Hope Is a Ferris Wheel (13 page)

It was a lot like being on the Ferris wheel again and finally coming down to the ground. It was the slowest part of the ride, but at least this time I knew that when I finally got off, Dad would be there waiting for me.

M
om microwaved us some breakfast burritos. She was still in her robe, which was odd, because she always likes to shower first thing in the morning. Then Gloria came over with a small bag of donuts and her big bag of hair-care products.

“Gloria's gonna touch up my lowlights,” Mom said. “Then we thought we'd hit a couple of thrift stores. What time will you girls be home?”

Winter said maybe around dinner, and Mom said, “There's that many redwoods to see?” and Winter said, “It takes a while to drive there, you know.” Then Mom gave Winter a few dollars for lunch, and we headed out the door.

“Hey, Winter,” Gloria said as she set her bags on the table. “When are we going to deal with those roots of yours?”

“I think I'm just gonna let the dye fade out,” Winter said. Already Winter's hair had faded into a rusty sort of reddish-black, but it was permanent dye, so it still had a couple of months before it finally croaked. So that was doubly surprising, especially since Winter hated having blond hair. It made her look too nice, she always said. No one was going to buy bloodbath horror novels from a girl with blond curls.

As we got into the pickup, I thought about letting my dye fade out, too, but once the blue faded, I'd be left with a bunch of white streaks in my hair. I'd look like some kind of mutant skunk. Langston would call me Skunk Girl.

Mrs. O'Grady came out of her trailer while we were buckling our seat belts. We could barely make out her head over the portable fencing. “Tell your mother to stop stealing my newspapers!” she yelled, and then her hand appeared, shaking a broom at us.

Winter yelled back, “Okay, Mrs. O'Grady!” And then muttered to me, “Who steals some old lady's newspapers?”

We drove out of Treasure Trailers. I guess since it was now less than a week until Halloween, everyone was decorating. Some people replaced their Christmas lights with
orange and black Halloween lights. Even the guy in the tinfoil-covered trailer had a tinfoil-covered jack-o'-lantern sitting in front of his steps.

“Are you really not going to dye your hair again?” I asked. “I thought you liked black.” I know
I
liked Winter better with black hair, because it made us look more like sisters.

“I just want it to grow out a bit,” she said. “I'll dye it again eventually. I just … don't know when.”

“When you go back to public school?” I asked.

“
If
I go back to public school.”

Of course she'd go back to public school. I told her that, but she didn't reply, and her lips pursed tightly together like she didn't want to say anything at all.

Maybe she was as nervous as I was. But I wanted to talk, talk, talk. I wanted Winter to tell me about the time she'd talked to Dad at the fair, or any other time she'd seen Dad. Hadn't she seen him when she was really little, before I was born?

Instead, I opened the glove box and let all her stories fall into my lap. Winter reached over, plucked one from the pile, and held it out to me. The paper was bright and new, the folds crisp. A brand-new story! Maybe the first that Winter had written since school started in September.

“What's this one rated?” I asked.

“Probably R,” Winter told me. “But only for violence. And some language.”

The story was about a girl who's at a party with a boy she likes, at a house by a dark and dreary lake. The boy dares her to drink some of the lake water, which is icy cold going down her throat. The next day she feels sick, but her mom won't let her stay home. She goes to school and feels sicker and sicker and sicker, and it feels like her insides are being sliced apart. But no one believes her when she says how much pain she's in. Finally, at the very end of the story, she goes to the bathroom, thinking she's about to throw up. But instead, a giant gross maggot bursts out of her stomach.

That's how it ended.

“So, she's dead?” I asked. “And then, does the maggot get bigger and bigger and start eating all the girls who come into the bathroom?”

Winter laughed and said, “Hey, that's pretty good! Maybe you should write some stories.”

“I wrote a poem,” I said, thinking about my Emily Dickinson poem. The first one, about Winter, was tucked safely in my Dad bag. “No one liked it, though.”

Winter told me no one had liked her first story, either, back in elementary school. She'd written about some
radioactive gum that made the girl chewing it melt into her desk. “You'll get better,” she said.

I didn't think so, considering my unfinished second poem. But that reminded me of the poetry book I'd brought along, so I asked Winter if she wanted to hear some poems, and she said sure. We were out of town now, and the traffic had thinned out, though the highway still had two lanes instead of one. Trees rose up all around us. Redwoods, which meant we could tell Mom we'd actually seen them.

I flipped through Eddie's book, looking for short poems, and read them to Winter, and we voted on whether they were good or bad. Most were somewhere in between, which I planned to tell Eddie to prove that Emily Dickinson really was the best poet in the world.

“See if ‘The Tyger' is in there. It's by William Blake,” Winter told me. “I bet you'd like it.”

I flipped to the table of contents to see, and found, at the very bottom, that someone had added a title in pencil. Sloppy pencil, like a really little kid had written it. It said,
Amarica's Gratist Poem
, followed by lots of dots and the number 548. So I flipped to the very end of the book, past the index, and into the blank pages that are always at the back of a book.

There, written in the same sloppy pencil, was the poem
“The Bagpipe Who Didn't Say No” by Shel Silverstein. I must have said the title out loud, because Winter said, “What?”

