Hope Is a Ferris Wheel

by Robin Herrera

  “Different poet,” Miss Fergusson told me.

  Denny was waiting outside, and for once he didn’t yank Genny’s arm and drag her away from me. Instead, he walked behind us with his hands jammed in his pockets while Genny and I worked out all our club details.

  “That’s five members so far that we know about,” Genny said. “We’re gonna need a sign-in sheet. We could elect a treasurer!”

  “Do treasurers do anything?” I asked.

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Okay, that can be Denny’s job.”

  By the time we got to the front entrance, we had next Monday planned out. Surprisingly, Genny is full of good ideas. Just as I was about to ask her if she was still going to take the minutes, she gasped, pointed to the street, and said, “Denny, look! It’s Winter!”

  And it was. Winter’s pickup was parked at the curb, with Winter inside. The giant pair of sunglasses sat on top of her head, keeping strands of curls out of her eyes. When she saw me, she waved, stepped out of the truck, and straightened out her skirt. Her high heels clicked against the pavement as she jogged over to me.

  “Hey, Star. I figured I’d pick you up today.”

  “I thought you got out after me,” I said, but I only thought that because I never actually saw Winter until way after coming home from school.

  “We had early dismissal,” she told me. Then she looked a little to my right, and her eyebrows jumped up her forehead. “Oh. Hi, Genny.”

  Genny’s mouth, Gloria would have said, was like a manhole without a cover, and her gaze darted between Winter and me and back again. “You know her?” she said, I think to both of us.

  “We’re sisters!” I told Genny, and then I realized what she’d said. “You know her?”

  Genny turned and yelled, “Denny! Did you know that Star and Winter are sisters?”

  Denny glared down at his own shoes.

  “Mom wants to know when you’re coming over again,” Genny said to Winter, and this time I had the manhole mouth. “And Allie won’t say. Saturday would be best, ’cause we’re having quiche. And it won’t have any meat in it.”

  With one quick motion, Winter pulled the sunglasses over her eyes. “Um. We’ll see.”

  “Okay. Denny! Come on!” Genny turned and ran over to her brother, grabbing his arm and dragging him down the block. Which was weird, but not as weird as both of them knowing who Winter was. I heard Genny’s voice even as she got farther away. “Let’s go tell Allie! He’s probably home now! They got early dismissal!”

  After they were out of earshot, Winter said, “You didn’t tell me you knew the Libras. Well, come on, let’s go.”

  Winter let me get into the truck first so I wouldn’t have to walk in the street. Then, after she got in and had started the engine and was moving along with traffic, I said, “How do you know them?”

  Emily Dickinson could have written a poem about the sigh Winter gave me, including words like regret, sadness, and willow tree. (Emily Dickinson always puts in plants or animals.) When she finally finished her sigh, she said, “I kind of went out with their brother Allie. Over the summer.”

  I reviewed all the things I knew about Genny and Denny’s brother: he went to Sarah Borne, he wore eyeliner, and he had a lip ring. Denny doesn’t seem to like him. Oh, and he’s their half brother, not their full brother. “What does he look like?” I asked. “Is he cute?” Denny looked like a long, skinny rat.

  “Uh, kind of,” Winter said. “Like, in a pathetic way. We broke up a while back, but I guess he hasn’t told his family yet. They always freaked me out. Like, they’re a little too happy, you know?”

  I thought of Genny and nodded, but then I thought of Denny and said, “I don’t think Denny knows how to be happy.”

  “Is he the one with the staring problem?” Winter lifted up her sunglasses and did such a perfect impression of Denny’s glare that we both burst out laughing, and the truck swerved a little too close to the sidewalk. Luckily we were on the street near Treasure Trailers, so there weren’t any other cars around. Winter pulled up to the entrance and said, “I’m not driving on that gravel, so I’ll let you out here.”

  “Okay.” I’d forgotten that Winter was just giving me a ride home. I guess I assumed she’d come back to the trailer with me. Maybe because I had so much to tell her about the Emily Dickinson Club, and my sentence boycott, and detention, and, and, and. “Where are you going?”

