Anne of Green Gables: Carrots

Anne had only just started at the Avonlea school, where her best friend Diana pointed out Gilbert Blythe, a tall boy with curly brown hair and a teasing smile.Gilbert was famous for his jokes: that morning he pinned Ruby Gillis’s long yellow braid to the back of her seat, and then he winked at Anne as if nothing had happened.Anne thought that he was handsome but very bold, and she decided that it was bad manners to wink at a girl you did not know.

That afternoon, while the teacher, Mr. Phillips, was busy in a corner, Anne sat with her chin on her hands, gazing at the blue lake through the window and dreaming.Gilbert wanted her to look at him, and when she did not, he reached across the aisle, lifted the end of her long red braid, and whispered, “Carrots! Carrots!”Anne jumped to her feet, cried, “You mean, hateful boy! How dare you!” and brought her slate down on his head, cracking it clean across — the slate, not his head.

The whole school gasped in delighted horror, and Mr. Phillips marched down the aisle to ask what it meant, but Anne would not say, in front of everyone, that she had been called “carrots.”Gilbert spoke up and said that the fault was his, but Mr. Phillips ignored him and told Anne to stand on the platform in front of the blackboard for the rest of the afternoon.He even wrote on the board above her head that she had a very bad temper, and Anne stood there with a white, set face, too angry to cry, and vowed that she would never look at Gilbert Blythe again.

When school was over, Gilbert tried to stop her at the door and whispered that he was awfully sorry for making fun of her hair, but Anne swept past him without a glance.The next day the pupils were told to be back in their seats on time, and Anne, who had been wandering happily in the woods with a wreath of flowers in her hair, ran in last.Mr. Phillips wanted someone to punish, so he told her to take the flowers out of her hair and sit beside Gilbert Blythe, and Anne felt that it was the end of all things and hid her face in her arms.

Gilbert quietly slipped a little pink candy heart marked “You are sweet” under her arm, but Anne dropped it on the floor and ground it to powder beneath her heel.When school ended, she carried all her books home and told Diana that she would never go back, though Diana begged her to return and listed all the fun she would miss.Marilla said that it was nonsense, but she was wise enough to say nothing more that night, and instead she went to ask her neighbor, Mrs. Rachel Lynde, what to do.

Mrs. Lynde said that Mr. Phillips had been in the wrong, and she advised Marilla to let Anne stay at home until she wished to return of her own accord.So Anne studied at home and played with Diana in the purple autumn twilight, and each time she met Gilbert Blythe she walked past him with icy contempt, sure that she would hate him for the rest of her life.