Hope Is a Ferris Wheel (11 page)

It's a weird poem, because it didn't fit into any of the three Emily Dickinson categories. It's not about God or death, and it seems like it might be a nature poem because it has a bird in it, but it's not actually about a bird, it's about hope. Hope is just a thing with feathers, so it could be anything. Anything with feathers.

I also wondered why Emily Dickinson thought about hope that way. When I thought about hope, I didn't think about anything feathery. Recently, I'd started thinking about my dad whenever I thought about hope. Maybe because I was hoping to see him soon, or maybe because of the line he'd written on Winter's card.

Before we came to California, I'd never really thought about Dad much at all, and now here he was, in my head, making me hope for things like birthday cards and ice cream dates and whatever else fathers and daughters did together.

Sometimes when I can't sleep at night, I'll half dream that I'm back on that Ferris wheel. I'll see Dad from way up high, and I'll reach my arms out. I'll want to touch him, and I can't, and when I open my eyes, I'm still in the trailer.

I think there's been this empty space in my heart where Dad was supposed to be, and I'd never noticed it before, since Mom won't talk about him and neither will Gloria.

But now that Winter and I are going to see him, it kind of feels like the Ferris wheel is moving again, bringing me closer and closer to Dad. Close enough to jump out and see whether he has brown eyes like mine, or gray ones like Winter's.

I took out my notebook and opened it to a fresh page to write,
Hope is a Ferris wheel
. It was supposed to be the
start of another Emily Dickinson–style poem, like my Winter poem, but after a few minutes of tapping my eraser on the desk, I gave up trying to think of what the next line was and just wrote,
It spins and spins and spins
.

I glanced over at Eddie, wondering what he thought hope was, or if there was something he was hoping for. But probably not.

I almost ripped out my poem, but even though it was only two lines, and not a very good poem, I figured maybe someday I'd be able to finish it.

I
lugged Eddie's stupid red book all the way home, because when I tried to give it back, he asked me what poem I'd read, and when I told him I'd read “Hope is the thing with feathers,” he got this disgusted look on his face and told me to keep reading.

Why is he even in the Emily Dickinson Club if he doesn't like Emily Dickinson?

We had a full house when I got back to the trailer: Winter sitting up in bed, looking pale and a little sweaty and insisting she felt fine; Mom in the bathroom, digging through the box of medicine, talking about doctor appointments; and Gloria at the counter, smelling a box of donuts but not yet eating them.

I grabbed a sprinkled cake donut from Gloria's box and sat down at the table. “Why does Winter have to go to the doctor?” I asked Mom.

“Because she's had the flu for nearly a week,” Mom said, at the same time Winter said, “I
don't
have to go to a doctor! Everyone's overreacting!”

“It'll be a quick trip, Winter,” Mom tried, but Winter shook her head back and forth violently. “I've got to take you to the doctor. I'm responsible for your welfare.”

“You're responsible for
putting
us on welfare,” Winter told her.

Mom didn't shrink an inch. “I guess I walked into that one,” she said. “Now, where'd I put our insurance cards …?”

“Probably in the shed, Carly,” Gloria said. Mom had a box labeled
IMPORTANT STUFF
that she kept in our storage shed, and it was a huge mess that contained everything from old pay stubs to medical records. For the first time I wondered if there was information about Dad somewhere in there. Mom kept the key in her room, but I didn't know where.

“Look,” Winter said. “The only reason I threw up was because I ate some meat yesterday.”

“Heavenly Donuts!” Gloria said. “What kind?”

“Pepperoni pizza.”

“So does that mean you're done being vegetarian?”
Mom asked, with a hopeful lilt in her voice. I hoped so, too, because while I wanted to be vegetarian with Winter, I really liked meat. There was no way I could give up ground beef and fish sticks and fried chicken.

But Winter wasn't done, she said. Since eating meat had made her throw up, she wasn't touching it again for a long time. Mom wilted a bit, but she didn't shrink, and Gloria held up a maple-bacon donut and said, “I guess I'm eating this one.”

While Mom and Gloria went out to the grocery store to get Winter some ginger ale, I took Eddie's book out of my backpack and flipped through some of the pages.

“What's that?” Winter asked.

I told her about the book, about how Eddie wanted me to read poems that weren't by Emily Dickinson. “Maybe we shouldn't have just Emily Dickinson poems,” I said.

Winter jumped off the top bunk, her feet thudding against the floor and shaking the trailer a bit. “Is this that kid who was trying to take over your club? I thought you were going to take charge of it again!”

“I want to,” I said, closing the book. “I just don't know how.” At this rate, I'd never get anybody else to join the club. I took out my club notebook to look at my notes and all the pages of Emily Dickinson poems I'd copied.

Winter sat down across from me at the table and said,
“You're not just reading them poems, are you? Everyone will get bored if you do that.”

“Um.” I kept flipping pages, trying to find one that didn't have a poem on it. There was Emily Dickinson's life story, which I'd copied out of the encyclopedia at the library … which was also probably going to bore everyone. I was about to give up when I landed on my not-even-half-finished poem, “Hope is a Ferris wheel.”

“Maybe we could all write our own poems,” I said, mostly to myself, but then I remembered that my own poem was not even half-finished, and if the club president couldn't finish writing a poem, that wasn't a good sign.

