Betti on the High Wire (20 page)

It was all so confusing.

“My heart. It has been attacked.” I dramatically put my hand right over my sore heart.

Mr. Buckworth chuckled, just a little. “You’re probably not having a heart attack, little tiger. You’re probably just missing people—missing
everything
—in your country. That’s normal. But sometimes that’s even worse.”

I pulled my circus doll off my pillow and sat her in my lap. “I ... do not want you to get mad,” I blurted out without meaning to.

Mrs. Buckworth crinkled her forehead. “Why would we be mad?”

“Sometimes I think ... my mama and dad ... I think they will come and get me in America. Here. At your house. But then ... I am sometimes afraid they will not come.” I looked at Mrs. Buckworth. “Like your mama and dad.”

Mr. and Mrs. Buckworth glanced at each other.

“Betti.” Mr. Buckworth cleared his throat. “Auntie Moo told us how the soldiers came to the camp a long time ago, and the circus people tried to fight back. They stood up for themselves; they fought for what they believed in, but they didn’t have guns. They only had their animals, right?”

I nodded.

Mrs. Buckworth’s eyes became a little wet. “Auntie Moo said that your mom and dad, and all the circus people, didn’t have a fair chance.”

“No,” I choked out. “It was not fair.”

“But they saved you, sweetie. The most loving thing parents can ever do. They hid you away when the soldiers came. They must’ve loved you so much.”

I hugged my doll against my chest.

“And now,” said Mr. Buckworth, “they’d be so proud of you, Betti. You’re brave, like them. You stand up for yourself like a little tiger.”

“My mama is the Tallest Woman in the World. With a Tail.” I looked up at the yellow ceiling, but I couldn’t see my mama. “And my dad is green man. If they come to your door you will know.” I looked at the fuzzy floor. No green dad with his arms ready to catch me. “If the leftover kids or Auntie Moo come to your door, you will know.”

The Buckworths both put their arms around me in one big tight hug.

“They’re my family too.” My voice was all sniffley and muffled. “You won’t be mad if I have two families?”

“No, little tiger. We just feel lucky,” said Mr. Buck-worth, “to be your second family.”

“Some people don’t have any family,” said Mrs. Buckworth, who didn’t used to have a family, “but you have two.”

Just like I had two names. Babo and Betti.

Even though the Buckworths could be very crazy at times, it wasn’t all that bad being squished between them.

But I wasn’t squished for long, because that’s when the Buckworths noticed something funny. Rooney. And Puddles. They’d jumped off my bed and were sneakily chomping on things in my secret room closet.

Mr. and Mrs. Buckworth curiously walked over there too. They both leaned down to look inside my orange bag.

“Oh!” Mrs. Buckworth slapped her hand over her mouth.

Mr. Buckworth itched his head. “What the—”

They didn’t know the right words to say even though they spoke English.

I had saved a whole lot. Leftovers. Cookies and apples and cereal and toast and pizza and weird boxes of juice. It was all still there, stored up, because I hadn’t been starving yet. I hadn’t starved a single day at the Buckworths’. I wasn’t even really a skin-’n’-bones chicken.

That’s when I barely whispered, “I am a camel,” even though it didn’t mean much anymore.

 

THAT NIGHT WHEN I was in my bed, a bright circle of light shined on me. I rubbed my eye. A bad dream? A sweet dream?

It was a flashlight. “We’re having a slumber party, Betti!” Lucy whispered way too loud. “Shhhhh.” She dropped her dolls in a heap by my head and trailed her spotlight over her dolls. “Betti, look at my dolls! Aren’t they ... BEAUTIFUL?”

Roller Derby Tina had a tail and one of her feet looked huge, just like Lucy’s. There was cloth wrapped around her roller skate. Malibu Margie was covered in black fur, which looked suspiciously like Rooney’s fur. Ramon had crayon all over his face like a scary clown. Jimmy Dale’s overalls were green and lumpy, and Jessie Lynn, still in her wedding dress, had an enormous blown-up head. Probably from the microwave.

Lucy crawled into my bed and laid her head on my potato sack. I almost felt the way I used to feel in the lion cage. With the leftover kids crunched up next to me so they wouldn’t have nightmares.

“Betti? I’m sorry. About your mom and dad. But I’m happy you get to be my sister. Do you think I can be in your circus too? Can I? I mean, if my dolls aren’t perfect? And I’m not perfect?”

