“Wait. Listen to this one!” Tina snickered.  She squeezed and passed gas. 

“OHHH!” Bette rolled away from her laughing and Tina giggled even harder.

“That one sounded like ‘whaaat?’” Tina squealed and she held her stomach and continued to laugh.

“You’re so sick!  You are!  Who makes words out of farts!?” Bette rolled back over and watched the little girl lying next to her wipe happy laughing tears from her cheeks.

“Your turn,” Tina sat up and leaned on her elbow. 

The girls got very still and Bette closed her eyes and concentrated, managing a very soft, high-pitched sound.  Then she busted up laughing when she saw the look on Tina’s face.

“What was that!?” Tina made an over exaggerated expression of surprise.  “Dang Bette, even your farts are prissy!”

“Stop!  Are not!”  Bette punched playfully at her as she giggled.

Then Tina fanned the air. “Pew! Dang!  What you been eatin’?”  And then Tina fell back down on her back and flopped round laughing as Bette tickled her sides.

It was after supper and the sun was down.  The girls were up in Tina’s tree house lying on their backs out on the exposed deck.  Bette, being wary of heights, was lying close along the wall, but Tina was out in the middle, on her back not at all afraid of the twenty-foot drop to the ground.

They had been meeting each night after supper.  Bette would bring a plate of leftovers and they would talk while Tina ate.  Then Bette would spend a half hour or so sitting close to Tina with the lantern above them on the little makeshift table, while the girl practiced her reading.  Tina would run her finger under the letters, mouthing and sounding out words.  When she’d get stuck, Bette would help her. 

“No, remember when it’s ‘i-before-e except after c’ you pronounce the ‘e’, not the ‘i’, so that word is ‘ceiling’,” Bette had said one evening.

Tina had nodded and scrunched her brows together.  “So ‘i’ is always before ‘e’ except after ‘c’?” Tina had asked seriously.  She was setting Bette up.

“Yes, that’s the rule,” Bette had said.

“Hmm,” Tina had pretended to ponder that information and then she said, “That’s a weird rule.”  She pursed her lips together, holding back her giggle, waiting to see if Bette got her clever joke.