only four possible futures: teacher, ballerina, mother, or nurse.

The possible, as it was presented in her Health textbook (a mathematical progression of dating, “career,” marriage, and motherhood), did not interest Harriet. Of all the heroes on her list, the greatest of them all was Sherlock Holmes, and he wasn’t even a real person. Then there was Harry Houdini. He was a master of the impossible; more importantly, for Harriet, he was a master of escape . No prison in the world could hold him: he escaped from straitjackets, from locked trunks dropped in fast rivers and from coffins buried six feet underground.

And how had he done it? He wasn’t afraid . Saint Joan had galloped out with the angels on her side but Houdini had mastered fear on his own. No divine aid for him; he’d taught himself the hard way how to beat back panic, the horror of suffocation and drowning and dark. Handcuffed in a locked trunk in the bottom of a river, he squandered not a heartbeat on being afraid, never buckled to the terror of the chains and the dark and the icy water; if he became lightheaded, for even a moment, if he fumbled at the breathless labor before him—somersaulting along the river-bed, head over heels—he would never come up from the water alive.

A training program. This was Houdini’s secret. He’d immersed himself in daily tubs of ice, swum immense distances underwater, practiced holding his breath until he could hold it for three minutes. And while the tubs of ice were impossible, the swimming and the breath-holding—this she could do.

She heard her mother and sister coming in the front door, her sister’s plaintive voice, unintelligible. Quickly she hid the notebook and ran downstairs.

“Don’t say Hate, honey,” said Charlotte absent-mindedly to Allison. The three of them were sitting around the dining-room table in their Sunday dresses, eating the chicken that Ida had left for their lunch.

Allison, with her hair falling in her face, sat staring at her plate, chewing a slice of lemon from her iced tea. Though she’d sawed apart her food energetically enough, and shoved it back and forth across her plate, and piled it up in unappetizing heaps (a habit of hers that drove Edie crazy), she’d eaten very little of it.

“I don’t see why Allison can’t say Hate, Mother,” said Harriet. “Hate is a perfectly good word.”

“It’s not polite.”

“It says Hate in the Bible. The Lord hateth this and the Lord hateth that. It says it practically on every page.”

“Well, don’t you say it.”

“All right, then,” Allison burst out. “I detest Mrs. Biggs.” Mrs. Biggs was Allison’s Sunday school teacher.

Charlotte, through her tranquilized fog, was mildly surprised. Allison was usually such a timid, gentle girl. Such crazy talk about hating people was more the kind of thing you expected from Harriet.

“Now, Allison,” she said. “Mrs. Biggs is a sweet old thing. And she’s a friend of your aunt Adelaide’s.”

Allison—raking her fork listlessly through her disordered plate—said: “I still hate her.”

“That’s no good reason to hate somebody, honey, just because they wouldn’t pray in Sunday school for a dead cat.”

“Why not? She made us pray that Sissy and Annabel Arnold would win the twirling contest.”

Harriet said: “Mr. Dial made us pray for that, too. It’s because their father is a deacon.”

Carefully, Allison balanced the slice of lemon on the edge of her plate. “I hope they drop one of those fire batons,” she said. “I hope the place burns down.”

“Listen, girls,” said Charlotte vaguely, in the silence that followed. Her mind—never fully engaged with the business of the cat and the church and the twirling competition—had already drifted on to something else. “Have y'all been down to the Health Center yet to get your typhoid shots?”