Bookworm
"Pole!" The librarian's voice was a mix of outrage and desperation. "What on earth have you done to this book?"
With a look of disgust she stared at the mud-splattered dirty volume in the hand of the girl who was standing in front of her desk, pale and wide-eyed.
Jill remembered…
Finally, she had found it on the library shelves, and it seemed like a small miracle to her that Peter Pan even existed in the library of Experiment House at all – after all, Experiment House prided itself on its 'modern critical attitude' as they liked to call it, and this meant they did not encourage books about fairies or boys that didn't want to grow up. She could hardly believe her luck, and she took the book out happily, even if the librarian gave her a disapproving look when she presented it for check-out.
After an unpleasant school day – not particularly unpleasant, quite ordinary in fact, with the usual teasing because of her clothing, her way of talking, or her appearance in general that she had become used to during the last couple of weeks, but certainly far from pleasant, either, -she put on the plain (her classmates used to call it shabby) jumper that her mother had knitted for her last Christmas (hand-made clothing was particularly looked down upon by the students of Experiment House), took her book and went down to the playground, where she sat down on a log apart from the others and began to read.
Soon she was so immersed in the tale of Wendy – even if she found her a bit too docile and too absorbed in her part of little mother, - that the noise of the other children around her receded from her mind and she could picture herself in the jungles of Neverland, on board of the pirate ship and in the cave of the lost boys. And she shivered with apprehension when Tinker Bell drank Peter's poisoned medicine. She read,
Do you believe?
Something wet and squashy hit her in the head, dirt splattered the pages of the book as it slid from her lap onto the wet grass. She jumped up, and when she had managed to wipe the mud from her eyes she saw the group of children standing around her in a circle, grinning nastily.
"Oi, bookworm!" a boy from her own year called Scrubb yelled as he slung another handful of mud at her narrowly missing her face, but fully hitting the book at her feet. The others jeered.
"Go home, bookworm!" they shouted and soon the air was full of fistfuls of mud as Jill grabbed her book and frantically sprinted towards the main building and her dormitory.
The laughter of the others kept ringing in her ears.
On her bed, she spread out the soiled book, trying to wipe it clean with her handkerchief, but just smearing the dirt all over it even more in the attempt. Tears sprang from her eyes as she surveyed the damage.
"Oh my, what shall I do?"
"There's one thing you'd better NOT do," Adela Pennyfather, who had just entered, said in a low threatening voice. "You know what we think of blabbing to teachers…"
"I'm really sorry, ma'am," Jill said to the librarian, and her voice was shaking. "I should have been more careful, I know… it's all my fault…"
"All right," the librarian said, moved by Jill's distress. "It's not that it's a very good book, anyway, so I guess it isn't such a great loss after all… But you must promise to take better care in future. Just imagine if it had been Modern Ways of Understanding Algebra …"
"Yes, ma'am," Jill muttered as she turned away.