Hope Is a Ferris Wheel (18 page)

“Anyway, I'm not smart enough to run that club,” Eddie said. And the weird thing was, he was completely serious.

“What are you talking about? You're the smartest one in the club!” It was maddening, but he was.

“If I was smart, I wouldn't have gotten held back,” he said, and he reminded me that he couldn't even read when he was in first grade—both times he was in first grade.

“You can read now,” I pointed out, but Eddie just grumbled about how
everyone can read now, Star.

Yeah
, I thought,
everyone reads thousand-page books and has fifty different poems memorized
. “You really don't think you're smart?”

“I know I'm not smart, and everyone else knows it, too. That's why everyone's afraid of me. Because I had to beat people up so much for calling me stupid all the time.” As if to prove it, he jerked at a passing sixth-grader, who jumped and started walking the other way. “I can tell they're still thinking it, though. Teachers included.”

“I don't think anyone from the club thinks you're stupid,” I told him. “Miss Fergusson included.”

“Hmph” was all he had to say to that. And then he shoved me, just a little bit, sending me off the track. We didn't say much to each other for the rest of the parade, but I could tell that Eddie didn't hate me anymore, and that was nice.

Of course, I still didn't know how Mr. Savage had found out about the club.

“Hey,” Eddie said before we went to line back up. “Genny told me you were upset because there are only five of us in the club.”

“Genny talked to you?” I asked. Genny was doing all kinds of weird things lately. First detention, and now this.

“Well, I like having only five people,” he told me. “You're new this year, so you don't know that everyone else pretty much sucks.”

That made me smile. It was nice to know that even though Eddie didn't like anyone else, he liked me.

Maybe the club had actually worked. Not completely, but a little bit. “You don't think that having only five people makes it a bad club?” I asked.

“We could have four people,” Eddie said. “You can kick that Denny kid out, since he just sits there.” I pointed out that Langston also just sat there, mostly, and Eddie said, “Yeah, but I like Langston.”

“Denny has to stay,” I told him. “I think he and Genny
have to be together.” What was I talking about? “It doesn't matter anyway. I can't get the club back.”

Eddie walked away, shaking his head. “So stubborn,” I heard him say.

“So are you,” I told him, but he was too far away to hear.

I
didn't go trick-or-treating. I did stop by the tinfoil man's trailer with Gloria, because he'd told her he had something he wanted to give me.

It was a toffee bar wrapped in tinfoil.

“Thanks,” I told his hand, which was the only thing I saw. It nodded at me and then disappeared back inside his trailer.

Mom made pumpkin soup for dinner, which was awful, and not only because everything Mom cooked lately seemed to taste like ash. It was actually awful, and I never wanted to eat it again. Gloria ended up pouring hers in the toilet. But when Winter came home, she ate the rest of the pot and then asked if there was any more.

“Ha! It wasn't that bad!” Mom said.

But it was. And it seemed like that awful soup sloshed around in my stomach all weekend. Or maybe it was just because I was so anxious about that letter. It didn't come Saturday, and I checked the mail twice on Sunday before remembering that there wasn't any mail on Sundays. I should have remembered that, considering Mom's yearlong stint working at the post office back in Brookings.

There still wasn't a letter on Monday morning either. I got to school early and used the library computer to type in
How long does it take for a letter to get from California to Oregon?
But I guess it depended on the cities, because California is a million miles long, and Oregon has all those long stretches full of trees and empty of houses. One website said between two and seven days.

So that was a bust.

I asked the librarian if she had any books about pregnancy or being pregnant. “Is your mother pregnant, dear?” she asked.

“I'm just curious,” I said. She gave me a big hardcover, which I took to the bench to read and then promptly wished I hadn't.

Being pregnant sucks.

Pregnant women get sick and throw up, they have crazy mood swings and food cravings, and also, because
of carrying a baby around along with a bunch of pregnancy weight, they get horrible back problems.

But the very worst part of the book was the end, where there was a picture of a mother and her newborn baby. The mother looked like she had just run a twenty-mile marathon without drinking any water, and the baby was covered in … I didn't even know what.

I returned that book immediately.

No wonder Winter wanted me to solve my own problems, when her problem was so, so huge. And if Mom found out? It'd be even huger.

E
ven though I went out of my way to choose a spot that was out of everyone else's way, Genny managed to find me in the cafeteria, setting her brown paper bag next to my tray.

“I think Chelsea and Maggie changed their minds,” Genny said.

“Really?” I wasn't actually that surprised. “Why do you think that?”

“Well, Chelsea came up to me and said that she and Maggie didn't want to be in the club after all.”

