The War that Saved My Life by Kimberly Brubaker Bradley

“What’s wrong?”
“I hurt it,” I said. “Just this morning.” Which was true enough.
“Will you let me look at it?” she asked.
“Oh, no,” I said, forcing myself to keep moving. “It’s getting better
already.”
After that it was easy. It was the most impossible thing I’d ever done, but it
was also easy. I held on to Jamie, and I kept moving forward. The yard filled
with children and teachers, the teachers organized us into lines. I wouldn’t
have been able to walk the half mile to the train station—I was mostly done in
—but suddenly in front of me was a face I recognized. “That you, Ada?” said
Stephen White.
He was the oldest of the White children; there were three girls between
Stephen and Billy. The whole bunch of them had pulled up and were staring
at me. They’d never seen me other than through my window.
“It’s me,” I said.
Stephen looked surprised. “I didn’t think you’d be coming,” he said. “I
mean, of course you’ve got to get out of London, but our mam said they had
special places for people like you.”
My mam hadn’t said anything about special places. I said, “What’dya
mean, ‘people like me’?”
Stephen looked at the ground. He was taller than me, older, I figured, but
not by much. “You know,” he said.
I knew. “Cripples,” I said.
He looked back at my face, startled. “No,” he said. “Simple. Not right in
the head. That’s what everybody says.” He said, “I didn’t even know you
could talk.”
I thought of all the time I spent at my window. I said, “I talk to you all the
time.”
“I know you wave and jibber-jabber, but”—he looked pretty
uncomfortable now—“we can’t ever really hear you, down on the street. We
can’t make out what you’re saying. I didn’t know you could talk normal. And
your mam says as how you’ve got to be kept locked up, for your own good.”
For the first time, he looked at my feet. “You’re a cripple?”
I nodded.