“We’ve seen the news, and we’ve heard about our soldiers too, right? Maybe some of you even know a soldier who’s over there ...”
It was weird hearing a Melon talk about my country. I wondered what exactly they’d all heard, what pictures they’d seen. Maybe they saw pretty people having a happy vacation, just like the Buckworths’ book.
I watched the girl’s mouth on the other side of the circle. She was chewing gum, chewing chewing, like the pigs in the pig yard. She had pointy hair with little pink streaks. Did it grow like that? That hair was crazier than mine and Sister Baroo would be very upset to comb out hair like that.
There was a boy in the circle with freckles and funny wires on his teeth, and two other boys wearing hats, but the hats were accidentally turned backward on their heads. The fifth camper was a round Melon girl with a pink face. She was tapping the toes of her play shoes together over and over again. Tap tap tap.
“Betti? Would you like to tell us anything about your life back home? You can tell us yourself. I’m afraid I don’t know nearly enough.” Ms. Stacy blushed.
For a second I forgot about the chewing and the tapping and the wire teeth. I tried hard to picture the circus camp: me climbing the tallest trees so I could see everything. I was definitely the leader and I definitely had a Big Mouth. But here? I could hardly spit out a single word.
“I lived ... I live ... at ... people food market.”
“At the market?” Ms. Stacy looked very confused.
The kids just laughed.
“I mean I live ...” The words were coming out all wrong. I couldn’t think straight. “At airport. At Base Mint. No ...” I inhaled a big breath and thought I’d faint face-first. “I live at circus.”
“At the circus?” Ms. Stacy started speaking very slowly, as if I had an out-of-order brain. “Do you mean—”
“I live at circus!” I said louder. “That is where I live!”
The girl with the crazy hair and the gum said, “The circus?”
“What circus?” asked a backward-hat boy with a horrible smirk.
“Fifi ... the elephant ... has clowns on back. Taller than mountain.” I pointed up. “Big, big birds speak ... words in languages. Three. Puppet Man with little head”—I held out my hand as if a head was nestled there—“do show. About soldiers. Smooshed. By Fifi. And people laugh.”
The campers stared.
“And—and—” I was sure they were looking at my bad eye. They probably thought I was making things up.
The leftover kids always believed me.
My face was hot. I think I had sweat dripping from the top of my head down through my hair.
The other boy with a backward hat let out a snickering snort and poked his friend.
My new overalls were making me itch and I looked down at my horribly new American play shoes. “Story is over,” I squeaked. “Blah blah blah. The end.”
“That’s all right,” said Camp Lady Stacy. “No worries, Betti. Maybe tomorrow.”
Dude and Brown Bag Food
IT WAS A long day at Day Camp.
And nothing at all like my circus camp.
Camp Lady Stacy told me that she was a brand-new teacher. She would be a real teacher as soon as school started in the fall, after she practiced being a teacher in Day Camp. She said that we were her first “guinea pigs.” She laughed and the campers laughed too.
I didn’t understand what was so funny about Ms. Stacy calling us pigs.
So instead of listening to Ms. Stacy, I looked around at all the funny things: the funny American trees, and the campers’ funny clothes, and the weird games where kids swung ropes over their heads and climbed on colored things that came out of the ground like enormous bugs. Funny, but not nearly as fun as the circus camp.
Then my eye landed on something familiar. Someone. All the way across the play yard I saw a girl sitting on a bench. It was the same girl I had seen sitting on the porch of the tilted house, building the tower, shopping at the people food market. The girl who reminded me of a circus girl, even though she was a Melon.
This time there was an old, old lady sitting next to her. The old lady’s hand was on the girl’s knee and the girl was leaning against her. They were talking softly, smiling, with a big book open on their laps. It made me think of Auntie Moo and me.
My good eye got watery and I started to sniffle, but that was when Ms. Stacy said it was time for lunch. The Summer Five took brown bags out of their backpacks, so I took my brown bag out of my orange bag. Mrs. Buckworth had handed it to me before I left this morning. Inside there was an apple fruit and a cookie and two pieces of uncooked bread with jelly and brown nutty goo smudged inside. I said “ick” and “yummy” and ate it all in about one second, even if it tasted funny.
