Paul said, scowling, that men didn't cry. Only girls and babies cried.

"You're not a man yet, smarty. You're only two years older'n me."

"That's all you know."

"What makes you think you're so much?"

His mouth set. He looked proud and embarrassed at the same time. "None of your business how I know. You're just a sissy girl, you don't know nothing."

"Yeah, big talk. Boys are all dumb."

He had pulled her hair, not teasing like some times, but mad at her the way he got these days. She didn't care, she wasn't scared of Paul. He was her best buddy, her chum ever since she was an ugly little baby and he was a good little boy just talking. Ma said he'd run to tell her every time Kate cried. That seemed funny now, she felt older so much of the time. They stuck up for each other at school, when the other kids made cracks about Pa and his drinking, or the way they dressed or what was in their lunch buckets.

She guessed she liked Paul better than anybody in the world, but she wasn't going to knuckle under to him, all the same.

He was coming in the barn to look for her. She lay shaking with pain and tension, but the corners of her mouth twitched into a smile. Let him find me, she thought. He knew where to look. Let him climb up the ladder and beg me to come in. Serve him right if he's worried.

"Ka-tie!"

Hurting as she was, she couldn't help giggling.

His footsteps echoed across the floor, and stopped. He was coming up the ladder. She scrunched down into the hay and waited, hardly breathing. Then his head showed at the top of the ladder, the hair a brighter brown than hers and sticking up in a cowlick at the parting.

The haymow began to go around and around, sickeningly slow, and the darkness grew deeper.

She screamed.

And woke up in Erika's bed, her face buried in the pillow, the blanket on the floor and Erika's arm across her breast. The echo of her scream still hung in the air of the room.

CHAPTER 12

“Kate, hush. Mrs. Brownlee will be up here. The other people in the house will all be awake."

"Let me loose!" She fought the hands that held her. "Don't touch me!"

"Kate, it was a dream. It's gone now.”

Kate looked around the room, puzzled to find herself suddenly there. "I'm sorry. I guess I was having a nightmare."

"Are you all right now?"

She blinked. The haymow was gone now. "Oh, sure."

Erika's clasp loosened, but she didn't move away. 'Well, Gott sei danke! You scared me."

"I scared myself" Kate said in a rueful whisper. She burrowed her head into the frail security of Erika's shoulder, feeling the warmth of her skin.

"What were you dreaming about?"

"I don't remember."

It was the first time she had lied to Erika. She wanted to take it back, to tell her the whole silly business from beginning to end; but she didn't know how. What was the beginning, what was the end? After Erika had gone back to sleep, she lay with her back turned and her knees drawn up, feeling miserably that the lie had put a wall between them.