by Betsy Byars
“I like it.”
John D bit into his hamburger and chewed. The meat had been cooked perfectly, but it tasted like paper.
Once in school John D remembered his class had had to write themes on why they wanted to be adults. Kids wrote “so I can drive a car” and “so I can stay up all night” and “so I can have as many cats as I want,” and he had written—he could remember it perfectly—he had written, “I want to be an adult so that I will not have to suffer the company of stupid people.” An incredibly intelligent sentence for a second-grader. He still felt exactly the same way.
“You are not going to eat one of the burnt ones!” Sam was saying to his mother.
“I am perfectly happy with a burnt one. I like my meat well-done.”
“You do not.”
“I like hamburgers well-done.”
“Take this one.”
“No.”
“Come on, take it.”
His mother pulled back her hands just in time to let the good hamburger, the only one left, fall into the sand. His mother threw back her head and let out a peal of laughter that would have done credit to a hyena. John D glanced at Sam to see if he was as disgusted over the picture of a grown woman laughing at a ruined hamburger as he himself was.
No, Sam was laughing too. John D watched them with an expression of distaste.
“Hey, why don’t we go in to that little seafood restaurant you wanted to try?” Sam said to Delores. “You kids wouldn’t mind, would you?”
“No,” John D said.
“Why should we mind?” said Deanie, swallowing a bite of her hamburger.
“We won’t be long.”
As they started toward the dunes Sam turned and said, “I noticed a Monopoly game in there on the bookcase. You could play after you go in.”
Deanie looked at Clara and let her eyes roll up into her head. Then she turned her face toward John D.
Possibly, he thought with alarm, she intended to share her amusement over the proposed game of Monopoly with him. He looked quickly out to sea, pretending to scan the horizon for a ship.
“You know what I just read somewhere?” Deanie said. Now that her father and Delores were over the dunes, she didn’t bother to soften her voice. “I read that the seashore—it has something to do with the meeting of land and sea—is such a dynamic place that it makes passions run higher, emotions stronger. It’s like a full moon to a werewolf.” She laughed.
“I’m going swimming,” Clara said abruptly.
John D got up too. He folded his chair, put it under his arm, and got to the house just as his mother and Sam drove away.
“I’M SORT OF LOOKING forward to this,” Deanie said. It was the next morning, and she was watching herself in the mirror as she blow-dried her hair.
“I’m not,” Clara said.
“Remember when we were little and we’d go to Fun World, and they would have statues of Bugs Bunny and Elmer Fudd and Tweety Bird beside the rides, and if you weren’t as big as Tweety, then you wouldn’t get to go?”
Clara nodded. She was sitting on the bed, hands in her lap, shoulders sagging. She had spent a miserable night. She had tossed and turned for hours, trying to get to sleep. And when she did sleep at last, she dreamed she had vomited all over her blouse and when she tried to wipe it off, she got the vomit all over her hands, and then she wiped her hands on her skirt and on her face and arms and then—she was desperate now, because John D was coming—on her hair and on her sunglasses, and when John D arrived with that small knowing smile of his, she was standing there with her entire body covered with vomit.
Now, this morning, still feeling ill, she was faced with a living nightmare. They were all going to Seven Continents for a day of rides and fun, and the thought of sitting in the backseat next to John D made her shudder.
“Promise me I won’t have to sit by John D,” she asked Deanie for the third time.
“I used to get just desperate.” Deanie went on as if Clara had not spoken. “I’d run up to every statue and stand there. ‘Am I big enough? Am I big enough?’” She stuck out her tongue and panted like a puppy.
“I don’t remember that.”
“That’s cause you were big enough,” Deanie said, giving her hair a final flip.
“I’ve always been big enough.”
“Anyway, the thing I remember most—the real blow—was that to go in Haunted City you had to be as big as Casper the Friendly Ghost—and I wasn’t—and I cried so hard, my nose ran all over my ice cream.”
“Girls, are you ready?”
