Anastasia at This Address by Lois Lowry Page A

into the camera and holding Daphne's cat. She looked at it carefully and decided she didn't look
too
bad, though she was wearing a sweatshirt that said CHARGE! across the front, with a picture of a MasterCard beneath the letters.
    She made a face and set it aside. She didn't want Septimus Smith to think that she was into shopping. She didn't even
like
shopping, except at yard sales, where you could sometimes get neat stuff for a dollar.
    Anastasia swept the group of snapshots back into the drawer and went downstairs.
    Sam was already in bed, and her parents were in the living room. Her father was reading the newspaper, and her mother was sewing a patch on the knee of Sam's blue jeans.
    "May I look at the photograph album?" Anastasia asked.
    "Sure," her mother said. "You don't need to ask permission for stuff like that. It's on the bottom shelf beside the fireplace, in the study."
    Anastasia brought the dark green leather album back to the living room, sprawled on the floor, and began to turn the pages from the back to the front. Her father glanced over. "I wonder why we always look at some things backwards," he commented. "I always leaf through
Time
magazine from back to front."
    "It would be the right direction if we were Japanese," Anastasia pointed out. "I wonder if Japanese people read
Time
magazine from front to back."
    "Well," said her father, wrinkling his nose to adjust his glasses, "we'll have to ask a Japanese person sometime." He looked back down at the
Boston Globe.
    "I read some things in little jumps," Mrs. Krupnik said.
    Anastasia's father looked up again. "
Little jumps?
" he asked.
    Mrs. Krupnik nodded. "Like
War and Peace,
" she explained. "I only read the peace parts. I jumped from one peace part to the next. I never read the war parts."
    Myron Krupnik put his newspaper down on the coffee table. It was extremely rare for him to put the
Boston Globe
down once he had picked it up. He stared at his wife. "You never read the war parts in
War and Peace?
" he asked in amazement.
    She smiled and turned the leg of Sam's jeans around so that she could start on the next side of the patch. "No," she said. "I hate war parts."
    "Me too," Anastasia said. "I hate war parts. I skipped the war parts in
Johnny Tremain.
Look, you guys, here's a nudie picture of Sam having a bath when he was two."
    "Isn't that sweet?" Mrs. Krupnik said affectionately, leaning over to see.
    Anastasia's father rolled his eyes. "I can't believe that you two—" he began.
    "Oh, look at this!" Anastasia exclaimed. "I love this picture of me because I look like a werewolf. See how the flash gave me red eyeballs? Just like a werewolf."
    Her mother chuckled, and her father picked up the newspaper again with a sigh.
    I can't send Septimus Smith a werewolf picture, Anastasia thought. She turned the pages slowly backward through the album. There was Sam, wrapped in a blanket, the day they brought him home from the hospital after he was born.
    There was her mother, pregnant with Sam, laughing and pointing at her own big belly. Anastasia peered intently at her mother's face in that photograph. Weird. Her mother looked like
her,
only older, of course, and pregnant.
    What she
wanted
was a picture of herself looking mature. Her mother's face was exactly right. Maybe she could—no. Septimus Smith definitely would not be thrilled with a picture of a pregnant lady.
    She flipped the pages again.
    "I think I look pretty mature in this picture, don't you?" She pointed to a snapshot of herself with her hair gathered up into a bun on the top of her head.
    Her mother looked. "Yeah. With your hair up that way, you looked very mature for an eight-year-old. You looked at least nine."
    At least
nine. Great.
Anastasia pictured Septimus Smith looking intently at the snapshot and thinking, Wow. Swifty looks at least nine. I think I'll invite her to the Caribbean for a week.
    As she continued turning pages, she grew younger and younger, smaller and smaller, in the