  “Work,” she said. “Those pretzels won’t make themselves.” Leaning across the cab, she kissed me on the side of the forehead and added, “We get paid Friday, but I won’t have enough for our Dad visit for another two weeks. Plus, I gotta find a place that’ll cash checks and not charge too much.”

  I gave her two thumbs up and jimmied open the creaky door so I could jump out. Maybe I should have been disappointed that we wouldn’t be seeing Dad until the end of the month, but it was nice to have a little more time. By this Friday, all I’d have is two week’s worth of detention.

  But by the end of the month, I’d have myself an actual club and actual friends.

  And Dad would want to hear all about it.

  Detention was the same as last week, with less punching. Even though I sat on the opposite side of the room this time, I was still positive that Eddie would be over at any second, fists flying like a couple of windmills.

  But Eddie just sat there reading his book. He was the quietest kid in detention, but no one would sit by him. Probably because of the punching.

  My new seat was awful, and I regretted moving, because now I was closer than ever to the other detention junkies. They all side-eyed me, and then side-mouthed to one another, probably about me, while Miss Fergusson was engrossed in her grading. I guess it wasn’t that bad—all I had to do was make sure I was the last to leave and pretend not to hear the girl who said my hair was the color of toilet cleaner. None of these delinquents know midnight blue when they see it.

  Outside, the front entrance was as busy as ever. Eddie sat on the steps, completely absorbed in his thousand-page book, so I thought I’d be able to sneak by without being noticed or squinted at. But that was a big bust, because his mohawked friend was sitting right next to him, asking Eddie over and over again what he was reading. When Eddie didn’t answer, he asked if it was a kissing book. And when Eddie still didn’t answer, he made kissing sounds until Eddie shoved him off the steps. He stayed sprawled out on the ground like that was exactly where he wanted to be, and my covert escape plan was ruined, because I had to step right over him to leave.

  “Hey,” he said to me. “Nice mullet.”

  Layered cut, I thought but didn’t say, because even though I was sure Eddie wouldn’t hit me without a reason, I wasn’t so sure about his friend.

  I spent the whole weekend at the library, except for the times when the library was closed. I spent those hours either in Gloria’s car or in Gloria’s trailer or in our trailer. Not a whole lot of time in Gloria’s trailer, because every time I open the door and the microwave turns on by itself, my heart jerks.

  In the library, I must have skimmed every book about Emily Dickinson they had. I knew a lot about her already, from my vocabulary sentences and the books Miss Fergusson had lent me. But I still learned a few cool things, like how she had a sister (a sister!) and how she’d had her heart smashed to bits when some guy wouldn’t marry her.

  Everything I read just proved that Emily Dickinson and Winter were almost the same person. Winter’s heart may not be smashed, but I can tell she’s carrying a big sadness inside her. The other night, after Mom had fallen asleep, Winter told me she hasn’t been turning in all of her homework. “I thought I’d be able to do it at work,” she said, “but people are always wanting pretzels.” I pointed out to her that Emily Dickinson had dropped out of school completely, and she was still a great writer.

  “Yeah,” Winter said, but the word was heavy with sadness. I hoped that seeing Dad would make that sadness go away.

  On Monday, as s
oon as the last bell rang, Genny and I raced to Miss Fergusson’s room, while Denny lagged behind. We said hi to Miss Fergusson, and she told us to go ahead and push some desks together. The couch looked so comfortable, but I guess only three or four people would be able to sit on it at one time, not an entire club. So Genny pushed five desks together, and then I squeezed a few more desks between them in case even more people showed up.

  And then we waited.

  Denny shuffled in, found a desk, crossed his arms, turned his glare on, and sat.

  We waited some more.

  Genny tapped her pencil against the paper she had out to record the minutes. The clock was being slow on purpose, I think, and I ended up arranging and rearranging and straightening all my papers a hundred times. Just as I was about to ask Miss Fergusson where her so-called promised club members had gone off to, the door to her room squeaked open, and two pairs of feet scraped against the floor.

  It was Eddie and, behind him, his mohawked buddy. Heading right for our cluster of desks, pointing at me and saying, “Poetry Club?”

