Betti on the High Wire (14 page)

 

SUMMER IS THE best time of the whole year in America, because school is over and there’s nothing to do. That’s what Lucy told me after I’d been in America for a whole week.

“Sometimes I get bored, and sometimes I get in trouble,” she said as we were walking on the white cement called “side walk.” It didn’t look like she was walking sideways to me. She told her mom that we definitely wanted to walk to Day Camp alone. No adults allowed. So Mr. Buckworth pretended that he wasn’t walking with us, even though he was walking behind us with Rooney and Puddles.

Mrs. Buckworth said I didn’t have to go to Day Camp if I didn’t want to, but I was very excited to go to Day Camp! Maybe it was like the circus camp, at least a little. Maybe there were leftover kids. Even though Lenore, the adoption expert lady, said I’d adapt if I met some friends in America—and I definitely wasn’t going to make friends or adapt—I was curious about Day Camp! Staying in America an extra day or two, just so I could go to Day Camp, wouldn’t hurt anything.

Lucy stopped walking and set her backpack on the ground and bent down to tie her shoe. “Sometimes I watch TV all day, and then Mom gets mad and she makes me go outside.”

I stopped too and set my orange bag on the ground. Mr. Buckworth had bought me a new pink backpack like Lucy’s, but I told him that I already had a bag. Mine was better.

“So, this summer? Mom let me to go to Day Camp. So I don’t drive her crazy. I guess that’s why you get to go to Day Camp too. So you don’t drive her crazy.”

I suddenly imagined Lucy and me driving all over the place—in the wagon—like crazy people. “Drive crazy?” I asked her. “You mean, the wagon?”

Lucy laughed. “No, you silly. I can’t drive ’til I’m sixteen. And I don’t
want
to drive that stupid wagon. It’s ugly. But I mean that when, I’m bored I bug my mom. I say, MOM! I’M BORED!”

“You
bug ...
her?” These must’ve been the same words in my language for a little gnat that gave old people warts.

“I mean, my mom, she gets like this ... wooooo ...” Lucy twirled her finger around her head and made googley eyes. “Nuts. She says that if I’m bored it’s my own fault. ’Cause I have an excellent imagination.”

A magic nation? Nation meant a country, but I’d never heard of a magic country. And nuts? Mrs. Buck-worth was like a peanut? My forehead got all wrinkled. I was trying to understand. I wanted to understand. But English was horribly difficult. And
Lucy English
was even worse.

Lucy sighed.

I sighed.

“Never mind,” she said.

“Never mind,” I said.

And we picked up the packs for our backs and kept walking to Day Camp without saying much at all.

 

“WELCOME., BETTI! WE’VE been excited for you to join us!”

My good eye darted around nervously as I watched Mr. Buckworth leaving. He’d said, “You’re going to be fine, little tiger.” He put his hand on my head.
“Finally,
after a whole week of being with us, you’ll get to have some fun with kids your own age.”

He introduced me to Ms. Stacy, the Day Camp Teacher Lady, who introduced me to the other day campers: five of them sitting in a circle on the grass.

Ms. Stacy said she called them the Summer Five. Now, with me here, she could call us the Summer Six, which sounded much better. Ms. Stacy pointed for me to sit down in the circle.

“Can you all say hi to Betti?” she said.

“Hi,” the campers muttered.

“Hello,” I squeaked back in a tiny voice.

Lucy had left me to join her own Day Camp with the little kids. And George was sitting in another circle across the enormous play yard. He was in Day Camp too, and I could see him already giggling with an American girl. George looked like he’d been in Day Camp forever. Which just figured.

Day Camp happened at Betsy Ross Elementary School. And I’d also be going to Betsy Ross Elementary School in the fall, after the summer. That’s what Lucy said. I’d be in the fifth grade unless I didn’t know enough.

But I definitely knew enough and I wasn’t going to be here after the summer anyway.

Lucy also told me that Betsy Ross was some lady who sewed up some flag for some American war a long, long time ago. I thought Lucy was making things up because it didn’t seem as if there’d ever been a war in America. Everything looked too perfect and nothing was broken.

“You’ve all heard about Betti’s country on TV,” explained Camp Lady Stacy.

She pulled a map out of her camp box on the grass. She pointed to my country and all the campers leaned forward trying to see it. I tried to see it too. My home was tiny next to all sorts of huge countries. It was light green and shaped like a chicken liver.

“We’ve all seen pictures of the war ...”

The campers kept squinting at Ms. Stacy’s map, and then at me. At the map, then at me. At the same time, I was looking at them. They all had different colored skin. Pink melon to charcoal black and everything in between. Old Lady Suri never told me that Melons came in different colors.

“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.”

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.”