Little Women and Me

Epilogue


Talk about getting sucked out of a good book!

I sit at the desk staring at a piece of paper without even seeing what’s on it.

Okay, what just happened here?

Really, what just happened?

I get out of my chair and rush to the floor-length mirror in the corner of the room. The reflection looking back is me. No more gowns and boots. No more hair piled on top of my head in pins. It’s me, in my regular clothes with my regular hair. I move a little from side to side—hey, I don’t have a corset anymore! I reach into the neck of my shirt and snap the thin strap on my shoulder. Yup, I got my bra back.

I turn away from the mirror and look around my room—my room—and see all my familiar things, familiar even though it feels like forever since I’ve seen them. I touch my iPod and my computer like I’m greeting old friends and it hits me: I’m not in the March house anymore. Or at least not that March house.

What happened?

Did I bump my head? Did I fall asleep at my desk and have the longest dream ever? Is this like The Wizard of Oz, with me as Dorothy, certain I’ve had the most amazing adventure ever while everyone around me is trying to convince me it was all just a dream?

Did any of that really happen at all?

“Emily!” Charlotte calls, and a moment later there’s a knock at my door. “Emily. Mom says it’s time for dinner.”

Charlotte! Mom!

I throw the door open and throw my arms around Charlotte’s neck. I’ve missed her so much without even realizing it.

“Um, Emily?” she says, stiff in my arms. “What are you doing?”

“Sorry,” I say, letting her go.

“It’s okay,” she says hurriedly. “I just didn’t understand. I think it’s been over four years since you hugged me.”

Four years? That’s the amount of time I was away!

“What year is this?” I ask.

“It’s the same year it was when you woke up this morning, you know that. What’s gotten into you?”

I can’t believe it. I feel like I’ve been away forever, and yet I haven’t?

I go to my desk, look down at the date on the paper there, the one I was looking at without really seeing it before. It’s my outline for the paper for Mr. Ochocinco’s class. The date on it? Let’s just say it is not in the 1860s.

I feel like so much has happened to me, like so much has changed in my life, and yet nothing here has changed at all?

Suddenly I hear a voice in my head, my own voice:

It’s the way the story was always meant to be.

Maybe Charlotte and me have never been close, and maybe I always blamed her for that. But I see now that while I’ll never be able to control anyone else’s behavior or choices, I can control what I bring to my relationships.

I go to Charlotte, grab her by the shoulders.

“You have to let Jackson know you like him, Charlotte. If you don’t, eventually—maybe not tomorrow, maybe not until next year, but eventually he’ll wind up with Anne.”

“Anne? What are you talking about? Have you bumped your head?”

Maybe I have. Mentally, I gotta give Charlotte credit though. At least she doesn’t put her hand to my forehead to see if I’ve got a fever.

“Never mind about me,” I say. “I know what I’m telling you may sound crazy. But you have to believe me. I do know what I’m talking about.”

“But why would I tell Jackson I like him? And why would Jackson ever go for Anne? You two are always together. He clearly likes you.”

I swallow my guilt. Not only does Jackson not know that Charlotte likes him, but Charlotte has no clue that Jackson likes her.

I do what I should have done all along.

I tell Charlotte the truth.

It’s the way the story was always meant to be.



After dinner, even though the rest of the weekend is still ahead of me and even though the assignment for Monday is just for the outline, with the paper not due until the following Monday, I sit down to write my paper.

Might as well get this over with while my thoughts are still fresh in my head.

But first, I really want a shower.

I go to the bathroom, thrilled with what I find there: a real live twenty-first-century bathroom. Do people who live in the present even know how lucky they are?

After about an hour of hot water and conditioner, I return to my paper.

When you first gave us this assignment, to change one thing in a favorite book, I knew which book I wanted to write about, Little Women. But deciding on just one thing proved harder than I thought. You see, as I’m sure most readers would agree, there are two things wrong with Little Women: Beth dying and Laurie winding up with Amy instead of Jo.



Let’s face it: everyone hates it when Beth dies. It’s just so sad!



So for a long time, that’s what I thought needed changing: Beth dying. But then I finally came to realize: Beth’s dying can’t be changed. It’s written in the cards the first moment she goes to see the Hummel family. From then on, it’s just a matter of time. I realize now that you can change a lot of things in life, but you can’t change death. You can’t stop it. Death will come, whether you want it to or not.



Louisa May Alcott was right to have Beth die, sad as it is.



But she was wrong about Laurie and Amy!