  I glanced behind me, to make sure he wasn’t talking to someone else. “Um, Emily Dickinson Club,” I told him.

  “Yup,” he said, instead of “Whoops” or “Oh, sorry, wrong room.” He tossed his backpack onto the nearest chair, where it thudded, as if the bottom was lined with cement.

  “Good job being on time, boys,” Miss Fergusson said.

  “Thanks!” said the boy with the mohawk. “And I would like to say, Fergie, that you look radiant today.”

  “Flattery didn’t get you far last year, Langston. Just take a seat.”

  “You got it!” And Langston, the boy with the mohawk, sat right next to me, as if there were no other available chairs anywhere in the room. “Hey, I know you,” he said, fixing his sunken eyes on me. “You’re Mullet Girl.”

  Before I even had time to think layered cut, Genny was leaning over her desk with her arms out, like she wanted to choke someone. “Her name is Star Mackie, not Mullet Girl, okay? And you have the stupidest hair here, so you can just shut up!”

  I think if Mr. Savage had popped in at that moment to tell us all that I was his number one student, I couldn’t have been any more surprised.

  “Genny!” Denny said, whirling on his sister, and she settled back into her seat, eyes blazing. I could tell then that the glare ran in the family but that Genny only used it for good, unlike her brother. Unfortunately, it had no effect on Langston, who put his feet up on the desk and leaned back in his chair.

  “He doesn’t know when he’s being insulted,” Eddie said to the group, and then, as if he were in charge or something, added, “So what’re we gonna read first? How about ‘Because I could not stop for Death’?”

  “We have to take minutes first,” Genny said, as if she was in charge.

  “We are going to introduce ourselves,” I announced, slapping my hand on the desk so hard it stung. “That is what we are going to do. And we’re all signing in.” I grabbed one of the papers off Genny’s desk and wrote my name on it in huge letters. “I’m Star,” I said, handing the paper to Langston.

  “We should also say one thing about ourselves,” Genny said, which was a good idea. Why hadn’t I thought of that?

  “Okay. I’m Star, and …” I couldn’t think of what to say. It was obvious that I liked Emily Dickinson, and telling people I lived in a trailer park had not gone very well before. So I said the next thing that popped into my mind: “I’m going to see my dad in a couple of weeks. My sister and I. We’re both going.” I paused. “It’s going to be a lot of fun.”

  “Cool,” Langston said, still writing. “I’m Langston. I probably won’t see my dad again until June. We always spend the summer together.”

  “Eddie,” said Eddie. “My dad’s black.”

  We all stared at him.

  “I thought we were talking about dads or something,” he said, shrugging.

  Genny waved and introduced herself. “My dad builds chicken coops and stuff,” she said. “We see him every day.”

  Denny was last. His glare had faded away. He said, “I’m Denny.” We waited. “Genny and I have the same dad.”

  “Okay!” I announced, maybe a bit too loudly, but only because we’d already wasted two whole minutes and we had a mountain of poems to read and categorize. Every one of Emily Dickinson’s poems fit in one of three categories: nature, God, or death. The plan was to vote on which ones belonged where. “We’re going to start with”—I flipped through the papers for a poem that was not “Because I could not stop for Death”—“Aha! Here we go. ‘A bird came down the walk.’ ” I took a deep breath to start the poem.

  “‘He did not know I saw,’ ” Eddie said. “‘He bit an angleworm in halves and ate the fellow, raw.’ ”

  My breath stalled in my throat. He was saying the same words that were on my paper. He was saying the poem from memory. “Wait a second,” I said, halfway through the second stanza. “How did you …?” I didn’t know what to ask, exactly. “Did you go to the library?”

  Eddie laughed, kind of like a dog barking one sharp, loud bark. “We’re not allowed at the library since somebody”—and he stared very pointedly at Langston—“got caught drawing bras on the covers of all the magazines.”

  “I’m not ashamed,” Langston said. “And if Emily Dickinsworth were alive today, I think she’d be okay with it. I’m very good at drawing bras.”

