True Colors by Natalie Kinsey-Warnock

garage, too.
    “They may have died,” Hannah said. “She’s so small and thin she may not have had enough milk to feed them.”
    That made me feel sad.
    “I wish she’d let me pet her,” I said.
    “Give her time,” Hannah said. “She has to learn to trust you.”
    “How could someone just leave her?” I asked. It was the same question I wanted to ask the woman who’d left me in Hannah’s kettle ten and a half years ago.
    “Some folks don’t think of anything but themselves,” Hannah said. “There’s lots of glundies in this world.”
    Glundie
is another word for “fool.” So are
gowk, coof, dobbie
, and
tattie. Tattie
also means “potatoes,” and we had tatties and neeps many nights for supper. Neeps are turnips. I didn’t care for turnips, and neither did Nadine, but she loved saying
tatties
and
neeps
. Nadine loved Hannah’s Scottish words (“She’s even better than ‘It Pays to Increase Your Word Power,’ ” Nadine said), and she’d giggle every morning when, instead of calling us lazybones, Hannah would holler up the stairs, “Up, you twosnoofmadrunes!” I liked the Scottish words, too. Maybe it was because I didn’t have to spell them.
    Thinking about those Scottish words gave me an idea. I’d been wondering what I’d give Nadine for her birthday (not having any money meant my presents always had to be homemade). Mrs. Tilton had said she needed a Scottish dictionary to understand me and Hannah; I’d make Nadine a dictionary of Scottish words!

chapter 10

    It was just the four of us for Nadine’s birthday. “An all-girls party,” Mrs. Tilton said, and Nadine smiled, but it was her fake smile, and I knew she was upset that her dad wasn’t there. I knew that Keith was over in Korea, but I’d thought Mr. Tilton would at least show up. He’d never missed her birthday before.
    Because Mr. Tilton and Keith weren’t there, Nadine’s birthday was more low-key than usual. Mrs. Tilton made pigs in a blanket for supper, and Hannah made vanilla ice cream. She used twelve eggs in the recipe, and cream from our cows. She added wild strawberries right at the end. Nadine seemed more like her old self as she and I took turns churning the ice cream, cranking until our arms ached, but we forgot all about the ache when we spooned the ice cream off the dasher. If there’s anything better than eating homemade strawberry ice cream with yourbest friend on a hot summer night, I don’t know what it is.
    “Let’s play charades,” Nadine said. We did radio shows (Nadine wanted us to do television shows, but since we didn’t have a television—no one did in Vermont—Hannah and I didn’t know any of those shows). For
Jack Armstrong
, first I pretended to jack up a car, and then I bent my arm and pointed to my muscle. Nadine did
The Shadow
by walking along and pointing to the ground behind her. Mrs. Tilton did
Queen for a Day
by doing a curtsy, and I thought we might die laughing when Hannah, trying to get us to say
Tarzan
, beat her chest with her fists and Mrs. Tilton yelled, “King Kong!”
    Hannah suggested we do some movies (“Have you seen
The African Queen
yet?” Mrs. Tilton asked. “Bogart and Hepburn are wonderful together.” “No,” said Hannah, “I’ve been waiting for it to get here”), but Nadine was impatient to open her presents.
    Nadine opened mine first. I was surprised how nervous I was when I handed it to her. I’d spent hours on it. Hannah’d had to help me with the spellings and definitions. I’d put in all my favorites. There was
grumpie
(“a pig”),
grumple
(“to feel with your fingers”—so I guess you could grumple your grumpie!),
paddock-pony
(“a tadpole”), and two dog ones:
snooker
(“someone who smells objects like a dog”) and
haisk
(“to make a noise like a dog when you’ve got something stuck in your throat”). And
shamble-shankit
(“havingcrooked legs”) and
glyde
(“an old horse”—which meant Dolly was a shamble-shankit