An Amish Christmas Read Online Free PDF Page A

glad when their house finally came into view. As soon as she had parked in the garage, both boys disappeared, headed to their rooms. Meg entered the kitchen to find Lizzie standing at the counter, her eyes red and puffy, sniffling as she spread peanut butter on a banana.
    “Sweetheart, have you been crying?” Alarmed, Meg went over to her, putting a hand on Lizzie’s arm.
    “No!” Lizzie snatched her arm away.
    “You want to tell me what’s wrong?”
    “Nothing. Nothing’s wrong.” Lizzie looked up at her mother’s face, and her resolve crumbled. “It’s Emily and Maya. I could just kill them!”
    “What happened?”
    “It’s Facebook stuff. They’re on some kind of campaign to get everyone to hate me.”
    Meg bristled. “Are you serious?”
    Lizzie paused, jabbing the knife into the nearly full peanut butter jar so that it stood straight up. “Okay, not
hate
me, maybe, but they’re saying a bunch of stuff that makes me look bad. I thought we were good friends, and now it seems like they never considered me a friend. It was all in my mind. I’m nothing to them.”
    Meg put her arms around Lizzie, and the girl rested her head against her mother’s shoulder. She began to cry in earnest. “Why is everybody so mean?” she got out between sobs. “I used to have so many friends, but now it’s like everyone’s changed.”
    Meg rubbed Lizzie’s back. “Oh, honey, the kids are going through their own stuff. It’s not about you, it’s about them.”
    Her daughter pulled away. “You always say stuff like that, Mom. It doesn’t mean anything.”
    “It’s really true, if you could just—”
    Lizzie grabbed the peanut butter–covered banana and turned to go. “Never mind. I’m sorry I said anything.”
    “Sweetie—”
    “Forget it.”
    She was gone.
    Meg pulled the knife out of the peanut butter, shaking her head. The backbiting among Lizzie’s friends had started aroundseventh grade and now seemed to be constant. Sometimes Lizzie was the target of the gossip, but by the time she got into high school, Meg suspected, her daughter sometimes did a bit of the gossiping herself. It drove Meg crazy, especially since computers and cell phones seemed to have brought the speed of gossip up to the speed of light. Like the news cycle on television, Meg reflected, the popularity cycle seemed to turn over every twenty-four hours.
    Upstairs, Will must have emerged from his room as Lizzie was going down the hall, because Meg heard the two of them shouting, something about hogging a DVD. LizzieandWillfighting, just one word, was how Meg thought of these frequent confrontations. She glanced at the clock on the microwave. Two-twelve. There was a lot more of this day to get through.
    I will be cool and calm, she resolved, turning to look at the magnet on the refrigerator. It was a small one she had picked up years ago at a local fair, featuring North Carolina’s state motto in Latin and English:
Esse quam videri
. To be, rather than to seem. Meg found it comforting, inspiring her not only to try and
appear
calm or wise or whatever she wished she could be at any given moment but actually to
feel
that way. She’d been looking at that magnet a lot lately.
    She hurried upstairs to change into her workout clothes, then spent forty minutes on the treadmill in their basement gym. The room had been James’s idea, a small area outfitted with the treadmill, a stationary bike, and some free weights, plus a large-screen television. He wound up using it only infrequently, on a Saturday or Sunday morning. Meg tried to put in four days a week, although she hated every minute of it. Whenshe was finished with her workout, luxuriating under the cool stream of the shower, she was surprised to see James enter the bathroom. He didn’t say anything but went directly to the sink to wash his hands.
    “Hi,” she said loudly over the noise of the water. “I thought you were playing golf all afternoon.”
    “We quit after nine