  “Say the word bras one more time, and I’m kicking you all out of my classroom,” said Miss Fergusson, without looking up from her papers. Genny wasn’t even taking minutes, I noticed—she’d locked her hands over her mouth to keep from laughing.

  And Denny was glaring at me like this was all my fault.

  “Okay, we’re not talking about—” I almost said it. “B-r-a-s. We have poems to read. Read, as in read from a paper!” Taking the papers in one hand, I rustled them at everyone in turn. When I got to Eddie, I asked, “How did you know that poem?”

  “I know a lot of poems,” he said.

  Winter once had to memorize a poem in junior high, and I remembered that she’d practiced for hours in front of the mirror before she had it down. “Are you really smart or something?” I asked, which set Langston off. He nearly tumbled off his chair laughing.

  “Smart!” he said. “He got held back in first grade ’cause he didn’t know how to read!”

  I expected Eddie to start punching, but he just crossed his arms, frowning. “Yeah, I didn’t know how to read until I got Mrs. Flower in second grade. She made me stay after school so she could teach me how to read with a bunch of poems and crap. Easy rhyming ones, not the hard ones. She had this big book full of poems in her desk, with goldrimmed pages and everything, and she said I could have it if I could read one of the poems inside without any help.”

  He unzipped his backpack then and took out a thick red hardcover book. The pages gleamed gold, and so did the title, America’s Best-Loved Poems. “When we’re done with Emily Dickinson, we can use this,” he said.

  “What do you mean, when we’re done with Emily Dickinson?” I asked. “This is the Emily Dickinson Club. We’re never going to be done with Emily Dickinson!”

  But no one was listening, and Genny was already reaching out for Eddie’s book, and next to me, Langston had somehow gotten ahold of the paper with all our names on it, and at the bottom he was drawing a girl in a bra.

  The whole time, Denny kept glaring at me, except his mouth had twisted into an evil little smile. He knew as well as I did that the first meeting of the Emily Dickinson Club had gone horribly, horribly wrong.

  I was going to need a word ten thousand times stronger than vexation.

  I popped into Miss Fergusson’s room during lunch recess for the next few days to ask if anyone else—anyone at all—had asked about joining the Emily Dickinson Club. She told me there had been “no further interest as of late.” She also said that Eddie was a nice boy and to give him a chance, but then I saw him at r
ecess shoving Jared into the tetherball pole and cussing out one of the playground monitors while Langston stood nearby laughing, and I thought, Nope.

  “Did you ever have anyone in your writing club who you didn’t want to join?” I asked Winter Wednesday afternoon while we shared a plate of carrots and ranch dressing. Normally she wouldn’t have been home, but she’d been sick with the stomach flu for the last few days. She wasn’t supposed to be eating anything either, since everything she ate made her throw up, but she was feeling better today and was going to risk it.

  “No,” she told me. “I just didn’t let people in if I didn’t like them, so it worked out pretty well. Or not, you know, since I still got expelled. You mind if I put some mustard in this?”

  I shrugged, wondering if I was anywhere close to expulsion. “They can’t expel you for not doing homework, right?” Winter said they couldn’t, and I relaxed a little. I told her about Eddie and Langston, who were probably way closer to being expelled than I was. I’m positive the reason no one else will join the club now is because of them. They were scaring people away. “And now they’re taking over my club and making it about bras and … and other poems … and they act like they’re the ones in charge …”

  “So be in charge,” Winter said, picking up a big glob of mustard with her carrot. “It’s your club.”

  She was right. It was my club. I’m the one who started it, and I’m the one who needed it. But how was I supposed to take charge of it?

  I think if I’d known that this club would be so much work, I wouldn’t have started it in the first place. But of course now that I’d gone through all the trouble of keeping it alive behind Mr. Savage’s back, there’s no way I’d ever give it up.

  Not even to Eddie.

  (Unless he tried to punch me.)

  Star Mackie

  October 16

  Week 5 Vocabulary Sentences

  I’M NOT TURNING THESE IN!!

  HA-HA-HA-HA-HA!!!!

  1. I will commence turning in sentences when Mr. Savage shaves his beard. (This is not going to happen, because he loves that beard and scratches it at least three times a day.)