But the other campers?
The boy named Timmy, with wire teeth, accidentally spit food out of his mouth and wiped his shirt with a tissue. The girl named Sam, with streaky hair, doodled strange creatures on her paper bag, and the pink Melon girl named Tabitha talked to Ms. Stacy about her cat. The two backward-hat boys, Jerry and Bobby Ray, kept calling each other “dude.” They laughed like crazy and punched each other’s arms.
I wasn’t sure what “dude” meant. I thought maybe it was their last name, and maybe the backward-hat boys were brothers. Maybe dude meant a sock in the arm, or maybe it meant “friend.” If it meant friend, I knew they’d never call me dude.
During food time all the campers talked and talked and laughed. Sometimes they looked at me, but usually they ignored me.
Once I heard one of the boys with a backward hat quietly say, “Does the new girl with the eye understand anything?”
The other boy answered, “No clue, dude.”
After that I pretended that my ears were out of order.
The Summer Five ate their cookies fast, without even saying “ick.” When Ms. Stacy told us that we could go and play, they left half of their bread and half of their fruit and half of their weird boxed juice just sitting there on plastic bags.
I snatched three goopy bread squares, two fruits, and one half-juice. I drank the juice in one slurp. And the rest of it? Well, I stuffed all of it into my orange bag.
When Ms. Stacy told us to throw our leftovers in the trash, there were no more leftovers. No one even seemed to notice because they were all focused on Ms. Stacy’s next “fun activiteee”: something called “Kick Ball.”
I asked Sam, the girl with pointy hair, “What does it mean?”
“What does what mean?”
“Kick Ball?”
She stared at me and squinted her eyes. “It means that you kick the ball. And run. No biggie.”
Kick Ball sounded very boring compared to my games.
So I nudged Sam and said, “Now ... you be Cindi. She sing in cage. Not zoo. She miss her love. Boy lion.”
Sam turned to me and snapped her blue gum. “What?”
I put my nose in the air and walked over to Timmy. I tugged on the back of his shirt. “You ... be Snake Lady. She live in tree.” I pointed over at a funny tree. “She speak snake. Ssssss.”
Timmy tilted his head and licked his wire teeth lips. “I don’t understand, Betti.”
Tabitha didn’t understand either when I told her, “You be Fifi the elephant. She has big feet and big nose. You dance.”
“I’m not an elephant. That’s mean!” Tabitha’s nose quivered and she blinked a whole bunch of times.
I wanted to play with George instead.
“George!” I hollered across the play yard, waving my arms around. “George! George!”
George didn’t even hear me. He was too busy with the second graders making funny hats and squealing as if this was the most fun he’d ever had in his whole life.
George was wearing the most ugly hat I’d ever seen. His extra-large ears stuck out like bananas on a vine.
But it was too late for my good games anyway. Kids were already kicking the ball, running across the grass, running around
in circles, catching the ball or picking it up, and bombing it at someone all over again. A girl got hit straight in the knee, so she hobbled off the play-ground crying. Kickball made me dizzy.
“Go! Go!” and “Whoo hoo!” and “Run!” they hollered and clapped as if kickball was some great circus act.
Suddenly someone pushed me to the front of a line. I watched my bright white play shoes as the ball came barreling toward me on the grass.
Three ...
Two ...
One ...
KICK!
The campers all reached their arms up, they jumped a little, their eyes all peered up and squinted from the sun as my ball flew through the sky. They looked just like the leftover kids when there was a Melon plane flying over the circus camp.
And me? I ran like crazy. I wasn’t sure where I was supposed to run exactly, so I ran straight toward George.
“GEORGE!” I shouted.
The voices behind me were shouting, “Get her!” and “Where is she going?” as I ran straight past all of them.
It was the perfect time to run away. Just perfect. I was going to run and run and run and run.
“Hurry, George!” I shouted, but George was too busy playing with his hat.