“And believe me, snotty peach ice cream is—”
“Girls!” their father called louder. “What are you doing in there?”
“Nothing, Dad,” Deanie called back cheerfully. “We’re on our way.”
“Promise me,” Clara said. She got off the bed and crossed the room to Deanie.
“What?” Deanie asked. She was still admiring her hair. “Never get between me and the mirror,” she said to Clara, laughing. “My hair only looks good at the beach for fifteen seconds. Then I start to look like Frankenstein’s bride.”
Clara shifted out of the way. “Promise!”
“What?” Deanie asked.
“That I won’t have to sit by him.” There was something about the thought of touching John D …“I just hate to sit by people who don’t like me.”
“Everybody feels that way.”
“Not like me.”
“Yes, like you. That’s why I almost flunked math—because I had to sit by Marie Edwards, and we have hated each other since first grade. She would deliberately make mistakes so that when I copied off her paper I’d get them wrong.”
“Promise, Deanie.”
“Listen, I can’t promise anything. I have no control over these terrible two weeks whatsoever, or over these terrible people.”
“You do! You can! Just promise to sit in the middle!”
Deanie turned away from the mirror, satisfied. She grinned. “I am a puppet in the hands of Fate.” She wiggled her way comically to the door, ankles wobbling, arms flailing helplessly in the air as her strings were pulled from above.
“That’s not funny,” Clara called after her. “That’s the way I really feel.”
Slowly, arms dangling, shoulders drooping, she followed her sister into the living room.
JOHN D HAD NOT slept well either. After supper a really troubling thought had hit him. At the first opportunity Deanie and Clara were going to snoop in his suitcase! They would have done it this afternoon if he hadn’t been sitting there looking at a magazine.
With that thought he had felt himself writhing like a snail turned out of its shell. He had never before been concerned about his privacy. His mother believed parents should respect their children’s property absolutely—she had written an entire column on it. But Deanie and Clara—they obviously respected nothing. He felt as if he had fallen into the hands of creatures no longer governed by human values.
As the night wore on he imagined the girls ruthlessly tearing through his suitcase, pulling out one article after another.
“Look at this!” Clara would cry. “Asthma pills!” She would whinny like a horse.
And Deanie—Deanie would be laughing so hard, she would not be able to speak. “He—he—he—” she would cry, waiting for the hilarity to let up. “He—he—he wears Fruit of the Loom underwear!”
Then he sat straight up in his bed, mouth open with shock. His manuscript. What a time they would have with that!
“Listen to this,” Clara would cry. “‘A runny nose is particularly ineffective.’”
“He—he—he,” Deanie would answer.
He put one hand to his forehead. The thought of his words, the words he had written with such care, the thought of those words being read aloud by idiots—it was more than he could bear.
And perhaps they would come across the notebook in which he was practicing his autograph. Twenty-seven pages of his name, written over and over, line
after line, so that when he became famous, he would have a bold, distinctive signature instead of the tiny uninteresting name he put to his homework papers. They would never understand that.
He got out of bed, stood on the bare sandy floor, and looked around the moonlit room. It was a room without hiding places—a chest, two beds, a table, his suitcase. He could possibly hide his manuscript and notebook under the mattress, but that would be the first place they would look.
“Aha!” Clara would cry, pulling up the mattress like a playful gorilla, and Deanie would once again answer, “He—he—he.”
He had stood a long time in the moonlight, as bothered as a prisoner trying to hide something in a bare cell. Then he had crawled back into bed and let out a sigh so long, it seemed to empty his body of air.
He lay without moving, his legs drawn up to his chest. A miserable knot of humanity, he stared at the wall like a sick person waiting for his medicine to start working. With the first light of dawn he had fallen into a troubled sleep of an hour and fifteen minutes.
Now it was morning. Miserable, suspicious, vengeful, and unrested, he followed his mother to the car.
