Glory Girl (10 page)

“You’re going?”

He nodded.

“Where, Uncle Newt? Will we see you again?”

“You remember George Oatis?”

“No.”

“Him and me grew up together. It’s his car I was driving the night of the accident. Anyway, it’s too many people around here for us, and Oats says he knows a man who can get us jobs out West.”

“You mean, like cowboys?”

Uncle Newt put his baseball cap on his head, grinned and ducked in embarrassment. “We probably sound like two fools to you.”

“No.”

“We sound like fools to ourselves. I don’t guess we’ll bust broncos or anything.”

“I just hope you’ll be happy, and I’m really glad I got to know you.”

“That goes double for me.”

Anna started to reach out to him, to shake his hand, but something about the way he was standing stopped her. “Listen,” she said suddenly, “do you need money? I’ve got a hundred and twenty-eight dollars over there in the box. I’d be glad to give it to you. The whole family would.”

“No.”

“They’d be honored if you took it, really.”

“No!” He lifted his hands. “No, thank you.” He lowered his hands, palms down, as if he were pressing something back into a box. “I want to leave things between me and your family just exactly where they’re at. If that makes any sense.” He took a step toward the door. “Now, you take care of yourself, you hear?”

“I will. You too.”

At the door he shifted his weight and paused. Without looking at her, he said, “You’re the best of the bunch—you know that?”

The way he said it, as if it were the first compliment he had ever given anybody, took her breath. She said in a rush, “I’m not, but thank you for saying it.”

He turned his head and looked directly at her. “It’s true. Any one of them—your mom, Bubba, any one of them would give me money now. Would be glad to. But you would have done it before, wouldn’t you?”

“Yes.”

“See, I knew that. I could tell. You’ve got a generous, kind way about you, and don’t you ever lose it.” She couldn’t answer. “Well, you tell the family I said so long.”

“I will, Uncle Newt.”

He touched the brim of his baseball cap and went out the door. It swung shut slowly behind him.

Anna stood for a moment in the empty entrance hall. She waited, listening for the sound of Uncle Newt’s car driving away. When the sound faded, she turned to go back into the auditorium.

As she turned she glanced up at George Washington. He seemed to be watching her with his bright blue eyes. She stepped closer.

Whoever had made the plaster statue had left the eyes blank, but someone had ballpoint-penned in some blue pupils. Suddenly she liked the statue. She looked up at it again. She put one hand on the cold plaster. There were probably a hundred statues like this in George Washington High Schools all over the country. And yet this one had, just by waiting, gotten a personality.

Smiling slightly, she turned to the auditorium. As she took the last seat, she heard her father saying, “We’re going to take a short break now—doctor’s orders—and while we do, at the back of the auditorium, one of the Glory girls, our little Anna, will be waiting to help you with your purchases. Stand up, darling, so they can see where you’re at.”

Anna got up. For the first time in her life she stood up smiling. She waved her hand and then stepped back out the auditorium door and sat at her table.

She straightened the stacks of records and cassette tapes. Her uncle’s words, “You’re the best of the bunch,” still echoed in her mind, making her feel better each time she heard them. “You’ve got a generous, kind way about you.” It was as if he had given her the first two positive pieces of a large and complicated puzzle. Like George Washington, she was at last getting a personality. Her smile broadened as the first people came out of the auditorium. “Can I help you?” she asked.

“Tonight before we sing our closing theme song, I’d like to say a special word about my brother, Newt. It was him that saved our lives. He put his life on the line again and again, for each one of us, and I wanted Newt to be with us tonight, singing here on the stage, part of the Glory family at last. It couldn’t be. So tonight I want to go on record as saying this. Wherever you are, Newt, whatever you’re doing, anytime you want to, come on home and—

“Sing with the Glorys

Yes, come sing

With the Glorys

If you sing

With the Glorys

Then you’ll never,

Never,

Never!

Sing a-lone!

“Good night, everybody, and may God bless you and keep you until we meet again.”

Betsy Byars (b. 1928) is an award-winning author of more than sixty books for children and young adults, including
The Summer of the Swans
(1970), which earned the prestigious Newbery Medal. Byars also received the National Book Award for
The Night Swimmers
(1980) and an Edgar Award for
Wanted . . . Mud Blossom
(1991), among many other accolades. Her books have been translated into nineteen languages and she has fans all over the world.

Byars was born Betsy Cromer in Charlotte, North Carolina. Her father, George, was a manager at a cotton mill and her mother, Nan, was a homemaker. As a child, Betsy showed no strong interest in writing but had a deep love of animals and sense of adventure. She and her friends ran a backyard zoo that starred “trained cicadas,” box turtles, leeches, and other animals they found in nearby woods. She also claims to have ridden the world’s first skateboard, after neighborhood kids took the wheels off a roller skate and nailed them to a plank of wood.

After high school, Byars began studying mathematics at Furman University, but she soon switched to English and transferred to Queens College in Charlotte, where she began writing. She also met Edward Ford Byars, an engineering graduate student from Clemson University, whom she would marry after she graduated in 1950.

Between 1951 and 1956 Byars had three daughters—Laurie, Betsy, and Nan. While raising her family, Byars began submitting stories to magazines, including the
Saturday Evening Post
and
Look
. Her success in publishing warm, funny stories in national magazines led her to consider writing a book. Her son, Guy, was born in 1959, the same year she finished her first manuscript. After several rejections,
Clementine
(1962), a children’s story about a dragon made out of a sock, was published.

Following
Clementine
, Byars released a string of popular children’s and young adult titles including
The Summer of the Swans
, which earned her the Newbery Medal. She continued to build on her early success through the following decades with award-winning titles such as
The Eighteenth Emergency
(1973),
The Night Swimmers
, the popular Bingo Brown series, and the Blossom Family series. Many of Byars’s stories describe children and young adults with quirky families who are trying to find their own way in the world. Others address problems young people have with school, bullies, romance, or the loss of close family members. Byars has also collaborated with daughters Betsy and Laurie on children’s titles such as
My Dog, My Hero
(2000).

Aside from writing, Byars continues to live adventurously. Her husband, Ed, has been a pilot since his student days, and Byars obtained her own pilot’s license in 1983. The couple lives on an airstrip in Seneca, South Carolina. Their home is built over a hangar and the two pilots can taxi out and take off almost from their front yard.

Byars (bottom left) at age five, with her mother and her older sister, Nancy.

A teenage Byars (left) and her sister, Nancy, on the dock of their father’s boat, which he named
NanaBet
for Betsy and Nancy.

Byars at age twenty, hanging out with friends at Queens College in 1948.

Byars and her new husband, Ed, coming up the aisle on their wedding day in June 1950.

Byars and Ed with their daughters Laurie and Betsy in 1955. The family lived for two years in one of these barracks apartments while Ed got a degree at the University of Illinois and Byars started writing.