“Hope is
what
?” Winter said, trying to read my writing upside down.

“A Ferris wheel.”

“Oh. That sounds good,” she told me. “But I don't really get it.”

Me neither
, I almost said. Instead, I reread the poem to myself, thinking that hope could be a lot of things.

And then I had it.

I yelped, making Winter flinch, and shut my notebook, shoving it into my backpack. Eddie's book went under my bed, where I hoped it would stay for a long, long time. Because if my idea worked, there was no way we'd ever be done with Emily Dickinson.

G
enny and I only put out five desks today for the Emily Dickinson Club, because the way I figured it, if anyone else came to join, that meant they weren't afraid of Eddie or Langston, and they could drag their own desks over.

While Genny wrote the names of all in attendance, I thumped my fist on the desk like a gavel. “Emily Dickinson said ‘Hope is the thing with feathers,' ” I started. “I thought maybe we could come up with our own ideas about what hope is.” It didn't quite sound as in charge as I wanted it to, so I thumped my fist again on the desk. “I think it's a Ferris wheel,” I said.

“Why a Ferris wheel?” Eddie asked.

“Because it spins,” I said.

Genny scribbled something into the minutes.

“And?” Eddie said. “What does that mean?”

Which was terrible, because I hadn't thought that far ahead. I'd need some time to figure out how to explain it. “You all have to write yours down first,” I said. “And then I'll tell you.”

Everyone except Denny asked for paper and pencils, which Miss Fergusson got out of her supply closet for us. She asked, “May I join in, too?”

“Sure!” I said, and she took a piece of paper back to her desk.

After about five minutes I asked if everyone was done, but no one except Langston was. After five more minutes Genny was done. After five
more
minutes, Denny and Miss Fergusson finished. And last, three minutes later, was Eddie.

I decided we should go in reverse order, so Eddie went first.

“Okay, this might sound dumb,” he said, and the look in his eyes said that if we thought it sounded dumb, he had a fist he'd like to introduce us to, “but I think hope is a rock. Because you can squeeze it all you want, and you can't destroy it.
But
.” He leaned in close, eyes wide. “It can still
be crushed.” Then he slapped his hand on the desk, and we all jumped back.

“Oooooooh,” Genny said.

“Don't put any of that in the minutes,” Eddie told her, and Genny started erasing fast.

Miss Fergusson was next. “Hope is September,” she told us from her desk. “That's when I get my new students. I always have so much hope for them.” She mostly said this to the back of Eddie's head.

Denny said hope was dust in the wind. I was actually impressed, because I'd expected Denny to not even try. But then Genny said he'd gotten that line from a song, and Denny went back to glaring at his lap.

Genny read hers: “Hope is everywhere. It's a meadow full of bees. They go buzzing by.”

“Mine doesn't seem that dumb now,” Eddie said.

“It's a haiku!” she said. “Okay, what did Langston write?”

Langston held up his paper to reveal a drawing of Emily Dickinson wearing a bra.

“Okay, well, unless Langston does it, too, I'm not explaining mine,” I said, staring him down.

Crumpling up his paper, Langston told us that hope was a dirty window. “You can't see through it all the way. You just figure there's something good out there.”

“Langston,” Eddie said, pretending to choke up, “that brought tears to my eyes.” Which made Langston throw his crumpled-up bra drawing right at Eddie's face. Eddie started to get up, and I banged my fist again, and suddenly everyone's attention was on me.

I was nervous, because everyone else's ideas about hope were a lot better than mine. But Eddie said, “Come on,” and Langston said, “You promised,” and Genny said, reading back over the minutes, “She didn't promise, but she did say she'd tell us.”

“Just don't laugh,” I said. So I started by telling them about the day at the fair, my only memory of Dad. I was six, and Winter was twelve, I knew for certain. And it must have been the first time we'd ever gone to the fair, because Mom always tells us that fairs and carnivals are money traps. Other than that, some details I had to make up, while others kind of popped into my head as I went on.

I guess I was the only one who wanted to ride the Ferris wheel. Mom and Winter promised to wait for me, so I took my ticket and stood in line, next to a woman whom Mom asked to ride with me so I wouldn't be by myself. By the time we got into the basket, Mom and Winter had gone, and before I could tell the woman to let me off, the basket lurched forward and up so fast, my stomach flipped.

The higher I got, the more of the fair I could see, and
soon I spotted Mom's straight black hair next to Winter's blond curls (it was before Winter started dyeing her hair). They were standing by the hot dog stand with a man I'd never seen before. From far away he was blurry, like Mom and Winter were, but I could tell a few things about him: he was tall (like Winter) with a red baseball cap (neither of us likes baseball) and a black leather jacket (we both like black).

When the Ferris wheel reached its highest point, I saw the man put his hand on Winter's shoulder, and that's when I started to yell. The bar holding us in was locked tight, though, and there was no hope of me getting out. The woman sitting with me must have thought I was just scared, because she put her arm around me and told me to close my eyes.

But I didn't. As the Ferris wheel came down again, I watched him walk away. Soon he was out of sight. And the next time my basket reached the top, he was gone, gone, gone, and Mom and Winter were back where they'd said they'd be.