The War that Saved My Life by Kimberly Brubaker Bradley

Maggie won, but not by much, and I stayed in the saddle the whole time even
though Butter galloped faster than he’d ever gone before. We followed
Maggie’s pony over two fallen logs—little soaring jumps, my first. By the
time we pulled up on the outskirts of town, both ponies blowing hard,
Maggie’s hair had come loose from its plait and her cheeks were bright red.
She was laughing. She’d forgotten I ever looked scared.
I knew Susan wasn’t real. Or, if she was a tiny bit real, sometimes, at the
very best she was only temporary. She’d be done with us once the war was
over, or whenever Mam changed her mind.
Maggie couldn’t come for Christmas dinner. She said she wished she could,
but her brother was expected home from aviation training, and her father was
coming from wherever he was doing secret war work, and they were all
having their traditional Christmas. So of course she had to stay home. “It’ll be
a miserable day,” she said. “Mum will be trying not to blubber over Jonathan,
so she’ll be snippy with everyone. Dad’s wound up about Hitler and won’t
talk about anything but the war, especially since there’s no hunting, and Mum
hates talking about the war. The cook quit to work in a factory and the
housekeeper’s an awful cook, and we’ve not got but one maid left, and no
footmen in the house at all. So I’ll be scrubbing on Christmas Eve and Mum
will be trying to help cook, and we’ll sit down in this big fancy room with
cobwebs in the corners and eat horrible food and pretend to be cheerful and
nothing, nothing will be like it used to.
“People keep saying it isn’t really a war,” she said. “Hardly anybody’s
being bombed, hardly anybody’s fighting. It feels like a war to me. A war
right in my family.” She gave me a sideways look. “You’re probably happy,”
she said.
“I’m not happy because you’re miserable,” I shot back.
She shook her head. “Oh, of course not. Come on.” We were riding again,
but this time we took a path Maggie chose, through woods down to the beach.
We had to stay on the far side of the barbed wire, but we followed the road
along the beach and watched the waves crash against the shore. It amazed me,
how different the ocean could look from day to day.