“Here, hold this,” she said cheerfully, handing him her purse. She tied a blue bandanna on her head, looking in the side-view mirror. “How are you getting along with Sam’s daughters?”
“As expected.”
“Did you play Monopoly last night?”
“Hardly.”
“Now, John D, they are very nice girls.” She put her dark glasses on top of her scarf and looked at him. “Especially Clara. I believe you two could—”
“They are hardly nice girls, Mom.”
She hesitated. “Then,” she said with a faint smile, “you should be getting along well. You told me the other day that you hate everything nice, so if they aren’t nice, well, then you should enjoy their company.”
“I have never admired or enjoyed stupidity,” he said in the calm cool voice that always stopped her.
“John D—” He met her eyes without blinking. She hesitated, then pulled her dark glasses over her eyes. “At least let other people have a good time.”
“I’m not stopping anybody.”
“I have to sit by a window!” It was Clara. “I get carsick.” She was coming down the steps behind Deanie and her father. Her face was red, her cheeks as puffed as an adder’s.
“Here, here’s your purse,” John D said quickly. He thrust it at his mother before the girls could see it on his arm and go into another one of those explosions of laughter they were so famous for.
“How’s it going this morning, John D?” Sam asked, and then said in a lower voice to Delores, “I’ve never seen that outfit before. I like you in blue.”
He leaned forward. Delores smiled and fluttered her eyelashes like a lovesick cat in a cartoon.
John D turned away in disgust. He did this just in time to see Deanie turn to Clara, grinning and fluttering her eyelashes in a perfect imitation of his mother. Did she—he wondered suddenly—imitate him as well?
He drew in his breath, turned, tried to get in the car so quickly that he stumbled, fell, and struck his shin. Pain shot all the way up to his eyebrows. He knelt in the backseat, bent over, unable to move.
“We’re not in that big a hurry,” his mother said. Her laughter was low, amused. She leaned forward then and put one hand on his back. “I’m sorry. Did you hurt yourself?” Her voice was concerned now.
“No.”
His face, turned away from his mother, was red, burning hot. His voice, when he managed to speak again, was cool.
“I fell,” he went on, “in order to test the humor level of the group. As I suspected, it is low.”
He got to his feet. “On a scale of one to ten, I rate the group as a two, the category for those who laugh at the world’s misfortunates.”
“No one laughed,” his mother said uneasily.
John D sat and faced forward. Now, at last, I hate every single person present, he thought.
“Well, let’s go,” Sam said. He pressed the girls into the backseat, Deanie on one side of John D, Clara on the other.
The car started. Shells crunched beneath the tires. As they turned left out of the driveway John D bumped into Deanie’s shoulder. As they turned right onto the road he touched Clara’s. I’m going to be clanging back and forth between these idiots all the way to the amusement park, he thought. He closed his eyes.
Trapped between the Animal and the Vegetable, all lines of escape cut off, what will be the fate of the proud young hero? Who will survive? Tune in—
For once he failed to amuse himself.
Twenty miles down the road, when they were driving over the causeway, one of a long line of cars and campers and trailered boats, with his mother reading aloud from a guidebook to Carolina Islands, he leaned down and felt the knot on his leg. At least that was not disappointing—a good solid lump.
He sat back in his seat, partially satisfied, and watched the road ahead.
“This is interesting,” his mother was saying. “The loggerhead sea turtle comes ashore and lays eggs here. Wouldn’t you love to see that?” She marked the page and turned. “Oh, and listen to this. Pirates used to hide in these islands and …”
“I AM NOT GOING on any more rides,” Deanie announced to her father.
Her father and Delores were sitting on a bench, eating Belgian waffles, laughing. Her father looked up at her, still smiling. “Why not?” There was whipped cream on his upper lip.
“Our boat got stuck in the Small World Tunnel, and we had to listen to a hundred and forty-five dolls singing ‘It’s a Small World After All’ for—how long was it, Clara? I don’t want to exaggerate.”
“Two minutes,” Clara said.