It’s Laurie and Jo who belong together. Anyone with eyes in their head and a brain to read knows that!



So that’s the one thing, the only thing, I would change about Little Women.



Laurie and Jo should wind up together, because while you can’t stop death, love should always, always be allowed to grow where it’s meant to be.



On Monday, even though the paper’s not due for another week, I hand it to Mr. Ochocinco at the end of class. And, because my paper’s short, he sits and reads it while I wait.

While I wait, I think about how since Friday night I’ve come to realize that whatever I may have thought had happened to me—time travel? really? what was I thinking?—it had all been in my head.

Mr. Ochocinco finishes my paper, hands it back to me.

“Aren’t you going to grade it?” I ask.

“It’s a fine piece of writing, Emily, and under normal circumstances I would give you an A. But I can’t even grade this paper. You’ll have to do it over again.”

“What? Why?”

“Because you obviously haven’t read the book. Or if you did, you never finished it.”

“What are you talking about?”

What is he talking about? Never even read the book? I feel like I practically lived that book!

“You say right here that Laurie winds up with Amy in the end,” he says. “But that’s wrong. If you’d bothered to finish Little Women, you’d remember that Laurie winds up with Jo.”

“No, he doesn’t,” I insist.

“Yes, he does.” Mr. Ochocinco swivels his chair, plucks a volume from the bookcase behind him. Turning, he hands me a copy of Little Women, the same volume I have with the woodcut illustrations.

“See for yourself,” he says. “Turn to the last chapter where the three remaining sisters are picnicking with their families.”

See for myself. See for himself! Is this man on drugs? I’ll show him, I think, paging through the book.

I quickly scan the text.

Wait a second here. I don’t even see Professor Bhaer’s name mentioned. But that’s Jo’s husband!

I scan through again.

There’s something about Meg and John and their kids. Next Jo’s name is linked with Laurie’s. And Amy—her name is linked with someone I’ve never even heard of before.

I study the final woodcut at the end of the book, a scene that depicts the three remaining girls clearly paired off with their spouses: Meg and John; Jo and Laurie; Amy with some other guy. Wait a second. Instinctively, I know that guy—he’s the redhaired guy that Jo didn’t want to dance with one time at a party!

I’ll tell you one thing. In that picture, Amy does not look happy. In fact, she almost looks as though she’s scowling directly at me.

I hand him back the book, stunned.

“So you see, Emily,” he says, “you’ll just have to rewrite your paper. Choose something else to change about Little Women. Or better yet, choose another book, preferably one you know better.”

“Yes, I do see,” I say vaguely.

I can’t believe this. OMG, did I change Little Women? Did everything I thought was a dream really happen?

Still feeling dazed, I head toward the door.

“Emily?” Mr. Ochocinco calls after me.

I turn.

“You dropped something from your notebook,” he says. Bending, he picks something up from the ground, hands it to me.

I look at the thing in my hand. It’s a paper crown, with the initials “P.C.” on it.

The Pickwick Club, I mouth the words silently.

But how …?

OMG, it all really did happen. I lived in Little Women, and I changed the ending!



As I close the door to Mr. Ochocinco’s room behind me, I see Jackson and Charlotte pass by in the hallway, holding hands.

After I told Charlotte about Jackson liking her on Friday night, and after we finished eating dinner, she got up the nerve to call him while I worked on my paper—the paper I’ll now have to rewrite.

Oh, well.

So Jo wound up with Laurie, and Charlotte is winding up with Jackson. Me, I wound up with neither Jackson nor Laurie. But that’s as it should be. It’s the way the story was always meant to go. Someday, I’ll have my own guy. He won’t be either Jackson or Laurie. He’ll be some guy I genuinely like for who he is, and who likes me for who I am.

I have got to find Kendra—I need to tell her everything that’s happened!

But then I realize: I’ll never be able to tell anyone what’s happened to me, what I’ve seen, where I’ve been, and how I changed the story even as it changed me—who would ever believe me?

And suddenly I miss my family, my other family: starchy Meg, annoying Jo, sweet Beth, and even Amy, the interloper.

I finger the paper crown in my hand as words come to me, words that I instinctively know are the last bit of dialogue Beth speaks before she dies, saying, “… for love is the only thing we can carry with us when we go; and it makes the end so easy.”

Yes, Beth, I think. Yes, it does.



Acknowledgments


Thanks to Pamela Harty and everyone at The Knight Agency for superior representation.

Thanks to Melanie Cecka and everyone at Bloomsbury USA for superior publishing.

