Collection 6: "Uprising" by Margaret Peterson Haddix

So you can read English a little bit better, so you handed out a few suffrage flyers—do you think that that’s enough?

“No,” Yetta said, but she grinned at the girl, and the girl grinned back, and Yetta thought maybe, just maybe, they’d inched just a little closer to the solidarity Yetta longed for.

“I’m going dancing tonight,” Jennie said, mischievously tapping out a rhythm on the floor.

“Not again! Those cutters and their cigarettes,” Yetta said scornfully.

In seconds the fire had gone from being something to scoff at under a table to a voracious beast ready to engulf the entire room.

“Stop it! This is a fireproof building!” Yetta yelled at Jennie.
But we’re tinder, she remembered.

Across the room, Yetta saw a spark land in a woman’s hair. In seconds, the woman’s whole pompadour was aflame.

He was slapping and punching the girls, beating them as though he blamed them for the fire. No—he was goading them toward the doors, toward the elevators and the fire escape.

We are on the same side now, Mr. Bernstein and me, Yetta marveled.

A spark landed on the sleeve of Yetta’s shirtwaist, and she watched in horror as it sputtered and shimmered and burned straight through. She could feel it singeing her skin.

He jerked open the stairway door and it opened out, making another obstacle in the tiny vestibule.

Through the window in the stairwell, Yetta could see the workers scrambling down the fire escape, teetering precariously on the metal railings, struggling past the metal shutters.

They were yammering away in some language Yetta didn’t recognize, or maybe it wasn’t a language at all, just witless jabbering.

One flight up, on the ninth floor, where two hundred and fifty girls worked, where Yetta had worked before the strike, where Bella worked now—up there, they had no idea there was an inferno raging beneath them, eating up the air, climbing higher and higher and higher.

Miss Milhouse would have scolded Harriet soundly; she would have taken it as her personal mission to stifle the little girl’s exuberant personality.

And she would have praised Millicent to the skies for her tidiness, her aversion to noise and mess, her ability to sit or stand still practically forever without squirming or exclaiming.

Personally, Jane thought Millicent was in danger of becoming a priggish bore.

And she worried that someday somebody would stifle Harriet’s exuberance.

“Millicent!” Jane shot the girl a reproving look. Remember what I’ve told you about bragging? she wanted to scold.

Somehow elevator mechanics had not been in the curriculum at Jane’s finishing school.

He even gave her a conspiratorial wink, which was much too forward, but somehow Jane didn’t mind. She winked back, and stepped out onto the polished wood floor of a spacious reception area.

“You’re the governess, right? You can just take them into Mr. Blanck’s office, and then go tell him they’re here.”

“Oh, he was just down on the ninth floor—no, wait, back in the storeroom? I’m sorry, I’d look for him myself, but—” The harried secretary gestured at the papers strewn across her desk, the bill poking out from her typewriter.

A contraption beside the typewriter buzzed, and Miss Mary looked over at it expectantly.

Or maybe it was the sight of the haggard workers hunched over their irons, girls who looked entirely too young, who would probably look entirely too old after just a year or two on the job.

Jane pulled the door shut on Millicent and Harriet, catching barely a glimpse of Mr. Blanck’s imposing mahogany desk, of the lovely arched windows behind the desk.

Passing Miss Mary’s desk, Jane was surprised to notice that the woman had vanished, leaving the telephone receiver hanging off the hook.
That’s odd. She seemed like such a conscientious sort....

A different elevator operator came up this time, a swarthily handsome Italian man.

“Oh, do you think so?” Bella asked wistfully.

The English part of her brain shut off, the Yiddish words in her brain evaporated, even the Italian she heard around her sounded garbled and foreign.