from the journal
Where Beckett and Evan's rooms were maintained according to General Eaton's exacting standards, the pink palace Anna inhabited was another world entirely. Beckett Eaton, age twelve, saw to it that his quarters were never untidy. Evan, age ten, could bounce a quarter on the rough wool blanket covering his extra-long twin bed. Anna Elizabeth Eaton, age eight, floated out of her impossibly soft white bed every morning, slid her tiny painted toenails into fuzzy pink slippers and skated across the wide-plank pine floorboards that had served generations of Eaton daughters since the house was built in 1803. The round carpet covering the floor of the turret in Anna's room, made by Grandmother Amelia Eaton while she was pregnant with the twins who didn't live the first summer, covered a precious, important secret. She'd heard Mama and the General talking about it once, how perhaps it would be better if Beckett moved in with Evan so Anna could have his room. It was a little eerie, that turret ... Anna worried, briefly. When the General decided, the die was cast. If he agreed with Mama, she'd lose everything: her gorgeous yellowed walls, once flat white, now alight with the sweetest dreams of all the little girls who'd come before; the white iron canopy bed with a down featherbed laying on the mattress that felt just like a cloud when she launched herself onto it from the floor; the turret where the poor dead girl told her troubles to Ken and Barbie.