That’s when I realized that someone was chasing me. “I’m not afraid of you,” I whispered between jagged breaths. I was known for being the fastest runner in the whole circus camp, maybe the whole village, even with my missing toes. But there weren’t any places to hide in the play yard. No woods. No trees. No swamps.
The ball whizzed right past me, and right past George’s ear.
“I GOT HER!” shouted the dude Bobby Ray. “On the shoulder.”
I stopped running and swung around. “NO ... YOU ... DID NOT!”
“I DID TOO!” His hands were clenched tight as he hit them against his sides. His brown hair was hanging over his eyes and I thought that his backward hat might fall off.
“YOU’RE OUT!”
I didn’t know what it meant to be “out.” I wasn’t sure if it was a good thing or a bad thing to be out.
So I kicked Bobby Ray.
“OW! She kicked me!” Bobby Ray rubbed his bottom, exactly where I’d kicked him. “Ms. Stacy! She—”
Running away was more dangerous than I thought.
So there was really only one place to go.
No one ever messed with old ladies in my country. They were the special ones. Everyone held their breath when old ladies told their stories. Old ladies had seen just about everything. They could see all the way into the past and halfway into the future.
No one would ever hit an old lady with a ball.
I ran right behind the girl who was sitting on the bench with the old, old lady. I gripped the back of the bench with my hands until they turned white. I was breathing straight into the back of their heads. Their hair blew up and down. The old lady’s hair was a tropical blue color, which matched her blue-veined hands. The girl stopped reading.
“Hi,” she said, turning around and looking up at me. Her eyes were squinting behind her crooked pink glasses.
“Nice of you to join us, sweet girl,” said the old, old lady. She didn’t look at me because she was staring straight ahead in her dark gray glasses.
“Those games get nasty.” The girl motioned with her head toward the kickball game. “I’m always the first one out.”
I nodded. Nasty. Which must’ve been the Melon word for when a ghost got mad and gave a bad kid purple pimples.
“I’m Mayda,” said the girl, smiling just a little. “And this is Nanny. We’re reading. You can listen, if you want.”
Nanny patted a place on the bench next to her, just as the kickball bounced toward the bench and landed between Nanny’s brown slipper shoes. Camp Lady Stacy was waving like crazy to me across the play yard.
It was the end of kickball and the end of Day Camp.
I’d have to run away on another day—I’d just have to wait—because I didn’t want to move an inch. I wanted to sit right there on the bench next to Mayda and Nanny. Mayda watched the campers for a second, and then she turned to the next page of her big book. Nanny put her wrinkled hand on the new page to keep it from flipping over.
Mayda took a breath and was about to start reading, when I suddenly blurted out, “My name is Babo. Betti. Betti Babo. You can call me Betti. Mrs. Buckworth’s mama. It maybe is easier.”
Roller Derby Lucy
IT IS BAD to kick people.
I told Mrs. Buckworth exactly how bad I was. Bobby Ray was a very good boy playing kickball, I told Mrs. Buckworth, but I was a very bad girl. Because I wanted to kick him in the bottom. For no good reason. That’s just how I am. Horrible.
I was all ready for Mrs. Buckworth to tell me to pack up my orange bag because I’d be flying straight back to the circus camp. Immediately.
Instead, she said I was ... grounded.
“Grownded?” Being grounded sounded horrible!
No TV for the rest of the day. No swinging on the swinging seats in the yard. I had to play quietly in my room. That’s what Mrs. Buckworth said.
I scrunched my face. “Only ... one day?”
“Betti,” she said, “you’re not a bad girl. I know better than that.”
“Yes I am.” I shook my head lots of times. “Bad bad.”
“No, I think there must’ve been a reason that you kicked Bobby Ray.” Mrs. Buckworth tilted her head and looked straight into my eyes. “Still, you’re absolutely right. It’s not nice to kick anybody. For any reason. And because you’re smart enough to know that already, well then, you’re grounded for today. I’m sorry.”
I sighed.
