Anastasia Again! Read Online Free PDF Page A

important thing. It-doesn't matter that he's deformed. You shouldn't feel embarrassed about that or anything."
    Deformed?
Good grief. Had she said that Sam was deformed? Why had she said
that?
And now that she had said it, and Robert had made that long speech about his cousin, and he had never told anybody else, for pete's sake, now she certainly couldn't say hey, I made a mistake, I lied, Sam
isn't
deformed.
    "Yeah, well, I'm not embarrassed about it," she said miserably. "It's not that bad."
    "And you know they can do a lot of good stuff at Children's Hospital. Probably your parents have already taken him there."
    "Yeah, they have." That, at least, wasn't a lie. Sam had had X rays at Children's Hospital last year, when he tipped over his high chair and fell on his head. The X rays were negative. He was fine. It took a long time to wash the oatmeal out of his hair, though.
    ***
    Robert said good-by to Anastasia at the corner near her house. He said he was going to go home and make something out of his Popsicle sticks. He also said two other things that made her feel strange.
    One was, "If you move to someplace not too far away, I'll ride out on my bike to see you."
    She answered, "Okay."
    And the other was, "My family always donates money to the March of Dimes and stuff."
    She couldn't figure out why he said that. "That's nice," she said, puzzled. "Mine gives money to the Civil Liberties Union."
    "The March of Dimes goes to help crippled children, like Sam," Robert explained before he rode away.
    Anastasia walked her bike down the block to where she lived. She decided that she would definitely read that article in
Cosmopolitan.
Maybe it would explain how some people got themselves into such dumb situations by simply opening their mouths. Maybe it would explain how to get
out
of those situations.
    She wondered how she would go about hiding Sam if Robert did come to visit her in the suburbs.
    ***
    It was all too complicated, too mysterious. She couldn't begin to make a title out of all the things that were mystifying in her life.
    Maybe she should write a letter to "Dear Abby," instead.
    "Dear Abby," Anastasia wrote, "There is this boy in my
class, I'll call him Richard to protect his identity, and the first thing that went wrong today was that Richard called me, and I said incredibly dumb things on the phone, and then..."
    She stopped. Dear Abby would laugh. Anastasia had a sudden, horrible vision of Dear Abby, looking glamorous, sitting behind a mahogany desk, reading Anastasia's letter and wiping tears off her cheeks with a lace handkerchief, because she was laughing so hard that she cried. Then she would publish the letter in the newspaper, and everyone in Anastasia's school—everyone in Cambridge, in fact—would read it and would recognize who it was, because of course she would have to write about the briefcase. Everyone in Cambridge would laugh at her.
    She turned to a new page in her notebook. "The Mystery," she wrote, thinking in titles again, "of Why Other People Always Think Your Very Serious Problems Are Hysterically Funny."

4

    "Run a comb through your hair, sport. The real estate lady'll be here in half an hour. She's going to take us to look at a house."
    "Daddy, I
told
you I don't want to go and look at houses.
Casablanca
is on TV this afternoon. I'm going to watch it over at Jenny's. You and Mom go look at the house with the real estate lady. I'll take Sam with me to Jenny's if you want."
    "Nope. You and Sam are coming with us today. Your mom and I have already looked at seven houses..."
    Her mother interrupted. "I looked at five others without you, Myron. I've looked at twelve altogether."
    "Twelve, then. And this sounds like one that we want
you to see. And Sam, too. Where is Sam?"
    Anastasia groaned and went to look for her brother. She found him sitting on his bedroom floor looking at a volume of
War and Peace.
    "Good grief, Sam. Don't tell me you can
read
now!"
    "Of course I can't read. I'm only two