Despite the booming popularity of young adult fiction, YA books with a historical focus are still relatively rare. Maybe that’s because, as a genre, YA tends to explore more contemporary problems and issues, but for whatever reason, there’s not nearly enough of it. This is what makes books like Monica Hesse’sso interesting, which not only help bring the past to life but centers the unique experiences of young people during tumultuous eras of history.
And it is possible for lives to be lost in ten seconds. It is possible for a life to be ruined in ten seconds. It is possible for a life to be ruined and to realize the story you thought you were telling was a different kind of story. I knew that, too.Miss Genovese’s voice behind me pierces through my headset, and I know the rest of her lecture before she begins it: Here at Central switchboard, if we wear dresses, they must be black or navy, and if we wear skirts, our blouses must be white.
“Say, didn’t I talk to you last week?” asks the staticky voice on the other end of the telephone line— young, male, swaggering. I can see a frown out of the corner of my eye; Miss Genovese is trying to figure out how I must have encouraged this conversation even though she’s heard all the words coming out of my mouth. She can’t be more than a few years older than I am. What she lacks in age she makes up for in sourness.“May I place a call for you now?” I ask a bit desperately.“Tremont 4246?” I blurt out the string of numbers as if I’m repeating them. “Please hold.
Under my workstation, I ball my hands into fists. As if any of us need reminding about the war. As if I, especially, need reminding about the war. My knee-jerk reaction to Helen’s earnest, missionary-daughter kindness is often unearned irritation, but this time I’m grateful for her concern. I bob my head up and down—“Some of us are going out for breakfast at the end of shift,” Helen continues, and then pauses to answer a call.It’s not hard to imagine the relationship Helen thinks we ought to have: two eighteen-year-old girls living in Washington, borrowing cardigans and hairbrushes, drinking sodas at the end of a shift.
I still find my hands shaking at random times, stilling them after my shift with a cigarette and then passing out unconscious. The job guarantees that I’m awake for at least eight hours at a stretch. Otherwise I would sleep twenty-three hours a day.
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