I thought about things. “Yes,” I finally whispered back. “You can be in my circus.”

Lucy fell asleep about one second later with her ponytail touching my cheek. I moved my feet right up against her cold little feet. And my feet stayed there, just like that.

THE NEXT DAY Mrs. Buckworth said that I could play at Mayda’s house. Even if Lenore, the adoption expert lady, said that I’d adapt if I made some friends and learned some English—and I definitely wasn’t going to adapt—I’d promised to play with Mayda, my English teacher, someday soon. And my promises were always good.

So Mrs. Buckworth called Mayda’s mama, and I guess she said it’d be just marvelous if I came over and played. When Mrs. Buckworth dropped me off, Mayda told Mrs. Buckworth that her dad was home but he was taking a bath at that exact moment.

“But we’ll bring Betti home this afternoon, okay? By three?” Mayda smiled politely at Mrs. Buckworth. Her teeth were a little crooked, just like all the leftover kids’ teeth.

Mrs. Buckworth nodded. “Well, I guess it’s ... okay. But will you call if you need anything, girls? Please?” Mrs. Buckworth looked a little worried, again. “And have lots of fun.”

We said good-bye to Mrs. Buckworth and I followed Mayda inside. As soon as she shut her front door, she turned to me and said, “You probably shouldn’t tell your mom that we’re here alone.”

“You live all by yourself? In your house?”

“Kind of,” she answered mysteriously. “Well, my dad lives here too, but it’s mostly me.”

If I lived all by myself in Mayda’s house, I would definitely adopt all the leftover kids and Auntie Moo.

“See, I know my mom’s voice perfectly.” Mayda pulled out a bag of bread in her kitchen. “I just acted like her on the phone because I wanted you to come play with me.” She started slathering brown nutty goo on the bread. “I’m making us a little snack. Peanut butter sandwiches. I hope you’re hungry.”

I was always hungry. “But, where is you mama then?” My eyes darted around Mayda’s empty skeleton living room.

“My mom? Oh, she lives in New Jersey. She calls me, though. On my birthday.”

I nodded. It was all very confusing.

“So I live with my dad. But he works a lot. Basically he has to work all the time. Two jobs. But it’s okay.” Mayda laid pieces of chocolate candy on top of our peanut bread. “I don’t want people to think that he’s a bad dad. He’s a really good dad. He wants to be here with me all the time, but I tell him I’m fine by myself. I get to be with Nanny too. And when my dad comes home at night we tell each other all the funny stories about our day.”

Mayda pulled white, squishy things out of a plastic bag and smooshed them on top of the chocolate candy. “I hope you like marshmallows.” Mayda stuffed a whole one in her mouth and handed me one, so I stuffed it in my mouth. Fluffy. “I love marshmallows,” she said, squashing more of them on top of the chocolate.

“Ick,” I replied. “Mayda, you do not want to go to Day Camp?”

“Oh, we can’t really afford it. We’re broke.”

I stared at her blankly. “You are broken?”

“No, we ... don’t have enough money.”

I understood the word “money,” and I was pretty sure that Mayda didn’t have any.

“My dad is saving money for me to go to college. Just a little at a time. He says I’m too smart not to go to college.” Mayda finally finished by plopping two pieces of bread on top of her two chocolate-marshmallow-peanut butter towers. She handed one to me. “Anyway,” continued Mayda, taking a big bite out of her sandwich, “some of those kids can be mean and horrible. I’d probably hate Day Camp.”

I thought about the mean and nasty dudes at Day Camp. I looked out of the corner of my good eye at Mayda. “Have they been ... horrible to you too?”

“Oh sure. Not these kids, but other kids. You know, at other schools. Ugh.”

I nodded. Ugh. We both had the locked lip sickness about nasty dudes.

“But it doesn’t matter. I don’t care if kids laugh at me. They never really get to know me.” Mayda shrugged. “We just move a lot.”

“You and Nanny?”

“No. My dad and me. Sometimes it’s hard to find jobs. Sometimes we think it’ll be easier in a different place. But it’s never really that much easier. Right now my dad has two jobs, so that’s good. He cleans buildings.”

“Buildings in the sky?”

Mayda smiled and nodded. “He may get to clean at Betsy Ross too. When school starts.”

Mayda motioned for me to follow her into the living room. We sat down on the stained carpet with our sandwiches. She grabbed the little plastic blue dog that was sitting against the wall. “This is the only pet I can have right now ’cause we keep moving.”

