Gertie's Leap to Greatness (12 page)

“It's true that sometimes—almost never—but sometimes, there are oil spills and lots of fish die and the ocean gets polluted. And it's true that oil makes fuel that people burn.” A line creased between his eyes. “There are a lot of factors I guess,” he said.

“So why do you do it? Why don't you be a truck driver instead?”

“Well, calm down. Drilling for oil isn't
all
bad. Do your friends ride in cars? Do their parents drive cars?” he asked.

Gertie shrugged.

He nodded. “They do, and when they do, they're burning fuel, which is also bad for the environment. But they do it because cars get them to school and work and the grocery store and all the other places they need to go.”

“Like the hospital,” Gertie said.

Her father blinked. “Exactly,” he said. “Cars would get them to the hospital if they needed to go there. That's a good thing. Right?”

Nothing in the world felt good to Gertie.

“And farmers use tractors to grow food. They've got to have diesel fuel for their tractors. And there are all kinds of products that you've got to have petroleum to make. We have to have oil to keep living like we do. At least until they invent something better.”

“But wouldn't you rather be a trucker?” Gertie picked up the newspaper.

“No. I like my job.”

“Why?”

“I'm good at it. And that makes me feel proud.” He ticked off a finger. “The people I work with are good friends.” He ticked off a second finger. “I make enough money that I can keep you and me and Aunt Rae fed, watered, dressed, and housed and still have some left over to buy things like comic books and bonsai kits.” Three fingers.

“Everybody hates you,” she said. “But if you'd get a new job, then they won't hate you anymore.”

“Everybody,” he repeated, and he put his footrest down and leaned forward, looking her in the eye. “Is this about your mama?”

“No!” Gertie said.

“Because
everybody
still won't like me if I become a truck driver.”

“You don't know that! If you were the greatest trucker in the world, maybe she would like you.”

He looked down at his hands for a long time, and when he looked up, he had sad eyes. “The people who love me, love me no matter what my job is.” He shook his head. “I thought you knew better.” He sighed. “Why don't you go to your room and think about it?”

“What?” Gertie froze. Her father had never sent her to her room before. She wasn't the kind of kid who got sent to her room. She was a good kid. How could he have forgotten that?

“Go.” He pointed.

Gertie stood up and walked, stiff-legged, down the hall. When she got to her room, she slammed her bedroom door.

There.

If he had a problem with her slamming her door, he could tell her about it. He could come right up to her, and she would explain that it was her door and she could slam it if she wanted to.

No one came.

*   *   *

Usually, when her father's vacation time was over and he packed his duffel bag to go back to the rig, Gertie begged him not to go. Usually, she locked her arms around him so tight that he called her a bulldog on a car tire, a barnacle on a boat's butt. Usually, she begged him to take one last look at her loose tooth or her half-finished comic or her bonsai's fungus. Usually, she promised to miss him every second of every day. Usually.

He came into the kitchen with his duffel bag over his shoulder.

Aunt Rae's scrub brush swished across the dishes. “Gertie, your daddy's leaving,” she said.

Gertie didn't look up from her Spanish homework spread out on the kitchen table.

“Gertie,” Aunt Rae snapped, “your daddy's going away to work around the clock to put food in your belly and clothes on your back.”

Gertie erased one of her answers.

She didn't need him to put food in her belly. After all, she could always eat Junior's lunch. And she didn't need clothes on her back. She'd heard about people who didn't wear any clothes at all. They went around utterly naked. They lived in places called nudist colonies where they used lots of insect repellent and—

“Say-goodbye-to-your-daddy-right-now,” Aunt Rae said.

Gertie finally looked up from her homework. “Adiós, amigo,” she said.

 

17

What Happens to the Junk Food?

Really, it was a good thing that no one liked Gertie anymore. Because now that no one would bother her at recess, she had an extra twenty minutes every day to study. And it was
excellent
that she didn't have to worry about whether or not she was hurting Jean's feelings anymore. And she was glad Audrey was mad at her and wasn't begging her all the time to play house and find the remote. So much time to study. All alone. By herself.

