Margaret and the Moth Tree Read Online Free PDF

“The rest of the Pets,” she whispered.
    â€œWhat’s a Pet?” Margaret asked.
    Just at that moment Lacey came stalking down the line so Judy didn’t get a chance to tell her. But as that dreadful day progressed, Margaret learned the answer for herself.
    Miss Switch, it soon became clear, divided the orphans into two groups. The ones she found to be cute and adorable she called Pets, while all the others were dregs.
    The Pets were Miss Switch’s personal favorites, and it was their job to keep the dregs in line. It was also their job to brush the Matron’s hair, paint her toenails or simply follow her around and admire her. She would say things like, “My hair is less shiny today than usual,” to which the Pets would respond, “Oh, no, Miss Switch! You have the loveliest hair in the world,” and so on.
    In return she treated them a great deal better than the less attractive orphans, who were forced to chop and cook and scrub and scrape and wash and weed all day long.
    Margaret, as you already know, had become a dreg, which meant that her life was now full of just such scrubbing and scraping and washing and weeding. She had begun what is called
a life of drudgery,
which is the most unpleasant kind of life to have.
    On Margaret’s second day in the orphanage, Miss Switch ordered her to chop onions into perfectly square-shaped pieces for her egg-white omelet. By the time Margaret finished, her eyes were stinging and watering so much that she dropped her bowl of breakfast mush on the floor and had nothing to eat at all.
    On Margaret’s third day, Miss Switch put her on porch-scrubbing duty with a pimply-faced dreg called Bessie Blotchly. Margaret’s hands got so sore from the scrub brush that painful blisters blossomed across her palms, and when she asked for permission to stop, Lacey gave her a row of hard pinches on her arm.
    The day after that, Miss Switch discovered that a nervous dreg called Vickram Skitter had accidentally thrown away her new fashion magazines. As punishment, she threw him down the laundry chute with a rope tied around his waist, where he spent the afternoon whimpering quietly until Margaret and the others were allowed to haul him up again.
    On the fifth day, Miss Switch commanded Margaret and the very smallest dreg, a puny boy called Timothy Smealing, to climb up into the chimney and scrape it out with toothbrushes. They got soot so far up their ears and noses that they couldn’t hear or smell anything for the rest of the day, and Miss Switch sent them to bed without supper for having dirty fingernails.
    As it happened, a young couple came to the orphanage that evening looking to adopt an orphan. But Margaret, lying in her bed with soot-filled ears and an empty stomach, didn’t even get to lay eyes on them, and they took home a fetching black-haired Pet named Charlotte Ravenhurst.
    Young as she was, Margaret had already faced a great number of unpleasant things. She had accepted her life of silence with Cousin Amos. She had endured Great-aunt Linda’s bossiness. She had minded her manners and tried to make the best of things, and she had always obeyed the rules because that is what she had been taught to do.
    But Margaret could see that Miss Switch was an entirely different kind of awful. Miss Switch wasn’t going to guard her, or care for her, or help her in any way. For the first time, Margaret had fallen under the thumb of a truly cruel person.
    Dealing with cruelty is a pretty tall order, even for grown-ups. But Margaret remembered what Hannah had whispered before driving away. 
Call if you need anything
.
    Margaret certainly needed something now. So, unused to boldness though she was, she concocted a very bold plan. And as she went about her chores, she waited patiently for a chance to act on it.

    CHAPTER 8 The Truth about Bullies
    Bullies, whether big or small, are really very much alike.
    No matter how much they