Before I could tell Genny that I was thinking maybe the club had been fine the way it was, Denny set his lunch bag down across from us. And when I say
set
, I really mean
slammed
. He dug a dollar bill out of his pocket and slid it over to Genny, saying, “Go buy us some milk.”

“Sure!” Genny said, and she skipped off, probably excited to have a very nice conversation with the lunch lady.

Once she was fully embroiled in the milk line, Denny whirled on me and said, “Okay. Enough is enough. You're done hanging out with my sister.”

“Yeah, right,” I told him. Like I was going to stop talking to the only girl in school who was actually nice to me.

“I'm serious,” he said, yanking everything out of his bag and slamming it onto the table. “She can't be around you anymore. You know she's
trying
to get detention again?” He made it sound like detention was the most disgusting thing on the planet. “At home, she's always talking about you and your stupid clothes and how she wants to get a stupid mullet.”

“It's a
layered cut
,” I said, which drew the attention of the two nearest tables. “It's supposed to look like this! It's not a mullet!”

He acted like he hadn't heard a single thing I'd said. “She was doing just fine until you came around,” he said. “You and your trashy sister.”

“Don't you say that about Winter! You don't even know her!”

“I know she came over this weekend begging Allie to get back together with her,” he said, and a horrible laugh tumbled out of his mouth. “He turned her down, too. She must be a real loser if she got dumped by Allie. He's the king of losers.”

I heard them, all around us—the kids at the other tables, laughing. I was used to Denny glaring at me and saying terrible things, but hearing him bad-mouth Winter was too much.

“You're not in the club anymore,” I told him.

“
There
is
no club!
” he screamed at me, his eyes wide. “I told Mr. Savage what you did, and now it's gone! So leave my sister
alone
.”

So it was Denny who'd ratted me out, and now that I looked back on what had happened, I couldn't believe I'd ever thought it could be Eddie. “You're nothing but a dirt-sucking termite,” I said. I could have called him a cockroach, because cockroaches are ugly, but termites are ugly
and
they destroy things.

“And you're a trailer-trash freak, just like your sister,” he said.

Voices rose around us, from every table—shrieks of every pitch, along with the loud hiss of dozens of whispers, and all of it surrounded by laughter. That poor lunchtime monitor didn't even know where to start shushing.

That's when Genny came back with the milks. “Why were you screaming?” she asked, handing Denny a carton of chocolate milk.

I grabbed it right out of his hand. He was too shocked to do anything, so he just watched as I opened it, on both sides, and then dumped the entire thing over his head.

“Star!” Genny gasped.

“He sold us out!” I told her, but that didn't wipe the horrified expression from her face. I didn't get it. She lived with Denny. She knew what a jerk he was. I bet she wanted to punch him every single day, but she couldn't because they were family.

Then something squished into the side of my head, and I heard a dozen voices around me all say, “Eww!” I reached up and peeled a piece of mayonnaise-covered bread—excuse me,
organic
mayonnaise-covered bread—off of my face.

“Denny!” Genny squeaked, just as he smooshed another piece right onto my forehead.

For the first time, I wished the hot lunch was that horrible beef stroganoff. It would have been the perfect thing to throw. But all I had on my tray was a pizza rectangle.

So I grabbed an applesauce from the kid behind me and flung it right at Denny's head.

And then it got
bad
. Denny got ahold of someone's
macaroni and cheese, and then I got his pants with Jell-O. He threw ranch dressing on me, and then I pushed some kids out of the way to get to the good stuff: salsa, yogurt, noodles, raisins. The whole time, Genny was screaming for us to stop, but Denny wasn't backing down, and neither was I. I was finally getting him back for all the horrible things he'd said and done and glared.

But then two monitors ran up and grabbed our foodstained arms. A third monitor stood in the middle of the cafeteria, blowing so hard on her whistle, her face had turned red.

All around us, the shouts and laughter faded into whispers and then into nothing but staring. I wasn't sure how I looked, but Denny looked bad, with chocolate milk dripping off his bangs. I wiped some mayonnaise out of my hair and onto my skirt, and then the monitors took us away.

We passed Genny, at the end of the table, and she looked like she was about to cry. I was relieved to see that she hadn't gotten any food on her. “I'm sorry,” I told her, but I don't think she heard. She was glaring right at Denny, and her glare was a thousand times worse than any of his.

I almost felt bad for him.

A
fter washing up and sitting in the principal's office for half an hour without saying anything, Denny and I finally got sent out into the hallway while the principal called our parents. Parent. Whatever.

The librarian was keeping an eye on us but also reading a picture book to herself. I could've made a break for it and gotten a few blocks away before she noticed. Instead, I slouched against the wall while my butt slowly went numb. I guess chairs were too much to ask for now that we were hardened criminals.