It paid off, too, because the next time Ms. Simms passed back a math test, Gertie had gotten every single answer right.

Gertie looked up at Jean, who was working very hard to pretend that her former best friend wasn't sitting right beside her. Had she seen Gertie's test? Gertie cleared her throat. Jean shifted through her desk so that books banged and number twos clattered.

Gertie turned to her other side and pushed her test toward Junior. “I made a one hundred,” she said. “Triple digits.”

Junior looked at the test and then glanced over at Jean. His shoulders hunched.

“Did you hear something, Ella?” asked Mary Sue.

“No,” said Ella, smirking. “I didn't hear anything.”

Mary Sue turned around to look at the second row. “Jean, did you hear something?”

Jean didn't look up from her desk. “
I
didn't hear anything.”

Mary Sue beamed at Jean.

Gertie had finally become the best at something, only it didn't matter because nobody cared. She glared at the back of Mary Sue's head. It felt like she'd been staring at that yellow head forever.

“No talking,” said Ms. Simms as she glanced at the clock. “I want you on your best behavior.”

Junior sighed and, with one finger, passed her test back to her. Gertie folded the paper.

Someone rapped on the door.

“Everyone,” said Ms. Simms, “Mrs. Stebbins is coming to talk with you. You will treat her with respect, like you would any other grown-up or guest in our classroom.”

Ms. Simms didn't have to tell them to be on their best behavior.

Stebbins was the art, drama, and music instructor. No one but Ms. Simms had ever called her
Mrs
. Stebbins. She was just Stebbins.

She had pearl earrings, dentures, and a gray bun with lots of bobby pins poked in it. Everyone agreed that she'd been working at Carroll Elementary School for one hundred and seven years. Everyone did whatever she said because if she decided you were too much trouble, she would lock you in the art supplies closet and never let you out, not even if the principal told her to, not even at the end of the school year, not even if you had to go to the bathroom.

That was why, as Stebbins stepped to the front of the classroom and faced the class, no one was thinking about being rude to her.

Without so much as a
good morning
, Stebbins said, “We will be putting on a play.”

Mary Sue's head snapped up.

“
Romeo and Juliet
!” squealed Ella.

“No,” said Stebbins.

“Is it about ninjas?” asked Roy.

“No.”

“Is it—”

Stebbins held up her hand. “It is about a girl named Evangelina Who Would Not Eat Her Vegetables.”

Stebbins spoke about Evangelina in capital letters. Gertie ironed out the creases in her math test as Stebbins continued.

“A group of children will play the various junk foods that Evangelina likes to eat, and another group of children will play the healthy foods that Evangelina does not like to eat. At first, Evangelina will be happy with her junk-food friends, but then they will turn on her and make her ill. And then”—Stebbins sniffed—“when things are grimmest, Evangelina's mother, sick with worry, will arrive with the cast of vegetables and fruits and healthy foods and make Evangelina well again.”

Evangelina.
Gertie's heart leaped like a fish.
E-van-juh-leeena.
It had that ring to it.

The rest of the class muttered. Evangelina sounded like a good part. But all the rest of the play sounded like the kind of thing adults did to warp kids for life. Like when Aunt Rae showed Junior pictures of naked baby Gertie.

“What happens to the junk food?” asked Jean.

“The junk foods are thrown out with the trash.” Stebbins pressed one of her bobby pins deeper into her bun. “Which is to say, they die.”

Ms. Simms's eyebrows drew together, and she cleared her throat.

Stebbins ignored her. “I expect all of you to audition. The sign-up sheet will be posted in my room on my supply closet door.”

Junior shivered.

“Who gets to be Evangelina?” asked Roy. He sounded panicked, and Gertie knew he was imagining the horror of standing in front of the whole school looking like a rutabaga. A kindergartner like Audrey might think it was fun to dress up as an onion, but the fifth graders would never be able to show their faces in public again. “I want to be Evangelina.”

