“Why are we going to the library?” I asked.
“I need to look something up on the Internet,” Winter said.
We used to have a computer and Internet, but the computer died, and then Mom said we didn’t need the Internet anyway. Winter kept telling Mom that we needed a new computer so that she could type up her schoolwork, and Mom kept saying she’d put it on the list, right below dental insurance.
Then one day Winter mentioned computers again, and Mom’s eyes shrank to raisin size, and she said, “If you want a computer so bad, sell the truck.” Mom would love that, but the pickup belongs to Winter. Dad had given it to her right after I was born, before Winter could even drive. It was a few months before he got married to someone else, Gloria told me later. I think it was an apology present because we weren’t invited to the wedding.
So Winter would never sell it, even to get twenty computers, and now we use the computers at the library. They give you a whole designated hour all to yourself, but there’s usually a long list of names to wait behind. Luckily, when we got there, the sign-up sheet only had one name that hadn’t been crossed off yet.
“Where do you want me to find you?” Winter asked. I couldn’t tell where she was looking because of the sunglasses, but I knew she wasn’t looking at me.
“I’ll be in nonfiction,” I said. “I need to read about clubs.” Winter didn’t say anything, so I added, “I started a club at school,” not sure if I’d told her yet.
“A club? Oh, right, so they’ll stop with the mullet jokes.” Then she adjusted her sunglasses and said, “Why is it so bright in here?” before racing off to the bathroom.
So I wandered around the nonfiction section, looking for club books. I was hoping a title would pop right off the shelf, something like Clubs for Fun and Profit! Or, even better: How to Get Everyone in School to Join Your Club!
But this library doesn’t have exciting books like that, just boring ones about bird-watching and lighthouses. When I hit the seventeenth aisle, I wondered if maybe I should go find one of the catalog computers and make sure this library even had books about clubs.
Discouraged, I went back to find Winter. She’d finally gotten on one of the computers, but when I came up behind her, she closed the browser she was looking at. “No books on clubs?” she guessed. “Well, go upstairs and see if there’re any decent movies. Something from after 1980, if possible.”
“What kind?” I asked. “Comedy? Romance? Adventure? Zombies?”
“Whatever,” she said. “I don’t really care. Nothing matters anymore.”
The word why was on its way out of my mouth, but Winter was already back to the computer, so I trudged up the stairs, wishing Winter wasn’t so miserable. Heavenly Donuts! Was it really that bad at Sarah Borne? She’d never complained much in the summer, but I guess in the summer she hadn’t thought she’d need to stay that long. I hoped she didn’t have to finish high school there.
Besides, now that the school year had started up, there were probably ten times as many delinquents running around at Sarah Borne. Pregnant girls snapping gum in the hallways. Girls with bald spots where chunks of their hair had been pulled out during a fight. Boys with long hair and eyelid piercings.
And she wasn’t allowed to have her writing club. Even if she was, who would join? She said most of the kids there didn’t even know how to write.
In the movie room I picked out A League of Their Own, which is about a pair of sisters, although these two are not at all like Winter and me, because they’re constantly fighting over who’s better at baseball. Winter told me it was a good choice, but when we were watching it that night, she left halfway through to go to bed.
I wanted to tell Mom that she should maybe consider putting Winter back into public school, but she was already shrunken from dealing with the Food Bank, and without Gloria there to calm her down, I knew it was a lost cause.
When I got to school on Monday, I wasn’t even thinking about clubs until Jared Barrel asked if he could join the Trailer Park Club while we were lining up outside Mr. Savage’s room. “Sure!” I said, kind of excited, but then he and a bunch of other boys laughed, so I don’t think he was serious.
All through class, Denny glared at me like it was his official classroom job. And instead of passing papers back to me, he whammed them onto my desk, making me jump every time his palm hit the polished wood. I think he was trying to scare me, but he’s too lanky to be scary.