I knew this poem. Everybody in the United States probably knew it. It's about a turtle who falls in love with a bagpipe, but the turtle gets his heart broken, because bagpipes don't have feelings.

“This is not a great poem,” I said. I couldn't believe Eddie had written it in there, but who else would have done it? No one, because then they would have been punched across the playground, even if they were a little kid. “He doesn't know anything about poetry,” I told Winter, snapping the book shut.

“You got your club under control?”

“Yeah, I think.” The book went back into my bag, but now I wished I'd just left it at home. “I still have to come up with something for next week, but I don't want to. Or maybe Dad will have an idea.” That would be good.

“Yeah,” said Winter. “I hope so, too.”

That word,
hope
, stood out, and I asked Winter, “What do you think hope is? Eddie said it was a rock.”

“You talk about Eddie a lot,” Winter pointed out. “Hey, look. The ocean.”

I'd seen the ocean before, and besides, with all those darkish clouds in the sky, the ocean looked gray and
swampy. “I thought it was a good answer,” I told her. I could hardly remember what everyone else had said about hope. I mean, Genny's was a haiku, and it didn't even make sense.

“Well, maybe he does know something about poetry,” Winter said. I told her he got held back in first grade, and he used to be a bad reader, and now he went around punching and shoving people, sometimes for no reason at all.

“I think he's the reason no one else will join the club.” Also Langston—Langston wasn't helping. “Plus, Eddie wants to stop doing Emily Dickinson. He wants to do all the other poems in the world. Anyway, what do you think hope is? You didn't answer yet.”

Winter smiled and said, “I know.” And then, just as little sprinkles of rain began pecking at the windshield, she said, “Maybe a raindrop. It goes hurtling to the ground, aiming for a puddle or a lake or the ocean, so it can be with all the other droplets.”

I'd known that Winter would have a good answer, but I hadn't expected it to give me chills. It was like she was describing me, except I was hurtling through school and hoping to make some real friends.

I looked around for a pen to write it down—on my arm, if I had to. But then Winter said, “usually, though,
it just splatters against the cement. Sometimes hope isn't enough, Star. Remember that.”

I told her I would, but for the rest of the ride I stared out the window and tried to forget.

H
is name was plain old Robert, and his house was bigger than three trailers combined. Tall green shrubs guarded his lawn instead of a fence, and his paved driveway, with two brand-new trucks parked in it, was miles away from any dump. The only bad thing I could say about the house was that it wouldn't stop raining outside. It always rains in Oregon.

Without our umbrellas or raincoats, the walk to the front door was much wetter than I would have liked. Winter's curls sagged with the rain, while my hair clung to the back of my neck.

We rang the doorbell but didn't hear it go off inside. I hoped he would be the one to answer the door, not his
wife, because, according to Gloria, his wife didn't like Mom at all, and so she probably wouldn't like us either.

Luckily he did answer, pulling open the door and looking from Winter down to me and back up again, like he couldn't understand what two soaked girls were doing standing on his porch. His gaze lingered on Winter for a few extra moments before he said her name. “Winter?”

She nodded, and if the smile on her face was a clue, she was too happy to speak. Instead, she wrapped her arms around him, and after a second of surprise, he did the same, hugging her tightly. “It's been years,” I heard him say into her shoulder, and then he looked at me and said, “And this must be Star.”

My heart swelled. If Emily Dickinson had any poems about hearts, I bet she would have described them as balloons. “Hi,” I said, and my bag felt suddenly heavy. There was so much to tell him, to show him. How was I going to get it all out?

“Come inside,” he said, inviting us in. His house was so warm, warm enough to walk around barefoot. Which I presumed he did most of the time, judging by the basket of shoes by the door. And he didn't smell like rubber at all, I noted as soon as he turned to close the door. He smelled like … fresh laundry.

“Does Carly know you're here?” he asked, and then he
answered his own question. “Of course not. She'd throw a fit. Come on, both of you. Take off your shoes. Let's go sit by the fire.”

Heavenly Donuts! He had a house with a fireplace!

I couldn't wait to go back to school on Monday and tell the next person who made fun of my trailer that my dad lived in a big house with a fireplace and that his carpets were spotless.

And then he looked at me, and I saw that his eyes were brown.
I got his eyes
, I thought.

I sank into a velvety couch and put my hands out to catch the heat from the fire that burned in a real brick fireplace. The wood made popping sounds as it burned, and a yellow glow filled the whole room.

Winter sat down next to me, and Robert next to her.

“You've really grown up, Winter,” he said. I wanted him to say something about me, but he kept his eyes on Winter, on her hair, her face, her hands. Winter wouldn't look at him, though, and kept her eyes locked on the fire.

She tried to speak, but hardly anything came out. A few silent moments passed before she turned to me and said, “Star, tell Dad about your club.”

And then he was looking at me, so I sat up as straight as I could and told him about the Emily Dickinson Club, leaving out a few parts that were embarrassing, such as the
number of people in it. “I wish a few more people would join,” I told him instead.

“Are all your friends already in it?” he asked.

“Yeah,” I lied.