Mary Sue spun around in her seat. “Evangelina is a
girl's
name.”

“We could change it to Evan,” Roy suggested.

“Like Ewan!” said Ewan. “But with a
v.
” He held up his fingers in a
v
.

Stebbins looked at Roy. “
Girls
will audition for the role, and I will choose the one who is most ap
t
”—her dentures clicked on the
t
—“to play the part.”

“You always give the good parts to the girls,” complained Roy.

Stebbins raised an eyebrow. Roy glared at her for a second longer. Then he crossed his arms and looked away.

Stebbins didn't bother to say goodbye to the students or Ms. Simms before she walked to the door, stepped through it, and slammed it behind her.

As soon as she was gone, everyone broke into conversation about who would play Evangelina and what kinds of costumes they'd have and whether or not there would be singing, which would be awful, because they hated singing.

*   *   *

“I guess I'll have to audition for something,” Junior told Gertie at recess, “because Stebbins'll lock me up if I don't. But I won't be any good. I'll get stage fright for sure. So I don't know why I should even bother.” Mrs. Parks had shaved off the Riptide, and he kept touching his stubbly head like he was reaching for something that wasn't there anymore.

Gertie was much too excited about the play to keep listening to Junior, so she went over to where a crowd had gathered around Mary Sue.

“The second most important thing to know about auditions…” Mary Sue's voice was high. Her eyes shone, and strands of her yellow hair stuck to her lip gloss.

Roy and Leo had their heads together and were discussing ways they could make Stebbins's play less mortifying.

“We should have French fries falling from the ceiling and raining everywhere,” Leo was explaining. He fluttered his fingers down to mime French fries raining down.

Gertie stepped closer to them and rocked forward on her toes. She wanted to squeeze into the crowd so bad that her fingers itched with longing.

“I hope there's a big fight scene,” she said, in the same quiet, rushed tones that Leo had used. “Like a battle between the good and evil foods.”

Roy's face lit up, his eyes far away, and she could tell he was already on stage, wrestling a healthful carrot to the ground.

“Yeah!” he began. “With forks and—” But then his eyes focused on Gertie, and when he realized who he was talking to, he turned away.

 

18

I Loathe Peas

The fifth graders had art-music-drama class in a room that was full of tables with mismatched chairs and costumes with missing sequins and ancient art projects that flaked paint and glue on the floor. Sometimes Stebbins decided to teach them art, and they colored with broken bits of crayons. Sometimes she decided to teach them music, and they sang “America the Beautiful” until their throats were raw and raspy—no one ever dared to ask for a drink of water. Sometimes she decided to teach them drama, and they would play charades or pretend to be jungle creatures or trees. Drama was Gertie's favorite.

Today, Stebbins told them to sit, silent as their graves, while she read them the script. Evangelina was sort of a whiny girl, but according to the script, she was beautiful, and when she got sick everyone was worried about her, which was lovely of them.

Gertie imagined herself on stage—thousands of people in the audience catching their breath as they saw Gertie-Evangelina growing sicker and sicker until an asparagus rushed onto the stage and saved her and everyone applauded and she smiled at them all weakly.

Stebbins's voice cut through Gertie's thoughts. “Now that you've heard the play, go sign up for the part that you will audition for.”

The class raced for the sign-up sheet. Someone shoved Gertie into the giant papier-mâché duck propped in the corner of the room, so she was at the back of the crowd that pressed toward the door where the sheet was taped. June and Ella were in front of her.

“I'm going to try out for Evangelina,” said June, standing on her toes so that she could see who was signing up, and so that all Gertie could see was June's thick braid.

“Oh,” said Ella, and she lowered her voice. Gertie could still hear her, though, and she was pretty sure that everyone else in the room could still hear her, too. “Oh, June, you don't want to do that. Mary Sue is gonna try out for that part. You know she'll get it. She's so pretty. It would be
so
embarrassing to try out for a part and then not get it.”