Wishing for Tomorrow

Wishing for Tomorrow

OnCe upOn a time there was a City.

In the city there was a square.

In the square there was a house.

It belonged to two sisters, Miss Maria Minchin and Miss Amelia Minchin.

From the street the house looked very much like all the other houses in the square. Tall and narrow and respectable, with servants in the basement, faces at the windows, and sparrows on the roof. If anything made it a little different from its neighbors, it was the faces at the windows. There were so many of them, and they looked out so often, and they were all girls.

The house was a school, a boarding school for girls.

There were little ones, bouncing up to wave to anybody passing in the road below. There were big ones, telling secrets and using the windowpane reflections to admire their hair. (Mirrors were very rare in the Miss Minchins’

house, and the few that existed had such thick, cheap glass that even the prettiest, healthiest people looked like they had been recently drowned in green water.)

And as well as the little girls and the big girls there was Ermengarde, who was too shy to wave, and never told secrets or admired her reflection (having been brought up to believe she was plain). Ermengarde gazed out of the windows more than anyone, and her eyes were always wide and expectant, as if she was waiting for the answer to a question, or the end of a story. Often she took no part in the gossiping, whispering, schoolroom world around her. Sometimes she didn’t even listen.

Eight-year-old Lottie always listened.

Lottie was officially a little one, but it was the school’s older students who interested her most. Lavinia, for instance, an unpredictable girl with a sharp and lovely face, and a way of glancing through half-closed eyes that even her best friend Jessica found slightly scary.

Lavinia was the most interesting girl in the school, decided Lottie. Jessica was the prettiest. Gertrude was the rudest. Ermengarde . . .

“Ermengarde is a nonentity,” said Lavinia.

“She is a plod,” agreed Jessica, and it was true that Ermengarde did not shine at anything, not lessons, nor games, nor jokes, nor stories round the fire. She had one skill, however: She was very quick and deft at freeing insects that were trapped against the glass.

“Once there was a butterfly,” said Lottie. “But it is

usually just bluebottles . . .” “Disgusting things,” said Lavinia. “. . . or wasps.” “I’m sure you’re supposed to kill wasps,” said Jessie. Ermengarde never took any notice of these remarks.

It was something she loved to do, to release the desperate buzzing into an airy silence. She would have released all the faces at the windows too, if she could, even including the stinging Lavinia.

Ermengarde did not think the Miss Minchins’ house was a good place to be.

Text copyright © 2009 by Hilary McKay. Maland Originally published in Great Britain in 2009 by Hodder Children’s Books Published by arrangement with Hodder Children’s Books First U.S. edition, 2010 All rights reserved,