At recess, I was hanging out on the bench by Mr. Savage’s room—where Pepperwood has a map of the United States painted on the blacktop—when Jenny, grinning, and Denny, glaring, walked up to me.
“I talked to Mom,” Jenny informed me, “and she said I could join any club I want.” She stopped, maybe waiting for Denny to argue, but he just stood there and did his thing. And then she smiled, said, “See you Wednesday!” and turned and skipped off, her skirt bouncing at her heels. Denny stayed where he was and tried to glare me off the bench.
“Yes?” I asked him.
He left without a word.
But now something was bothering me. Denny and Jenny had some weird thing going on with each other. I thought maybe they were related, except that Jenny’s last name was Withagee, and Denny’s was Libra.
The roll sheet was already gone by the time we came in for lunch, but Mr. Savage kept a list of all our names—in alphabetical order, which must be his most favorite thing ever—above the pencil sharpener. I pressed my pencil hard against my paper during our practice spelling test so I’d have an excuse to go study the list and make sure I wasn’t wrong about Jenny’s name, even though I’d heard her clearly the first day of school saying that she was Jenny Withagee.
As it turns out, I was dead wrong, because there wasn’t a single Jenny on that list, not even a Jennifer. But right below Denny Libra was the name Geneva Libra, and it was only after staring at it for a minute that I finally got it.
Jenny Withagee. Jenny with a G. Genny. Geneva Libra.
Of course.
Then Mr. Savage asked what was taking me so long at that pencil sharpener and had I even sharpened my pencil yet, and so I sharpened my pencil for something like half a second before sitting down again and writing out the next word with a stubby pencil lead. Which I hate.
After school I hung up the very first club flyer in Mr. Savage’s room. It had everything: 3-D block letters, glitter, and a picture of a very fancy-looking trailer I’d printed off the Internet.
Hopefully people would see it and decide to join, because there was no way I’d run a club with Denny’s sister as the only member.
Winter was acting weirder than ever. She’d sleep in, then get up and not even shower and put on clothes that were lying on the floor, clothes that didn’t even go together. Then she’d come home late, with droopy eyes, and half the time she’d say a couple of words, but the other half she’d just head straight to bed.
I started recording Winter’s behavior in my club notebook, since I wasn’t doing so great a job of putting club stuff in there. The first page had a list of pros and cons about trailer parks, most of which I’d gotten from other people:
Pros
• Cheap rent (Mom)
• Donut shop down the block, even better than Heavenly Donuts (Gloria)
• Christmas lights up all year long, looks pretty at night (me)
Cons
• Have to keep stuff in storage (Winter)
• Hate walking and driving on gravel (Winter)
• Lots of weird neighbors (Winter)
I never finished, though; I was going to ask Mrs. O’Grady when she was in one of her good moods, and slip a note to the guy in the tinfoil-covered trailer who lives next to Gloria, but that never happened. I just flipped my pros-and-cons page and started a new page all about Winter.
She was still vegetarian, but I could tell sometimes she didn’t like it, like when Gloria would come over to heat bacon in the microwave and the whole trailer would smell so, so good that I’d
beg Gloria to break me off a piece. The only thing better than the smell of bacon is the taste, and I knew Winter hated being able to smell it and not taste it.
Another thing that seemed weird: Winter was letting her roots grow out. She has blond roots, which are extremely noticeable when you dye your hair black. That’s not a problem with my hair, because midnight blue and black are both dark colors, but Winter has to dye her hair every month or it looks bad.
Also, I never saw Winter doing homework. But I thought, maybe that’s why she was out so late—she was doing homework. Just not at home.
I filled pages and pages with observations, which I knew would have impressed my second-grade teacher, who had made us study worms. My plan was to show Mom the notes and hope she was equally impressed. Then she’d realize that she had to pull Winter out of Sarah Borne once and for all.
Unfortunately, it kind of took away from my club-planning time, so when the Trailer Park Club met for the very first time on Wednesday, at 3:05 in Mr. Savage’s room, I was a little unprepared.
