The War that Saved My Life by Kimberly Brubaker Bradley

like a fly buzzing against a window. I fell asleep.
In the morning, though, those first words stuck in my head until I couldn’t
stand it anymore. “Miss?” I said at breakfast. “What’s ‘tempest-tossed’?”
Miss Smith looked at me over her mug of tea. “Caught in a storm,” she
said. “Wind and rain and lightning, and if you’re in a boat, at sea, you get
tossed from side to side. You’re all thrown about, because of the storm.”
I looked at Jamie. “That’s us,” I said. “All thrown about. We’re tempesttossed.”
He nodded.
I turned back to Miss Smith. “What’s ‘educable’?”
She cleared her throat. “Able to be educated,” she said. “Able to learn. You
are plenty able to learn, Ada. You are educable. I know you are. That teacher
is wrong.”
A plane zoomed overhead. Jamie jumped up. We heard and saw planes all
the time now, because of the airfield, but Jamie never tired of watching them.
I got up to go out too.
“Ada,” Miss Smith said, “if you like, this morning I’ll start to teach you to
read.”
I edged away. “No, thank you,” I said, using the manners she taught me. “I
want to go look at the planes.”
She shook her head. “That’s not true.”
“I want to talk to Butter.”
Miss Smith leaned forward. “You’re perfectly capable of learning. You
mustn’t listen to people who don’t know you. Listen to what you know,
yourself.”
What I knew, I’d learned looking out a single window. I knew nothing.
Words she used—capable, tempest-tossed. Even little words, sea. What was a
sea? Boats came down the River Thames. Was a sea the same as a river? I
knew nothing, nothing at all.
“I need to see the pony,” I said.
She sighed. “Suit yourself,” she said, and turned away.
I’d found a brush in the storage room and I used it all over Butter’s yellow
coat. Dust and loose hair flew up. I could tell he liked it. “Good, isn’t it?” I
asked him. “Gets the itches out.”
My skin didn’t itch the way it used to. The stinky lotion cleared up the