“It must have been longer than that. It seemed like hours. Anyway, dolls doing the same thing over and over are very boring.” She broke off. “Oh, look, here come the Three Little Pigs.”
“Where?” Clara asked. She moved back quickly behind the bench and out of the reach of the Three Little Pigs. She had already been hugged by somebody in a Wimpy costume, and all she wanted now was to be left alone.
“Right there.”
The Three Little Pigs came through the crowd singing “Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf” and dancing on their short legs. They paused to circle an elderly couple. The old man gamely danced a jig with them.
Deanie turned back to her father. “Are those midgets in pig suits,” she asked, “or little children?”
“They’re real pigs,” he answered.
Delores laughed, dropping Belgian waffle on her blouse. “Like me,” she said, pointing to herself.
“See,” Deanie’s father went on, “the public won’t accept real pigs dancing through the park, real pigs have a reputation for being slobs, so they put them in pink suits and false eyelashes. Do you think that old man would dance with that pig, if he knew she was real?”
“I think they’re midgets,” Deanie said, smiling, “like Munchkins.”
“Well, anyway, Wimpy’s a woman,” Clara said loudly. “When she hugged me, I felt her chests!”
“Clara!” Deanie said. Clara paused, froze, and then turned away. Her father threw back his head and laughed. Delores choked on a piece of waffle and signaled to be clapped on the back.
Clara’s face burned. Why had she said that? Chests! She looked around for a way to escape.
The Big Bad Wolf met her eyes. He was creeping through the crowd, making his way toward the Three Little Pigs. He put one finger to his lips. Don’t tell! His eyebrows snapped up and down.
Clara twisted away. Suddenly she had to get away from it all—the confusion, the awful pretense of fun. How could the others keep it up? To Clara it was like a game in which they took turns making fun of one another.
A child’s voice called out a warning to the pigs. “The Big Bad Wolf’s behind that fat lady.”
Clara walked quickly away from the bench. “Where are you going?” Deanie asked, fol
lowing her.
“On a ride.”
“Which one? We’ve been on everything. I hope you’re not going to try to squeeze into the Tweety Bird Choo-Choo.”
Clara looked up. Her eyes focused on the huge dome of the Space Cyclone, the one place nobody would follow her. “I’m going on that one,” she said.
“Are you out of your mind? The Space Cyclone?”
“Yes.”
“You know you’ll get sick. Just once I would like to drive home from an amusement park with you when you didn’t smell like puke. Dad, don’t let her go!” Deanie turned back to her father, dodging people until she had his attention.
“Clara,” her father called mildly, “don’t go if it’s going to make you sick.”
Clara kept walking. “You’re going to be miserable!” Deanie sang out behind her. Deanie’s voice sounded so much like her mother’s that Clara almost turned around to see if by some miracle her mother had actually arrived to take her home.
The Space Cyclone was just ahead. There was a sign warning people with bad hearts not to go on the ride. Clara handed the attendant her book, and he tore out the last ticket. Clara got into line.
There were three teen-age boys in front of her, a family of five behind. Clara was the only person who was not part of a group, but she was relieved to be alone. The line moved back and forth, snaking forward slowly. All too soon Clara was there. “Remove your sunglasses,” a woman in a space outfit told her, “and remain seated until the end of the ride.”
Clara nodded.
The car slid forward and slowly began to climb. It was so dark, Clara couldn’t see anything. Space music began. Computerized chords whined, rising and falling eerily. A cold came in the air.
Suddenly, without warning, the car lunged over the top and, twisting and turning, began to spiral down through the darkness. Clara heard herself scream. Stars exploded in her face. Meteorites flew at her. Space vehicles attacked. Her stomach turned as the car plunged down into a black hole and up again.
The car began another slow climb. Clara leaned back. She breathed deeply. She had never heard her body so loudly before. Blood pumped. Her ears popped. Her stomach throbbed. She was like an orchestra tuning up.
