The War that Saved My Life by Kimberly Brubaker Bradley

The train was miserable, of course. Most of the children weren’t glad to be
leaving like I was. Some cried, and one got sick in the corner of the car. The
teacher assigned to our car fluttered around, trying to clean up the mess and
stop boys from fighting and explain for the third or tenth or hundredth time
that no, there weren’t any loos on this car, we would just have to hold it, and
no, she didn’t know how much longer, no one even knew where the train was
going, much less how long it would take.
No loos, nothing to drink, and we’d eaten all our bread. I poured sugar
onto Jamie’s hand and he licked at it, like a cat. Meanwhile the world moved
outside the windows, faster and faster. If I let my eyes unfocus, the scene
blurred and ran past me. If I looked hard at one thing it stood still while I
moved my head, and it became clear the train was moving, not the world.
The buildings ended and suddenly there was green. Green everywhere.
Bright, vibrant, astonishing green, floating into the air toward the blue, blue
sky. I stared, mesmerized. “What’s that?”
“Grass,” Jamie said.
“Grass?” He knew about this green? There wasn’t any grass on our lane,
nor nothing like it that I’d ever seen. I knew green from clothing or cabbages,
not from fields.
Jamie nodded. “It’s on the ground. Spikey stuff, but soft, not prickly.
There’s grass in the churchyard. Round the headstones. And trees, like that
over there.” He pointed out the window.
Trees were tall and thin, like stalks of celery, only giant-sized. Bursts of
green on top. “When were you in a churchyard?” I asked. What’s a
churchyard? I might have asked next. There was no end to the things I didn’t
know.
Jamie shrugged. “St. Mary’s. Playing leapfrog on the tombstones. Rector
chased us out.”
I watched the green until it started to blur. I’d been up half the night,
making sure we didn’t oversleep, and now my eyelids began to settle, lower
and lower, until Jamie whispered, “Ada. Ada, look.”
A girl on a pony was racing the train. She was actually on top of the pony,