Mayda pushed a button and the blue barking dog crawled on jerky legs across Mayda’s living room floor. It would stop every few steps and bark with plastic teeth. Woof woof woof. I liked Rooney and Puddles better.

“So Nanny is your ... Grand Mama?” I asked.

“Nanny? No. She’s not really my Nanny. I just met her when I moved here at the beginning of summer. She’s my friend. She watches out for me and I watch out for her. Today she’s sick, though.” Mayda looked off into space at nothing. “She’s at the doctor. She tells me not to worry.”

Almost everyone I knew was sick and I always worried too.

Our mouths were chewing in slow motion, our lips were practically stuck. I was starting to like American food. I definitely was.

“Hey!” Mayda suddenly cried out. “Can I take your picture?”

Before I could answer, Mayda ran down her hall. She came back in about one second and held out a little black box. “This is a camera, see? Nanny gave it to me. I think it’s about a hundred years old.”

I thought of the pictures I had of the Buckworths in my orange bag. I thought of the picture of Lucy on roller skates, and George’s mommy in front of the swimming pool. Now I’d have a picture of ME to send to Auntie Moo.

Mayda stood back and put the camera to her eye and aimed it at me. “Smile, Betti.”

But I wasn’t used to smiling at a black box so I just squinted as the camera went FLASH and my good eye saw stars.

“Thanks.” Mayda set her camera down. “Do you want another sandwich, Betti?”

I didn’t know what sand and a witch had to do with bread and marshmallows, but I nodded and said “yummy” anyway. The barking blue dog crashed into the wall and fell over. Its little blue legs waved in the air.

“You can eat it on the way, okay?”

 

“THERE’S JUST NOT much to do at my house!” Mayda shouted over her shoulder. “It’s more fun to go places!”

“I think so too!” I shouted back.

I rode on the back of Mayda’s beat-up brown bicycle. We both wore hard hats on our heads, which Mayda called “helmets.” My orange bag bounced up and down on my back as we rode over bumps and holes. The cool wind blew in my face and my hair blew out of my helmet. My chocolate marshmallow bread almost flew away, so I stuffed it all in my mouth.

When we arrived at an old building, Mayda left her bike outside leaning against the wall. “No one ever steals this ol’ thing,” she said. She took off her helmet and swung it around with her hand. “This is the library.

It’s one of my favorite places. They let you read books for free. Sometimes I come here with Nanny, and sometimes just by myself.”

“The Lie berry,” I repeated. “Free books.”

The library was very quiet. Probably there were a lot of reading ghosts flying around. “Hi Mayda,” said two library ladies when we walked in. Mayda knew everybody at the library. She led me past walls and walls and walls of books. She stopped in the section that said “Children.”

“You can choose some, Betti.”

“Which one?” I asked, looking at hundreds and thousands of books.

“Any one you want. That’s what’s cool about the library.”

So I closed my good eye and picked one off the shelf. It was enormous and didn’t have many words inside, but it had very shiny, funny pictures. Then Mayda picked a book for me. “This is a good one, Betti!” On the front of my new book was a picture of a little piglet and a grandma spider.

“Chair-lett Weeb?”

“Charlotte’s Web,” said Mayda. “I really like this one!”

I didn’t know if I liked my new book or not. But I liked holding it in my hands. I liked touching the pig’s pink snout and tracing my finger around the spider’s web.

“We’ll start easy at first,” Mayda said over her shoulder, “and then we’ll read harder ones, okay?” She led me past more walls of books to some plastic chairs in a corner. On the way, Mayda stopped in the section that said “Young Adult Fiction” and picked a book off the shelf for herself. Mayda acted like a wise old woman, as if she were already in the ninth grade.

I immediately liked my story of the happy pig and the wise old lady spider. I couldn’t understand all of it, but Mayda helped me. When there were words I didn’t know, Mayda explained them and I wrote them in my Empty Book so I would remember. Someday, I thought, I would tell this happy pig story to the leftover kids.

That’s when Mayda said, “Let’s sit by the fountain.”

“Okay. Fow Tin.” It was like a swimming pool that magically spouted water into the sky. Mayda and I swung our legs back and forth. Then I dunked my arm all the way to the bottom of the water and fished out two coins, which Mayda thought was very funny. One coin for Mayda and one for me.