First I sat in my yellow room and ate some leftover lunch out of my orange bag. Then I drew some horrible pictures for Auntie Moo in my Empty Book. Mean backward hats, and wire teeth, and a pig mouth, and crazy spiked hair, and me kicking a bad boy. I also wrote down important new words like “drive me crazy,” and “nuts,” and “dude.” Auntie Moo would want to know these words too. I read her letter again and folded it up neatly.
I changed out of my Day Camp clothes, back into my circus dress, and stood in front of the mirror. I pretended I was the Snake Lady. “Ssssss. Ssssss.” I swayed back and forth to a rattlesnake rhythm. I pretended that I was the Hairy Bear Boy. I beat my chest and squinted my eyes and put my nose right up to the glass. I pretended I was Santy Claws and the Fairy Ghost with Teeth. I growled and scratched and chomped my fangs like a little tiger.
Then I got on top of my bed and put my arms out and put one foot in front of the other. My line in the sky. I had to practice every second so those Melon campers would believe me. I did live at the circus. I am a circus star. I watched my feet as I walked to the end of my bouncy bed, and—
“Betti?”
I tripped on my pillow and tipped over.
Lucy tilted her head and stared at me. One of her ponytails was practically on top of her head and the other was way down by her shoulder. Her play pants had big circles of dirt on the knees. “What are you doing, Betti?”
“I am playing.”
“Playing what?”
I opened my mouth really wide. “I am playing that a lady ghost watch me and try to steal my teeth.”
“Oh,” said Lucy.
“Then ... an important ghost man with claws come down from sky.” I pointed at my ceiling. “He only come one time in year—today. But they are not my mama and dad.”
“Well, can I play too?” Lucy didn’t wait for an answer. She came and sat down right next to me.
“I am bad. I am grounded.”
“Sometimes I’m bad too. Really, really bad. I get grounded all the time.” Lucy bounced on the bed, which made me bounce too. “But I don’t want to play that game with the teeth lady or the man with claws.” In about one second Lucy ran out of my room hollering, “I know!” And then came leaping back. “Look, Betti! Look what I have!”
Lucy’s little hand was gripping a doll with wheels on h
er shoes. “Her name is ... Roller Derby Tina. She’s my very favorite ... I never even play with her ’cause ... don’t want her to get dirty ... or to ...”
Gobbledygook.
Lucy held her doll up in front of my nose so I had to look at her up close.
“Rolling Derby Teeena. She is like ... picture.”
“What picture?”
I got up and opened my secret door closet. I took out my orange bag and dug to the bottom for the picture. Lucy with wheels on her feet.
“Oh!” Lucy beamed. “That’s me roller-skating!”
“It is ... fun?”
“It is so fun. I love to skate. And I’m so good, Betti. You should see me! Sometimes I roller-skate outside, and sometimes Dad takes me to the roller rink. He’s not as good as me though. I’m probably the best skater in the world.” Lucy started to twirl around my yellow room. Then she lifted one leg and bounced around and put her arms out like an exotic bird.
Once in a while Lucy did something interesting. I really needed to practice for the circus, but instead I said, “I want to play that.”
“Well, Dad said that I can’t skate unless I skate with him. It’s kinda dangerous, he says. But maybe we can just try them on.”
Dangerous? Perfect.
“Okay. Yes.” And just as I said it, Lucy was out the door in a flash. When she came back she had two pairs of roller skates in her hands, one tiny red pair and one enormous blue and white striped pair. Lucy held out the big pair for me as she took off her play shoes and laced up the red skates on her feet.
I took the huge wheel shoes in my hands and looked at them. I rolled one of them up and over my orange bag and along the edge of my bed. They were about as long as my arm. “My wheel shoes are too big.”
Lucy was already trying to roll around on the floor. “Yeah, they’re my dad’s. Just put some socks in ’em.”
I balled up some of my new white socks, stuffed them inside the huge skates, and slipped the skates on. They felt like someone else’s feet, but I didn’t care. My missing toes never felt much anyway.
Betti on the High Wire Page 11