Me and Billy by James Lincoln Collier

for mowing, and her brown hair was tucked under a straw hat. She was sweating pretty good, and there were bits of seeds and hay dust stuck in the sweat on her face.
    Even so, she was mighty pretty. Suddenly I wished I’d cleaned up a little before we climbed over that fence. I reached around back and tucked in my shirt. Billy just stood there staring at her, but I knew more about manners than he did. I sort of bowed. “Howdy, ma’am.”
    She leaned on the scythe to rest. I figured she’d been at that scything all day, from the amount she’d cut. “Where’d you fellas come from? We don’t get a whole lot of strangers out in these parts.”
    I wasn’t about to tell her the exact truth. “From Plunket City. We’re heading for the mountains.”
    “Plunket City? That’s twelve miles.”
    Billy finally caught on that she was pretty and got into the conversation. “We got run out of there,” he said. That was exactly what I didn’t want him to say, and I gave him a quick knock on his arm. But he was proud of it. “We were working with a fella skinning folks with this elixir, and somebody took a shot at him.”
    “Blame you, Billy,” I whispered.
    He grinned. “We had to run for it. We don’t know if the fella’s dead or just wounded.”
    “They shot him?” she said. “What on earth for?” She stopped short. “Oh, glory, my skirt.” She blushed all pink under the hay dust, which only made her look prettier, and jerked her skirt from under her belt. “Pa’d kill me if he knew some boys saw me like that.” She took off her hat, and her hair fell down to the middle of her back. With her fingers, she combed it out a little. Then she took a handkerchief out of the pocket of her skirt and wiped the sweat and hay dust off her face.
    I decided I was going to fix Billy’s wagon for him. “Don’t mind what Billy says, ma’am. He can’t always help himself.”
    Billy grinned. “Possum’s right. You can’t trust anything about me.”
    She looked at me. “Is your name really Possum?”
    I was glad she asked me instead of Billy, but I wished she’d lighted on a different subject. “Yes,” I said. I changed the subject. “How far do you reckon it is to those mountains?”
    “How’d you get a name like that?”
    But before I could think of what to say, Billy told her. “When they first brought him to the Home, he was curled up in a basket like a possum, so they called him that.”
    “I’ll get you, Billy,” I whispered.
    “The Home?”
    I could see that Billy had made up his mind to make a nuisance of himself, and I figured I’d better take over as much as I could. “The Deacon Smith Home for Waifs,” I said. “You have to be pretty smart to go there.” I blushed and cursed myself for blushing. I just couldn’t get the hang of lying. “Well, maybe that’s putting it too strong.”
    “It’s for kids whose pa and ma don’t want them,” Billy said.
    “Glory,” she said, shifting her attention to Billy. “You mean your ma and pa didn’t want you?”
    “You don’t know if they didn’t want us, Billy. They could have died. Or were just too poor to feed us and figured we were better off in the Home, where we’d eat regular. Maybe the tears were running down their face like a faucet when they took us to the Home.”
    “Then how come they never came to visit us?” Billy said, giving me a look.
    “Maybe they had to move away because they were too poor to live there anymore,” I said. “Let’s get off this subject.” I didn’t mind if Billy talked to her some, but I was the one who started talking to her. “Now we told you our names, you got to tell us yours.”
    “Betty Ann Singletary,” she said. “Listen, fellas, I got to get this hay in before dark.”
    “How come you got to do it by yourself?” Billy said.
    “There’s just me. The mule kicked Pa and busted his leg. He’s better, but not good enough to swing a scythe.”
    “What about your ma?” Billy said.
    I had a