But it turned out that didn’t matter at all, because despite the extra flyers I’d put up in the outside hallway and on the door and next to the bookcase, the only kids who showed up were Genny and Denny Libra. And I’m pretty sure Denny was only there because he didn’t want Genny to be the only member.
“You want to take the minutes?” I asked him, but he just glared back at me, so I decided I’d probably be better at the minutes taking.
3:05 Meeting started
3:06 Denny did not want to take minutes
3:07 I introduced myself
3:08 Genny said I don’t think you have to record every minute
3:09 Silence
Then Genny took the minutes from me and said she’d do them, which was good, because I couldn’t talk and do minutes at the same time. In the corner, at his desk, Mr. Savage gave a small cough. He was grading papers, I think, and not really paying attention to the meeting.
“So,” I said, “this is a club about trailer parks.”
Denny rolled his eyes, and I couldn’t blame him. Even I knew this was a horrible start. Genny scribbled something in the notes and asked, “Are we ever going to take a field trip to the trailer park?”
I hadn’t thought about that, but Denny said, “No,” so I said, “Yes,” much louder. “But not until another meeting.”
On the minutes Genny wrote, Field Trip TBA. Then she asked, “What’s Treasure Trailers like?”
“I made a list of pros and cons!” I’d only just remembered that, so I dug the notebook out of my backpack and opened it to the first page.
“Donuts is a pro?” Genny asked after half a minute.
“That’s from Gloria,” I explained. “She’s like my godmother, because she and my mom are best friends. We used to eat at this place called Heavenly Donuts in Oregon.” I was so busy talking, I didn’t even notice that Denny was writing on my list. “Hey!” I snatched it away and read what he’d written in the cons column: Next to the dump.
“It’s separated by a very high chain-link fence with barbed wire and everything,” I told him. “It’s not like we have junk lying all over the place.” Which was kind of a lie, because the trailer across from ours had rusted lawn chairs scattered in front of it, and even though Mrs. O’Grady had put up portable fencing around her trailer, I’d seen filled-to-the-brim trash bags piled in her designated driveway.
The rest of the meeting went flaming down a cliff from there. Every time Genny asked a question, Denny tried to answer it before me, and his answers were completely untrue. He said the reason we leave Christmas lights up all year long is because we’re too lazy to take them down, and that everyone in the trailer park lives off welfare.
“Not the tinfoil guy!” I corrected him. “He doesn’t trust the government, so he doesn’t take anything from them!”
To make matters worse, Genny recorded everything we said in the minutes.
After an hour Mr. Savage kicked us out, saying that he wanted to go home. I again offered to lock the classroom and leave the keys in the drainpipe, but Mr. Savage didn’t even answer, and within a few minutes we found ourselves outside, in the hallway, watching the rain splatter against the cement. Mr. Savage was gone in another minute, whipping out his umbrella and reminding me about my vocabulary sentences, which I hadn’t even done yet, before he headed out to the parking lot.
For a while, the only sound came from the rain hitting the roof of the hallway. To break the silence, I said, “I like your tattoos,” to Genny.
“Thanks!” she said. “They were a gift from our brother’s girlfriend.”
It made me sad to think there was another Denny running around, and sadder to think there was some poor girl dating the other Denny.
“I’m gonna get a real one someday,” Genny said. “I don’t know what, but I want it to cover my whole back. And then I want—”
“You’re not getting any tattoos,” Denny said, and without saying good-bye, he grabbed his sister’s arm and dragged her away. Genny waved back at me with her other hand and said, “See you tomorrow!”
“See you,” I said. It was too bad, because Genny was really nice. She just had the misfortune of having the world’s worst brother. But Genny’s being nice was not going to keep everyone from teasing me about my stupid mull—layered cut.
The wind picked up, taking down a corner of the flyer I’d taped to the outside of Mr. Savage’s door. I went ahead and ripped the whole thing down to save the wind the trouble.
Maybe if I canceled the club now, no one would remember that I’d ever tried to start it in the first place.
