With that he turned and faced Jacqueline with a look he might have hoped looked stern and forbidding. Jacqueline saw something else.

"I normally don't talk to eight-year-olds like this, but I will now. Do not write about David Weller. Do not write his story. If you do I will expel you and you will have to buy all that paper you use."

Jacqueline clutched her notebook closer to her.

"Can I write a story about the death of Fluffy Bunny? I can write a book…"

Archie raised his hand. "Deal."

He shook her hand and left in search of Mary Timm.

The upstairs boy's room had large windows.

Jacqueline loved human emotions.

She collected them like a painter collects pigments, as a warrior collects scars and stories.

Now, for the first time, young Jackie wasn't so certain of her love of those things.

She had, in her short life, never seen desolation before. She wasn't sure if she could write David Weller's story now that she saw what it might mean.

"Are you okay, Jackie?"

Jacqueline plummeted into Allan's arms.

"Jackie?" he asked.

"Promise me." She prayed the prayer of all artists, punctuated by tears. "Promise me that when I die you won't try to forget about me."

"I won't. I promise."

Quintessentially Blonde

Virginia DeMarce

Grantville, January 1635

"Why are you asking, Missy?" Debbie Jenkins asked.

"You know Pam Hardesty. In the going-to-be-a-librarian-someday classes with me. She's thinking about when she comes to get married. If she does. And what she's going to tell a respectable down-time man about that blank spot on her birth certificate. If she should marry one. A respectable down-time man, that is. Not that he's asked her, yet. If there was one on the horizon. So I thought, maybe… Well, everyone knows what Velma Hardesty was like, so maybe nobody knows. But I thought that maybe you and Dad had picked up some gossip back then. About who her father was, I mean. Or might have been."