Thanks to writers who helped this particular book on its way—Lauren Catherine, Andrea Schicke Hirsch, Greg Logsted, and Rob Mayette—for superior help.

Thanks to Lucille Baratz for being a superior mother, Greg Logsted for being a superior husband, and Jackie Logsted for being the most superior of daughters.

Thanks to booksellers, librarians, and readers everywhere—superlative beings, one and all.



Author’s Note


[Author’s Note about the Author’s Note: Please don’t read this if you haven’t finished the book!]

When I was younger, I read Little Women more times than I can count. I loved the world Louisa May Alcott created, although I did have two major issues with it: I always hated it when Beth died, and I really hated that Laurie wound up with Amy instead of the person I’d have him end up with if I were in charge of the world, Jo. There are some books you first encounter when you’re younger—Jane Eyre and The Great Gatsby immediately spring to mind—that you read again as you get older, but Little Women had never been that way for me. Once I reached a certain age, it became a book I no longer reread, the Marches existing instead in fond memory and movie adaptations.

But then, a few years ago, my daughter, Jackie, and her best friend discovered Little Women for the first time, and I began really thinking about the book once more. We discussed how sad it is that Beth dies, how even Joey on Friends is so upset about it that he makes Rachel hide the book in the freezer! And we discussed how wrong we all thought it was that Laurie winds up with Amy instead of Jo.

That’s when I had the kind of moment that drives so much of my writing: What if? In this case, what if a contemporary teen somehow found herself inside the world of Little Women, her mission there being to change one of the two problems readers traditionally have with the book? So I sat down and wrote the prologue to Little Women and Me, in which Emily is literally sucked into the story. And then I pulled out a copy of Little Women and set about writing the rest of my book.

Normally, when writing a book, I might do all of my research first, which in this case would have meant rereading all of Little Women before writing my own version. But I didn’t do that. Instead, I’d read one chapter of Alcott’s book and then write my own version, keeping the plot points and whatever else I wanted from hers, while inserting Emily into the story and adding my own twists. This chapter-by-chapter correspondence goes on through Chapter 30. Alcott’s Little Women continues for another seventeen chapters while my version veers off there into the epilogue. I leave the story before Beth dies, although the reader now knows that eventually she will, that no matter what Emily did, she couldn’t stop that.

Here’s the most surprising thing I found while rereading Little Women, something I never noticed when I was younger, but that Emily comments on several times during her journey through the book—it’s all so random! Sure, there’s a plotline, but family members and friends and even events enter the story from out of the blue, like the meeting of the Pickwick Club. The March sisters have been seemingly meeting regularly to put together their own newspaper, but no mention is made of the club before or after the chapter in which that one meeting takes place.

So if readers of my book occasionally think, “Wow! That thing that just happened was so random!” chances are the original book was random first.

One thing that may surprise readers is how I came up with the ending. Most of the time when I write a book, I know how it’s going to end practically from the beginning. Not so with Little Women and Me. Louisa May Alcott wrote her book in episodic fashion, and so it was with me and mine. But about two-thirds of the way through, I had one of those epiphanies that sometimes happen while writing a book, and I realized: Whoa! Emily’s not the only time traveler in the book—Amy’s a time traveler too … and Papa! That’s when I knew how the book would end: Emily and Amy would confront each other, and eventually Emily would “fix” the story, making it so that Jo would wind up with Laurie, thereby earning her way back to her own life.

It was while I was writing the epilogue that another moment of inspiration struck. Earlier, I mentioned the Pickwick Club. In my chapter about that unusual writing society, just as in the original version, the March sisters wear badges with the initials “P.C.” on them wrapped around their heads like crowns. There’s a great book on writing by Christopher Vogler called The Writer’s Journey. It primarily discusses writing for film, but a lot of it can be used for writing novels as well. It breaks down a story’s structure into twelve parts, and one of the parts near the end is called “the return with the elixir”—think of the elixir as some tangible item that the hero or heroine brings back like a reward for their successful journey or, in Emily’s case, proof that the journey even happened. In the epilogue, after Emily talks to her teacher about her paper, she’s still stunned by everything that’s happened, still unsure if it was all a dream or if it was real. Then the paper crown with “P.C.” on it falls out of her notebook—the elixir Emily didn’t know she brought back with her—and the truth finally hits: she time traveled into Little Women and she changed the ending.

I hope you enjoyed Little Women and Me even half as much as I enjoyed writing it. Thanks for reading!