That night, before Winter came home, I asked Mom if she’d ever let me get a tattoo.
“Sure,” she said, “but you have to let me draw it.” This was a joke, I could tell, because Mom can’t even draw stick figures. “Why?” she asked. “Does Winter have a tattoo I don’t know about?”
Winter didn’t have any tattoos that I knew about. “What does Winter have to do with it?” I asked.
“Well, whenever Winter does something, you suddenly want to do it, too,” Mom said. Which was a complete falsehood, because I had no desire to set foot in Sarah Borne.
“I was just wondering,” I told her. But I remembered the notebook and my observations. This would be the perfect time to show Mom. I started by asking, “Why is Winter still going to Sarah Borne? Can’t she go back to public school?”
“She absolutely could, if I would let her,” Mom said. “And though I shouldn’t have to explain my decisions to my ten-year-old daughter, I will tell you that I want to make absolutely sure that Winter remembers her time at Sarah Borne. It will prevent future mishaps.”
Future mishaps had already been prevented, I thought, since Winter was keeping all her stories extra-secret. I told Mom that maybe her plan was working too well, pointing out how depressed Winter was all the time and pulling out my notebook for her to read.
Mom read through the entire list of observations without a single “Hmm,” or “Oh no,” or even “Heavenly Donuts!” After a few minutes she handed the notebook back to me and said, “Star, I know teenagers. When I was pregnant with Winter and I thought my life was over, I was very depressed. But it was just a phase. Now Winter’s going through similar feelings, even if she is being a bit overdramatic about it. When you’re a teenager, you’ll find out. Even the smallest, most insignificant things can make you feel like the whole world’s out to get you.”
Maybe Mom was right. And if she was, maybe I was overreacting, thinking that my failure of a club was a hopeless mess that couldn’t be saved.
I mean, it is a good club.
It just needs more people.
Star Mackie
September 25
Week 2 Vocabulary Sentences
NEW AND IMPROVED!
1. Once during the summer Mom and Winter got into a huge argument about school and California and gas money. Winter threw a lamp that shattered against the wall and f
ell to pieces, and then two seconds later Gloria came in the door with a big pink box of donuts, and she said, “Who wants donuts?” all singsong and happy, and the silence after she said that was awkward.
2. When we lived in Brookings, Oregon, we boycotted a lot of things. Mostly department stores, unless there was a clearance sale, but I remember once Mom boycotted the electric company because she didn’t have enough money to pay the bill. That was actually fun, because we got to use candles for a few months.
3. A lot of the trailers at Treasure Trailers are derelict. Winter says it’s because people who live in trailers already know they’ve hit rock bottom. Mom says it’s because trailers are hard to maintain. Gloria says the rust spots give her trailer personality.
4. There are at least five different people in Treasure Trailers who fit the description of gaunt, but Gloria says they are just drugged-out. So I guess that girl’s mom was right? Unless “drugged-out” is different from “drug-addicted.”
5. No one uses the word katzenjammer, Mr. Savage, but I will try: everyone in Treasure Trailers—at least Mrs. O’Grady, though she says she knows a couple others who agree—is in a katzenjammer about the broken-down vending machine in front of the owner’s office that keeps eating one-dollar bills without giving anything back.
6. Some of the perils of living in a trailer park: sometimes cars crash into your trailer, and sometimes the cops come by and ask a lot of questions even though they’re actually looking for the guy in the next lot who already moved out.
7. The dump is across the fence from us. If I were a criminal escaping from the police, I would hide there, behind the enormous trash piles. And then I’d be taking refuge in refuse. Get it?
8. My mom had her very own scandal. When she was nineteen, she had my sister, Winter, and she wasn’t married. Gloria said it was a big deal, even in the nineties.
9. Every day I traverse my way to school, since Mom says, “It’s only twelve blocks” and “Ask me again how far I used to walk to school, Star, go ahead.”
Hope Is a Ferris Wheel Page 3
