The War that Saved My Life by Kimberly Brubaker Bradley

I guess he did, but I’d never noticed. I’d never cared. “So?”
“So he’s learning to write now, and it’s much harder to write with the hand
you don’t eat with. I’ll show you, when we get home.” She opened the main
door of the school, and we went out. A chill wind swirled some dead leaves
around the steps. “In the Bible the good people stand on God’s right, and the
bad people stand on the left, before they get cast into hell. So some—people
—”
“Idjits,” I supplied.
“Yes.” She smiled at me. “Some idiots think left-handedness comes from
the devil. It doesn’t. It comes from the brain.”
“Like that man you were talking about,” I said.
“What? Oh, Dr. Goudge. Yes, he’s Regius Professor of Divinity at Oxford
University. Where I studied.”
“And he’s left-handed, like Jamie?”
Miss Smith snorted. “I’ve no idea. I didn’t read Divinity. I never met the
man.”
She’d lied. I looked at her sideways. “So you didn’t go to Oxford,” I said.
Wherever that was, whatever it meant.
“Of course I did,” she said. “I studied maths.”
We walked down the road. “Is a clubfoot like that?” I asked.
“Like being left-handed? In a way. It’s something you’re born with.”
“No, I mean, is it what that teacher said? A—a mark of the devil.” It would
explain everything, I thought.
“Ada, of course not! How could you think so?”
I shrugged. “I thought maybe that was why Mam hated me.”
Miss Smith’s hand touched my shoulder. When she spoke, her voice was
uneven. “She doesn’t—I’m sure it’s not—” She stopped walking and turned
to face me. “I don’t know what to say,” she said, after a pause. “I don’t want
to tell you a lie, and I don’t know the truth.”
It was maybe the most honest thing anyone had ever said to me.
“If she does hate you she’s wrong to do so,” Miss Smith said.
I shook that off. It didn’t matter, did it?
Leaves skittered around the tips of my crutches. My bad foot swung in the