Hope Is a Ferris Wheel (4 page)

“Star,” Mr. Savage said as everyone left the room, “may I speak with you for a second?”

On the fourth-grade end of the room, Jenny Withagee lingered, stuffing papers into her purple backpack and glancing at me every other second. I skip-walked over to Mr. Savage's desk, where he stood, his hands palms-down on his desk calendar.

“I think your club name may be a little off-putting,” he told me. “Maybe if you changed it to something else …”

I didn't want to change the name. And I wished Mr. Savage would stop scratching his beard, which he was doing now; it made my face itch. I said nothing—another Winter tactic. She said it put the other person on the defensive,
making them scramble for stuff to say, and then they looked so stupid that they just gave up.

“I just don't know if anyone's going to want to join,” Mr. Savage said, and he didn't look stupid at all. He looked kind of sad … or like he was sad
for me
, which was even worse. I was about to abandon the whole silence plan and start pleading, when an airy voice called out, “I'll be there!”

Jenny appeared next to me, grinning so hard her eyes almost disappeared. I was on the verge of saying, “Fifth-graders only.” Not because Jenny wears skirts to her ankles and has rub-on tattoos up and down her arms, which I don't even care about, but because I don't really know who she is, and I had this feeling that she wanted me to be happy that she'd just saved me from having my club taken away, even though she hadn't.

Then I saw Mr. Savage's face. I had no idea his eyebrows could go that high, but I was more angry at him for being so surprised than I was at Jenny for trying to be all heroic.

“See?” I told Mr. Savage. “One member already.”

He apologized and said that
of course
I didn't have to change the name, and
of course
the Trailer Park Club was an excellent name. I smiled and walked out the door, glad that my club was saved but unglad that Jenny's footsteps were following mine.

“So,” she said, once we were outside in the outdoor hallway, dodging the few other kids who'd gotten out a bit late, “it's on Wednesday? Should I bring anything?” Which bothered me, because I hadn't even thought about bringing stuff myself. But I was saved from answering by, of all people, Denny Libra, who came out from behind one of the cement pillars holding up the hallway roof and curled his fingers around Jenny's tattooed arm.

“Let's go,” he said, and he started pulling her away, toward the playground. It was pretty obvious from the glare he was shooting me that he didn't want her talking to me, which I thought was kind of creepy. I grabbed Jenny's other arm and pulled her back, saying, “We're talking about club stuff, donut-brain.”

“She's not joining your club!” Denny shouted, so loudly that I had to let go. “You're not joining her club,” Denny said to her, and he dragged her away, and she didn't say anything, not one thing; she just followed him onto the blacktop.

I glanced back into the classroom to make sure Mr. Savage hadn't seen, because I wasn't sure he'd let me have my club if he knew the only member had just been yanked right out of it.

T
he first chance I got to talk to Winter alone since the world's worst vocabulary sentences was on Saturday. Mom said she had a score to settle with the Food Bank, which meant she'd lost her card again and would have to argue a bag of food out of them. Gloria had a bunch of appointments booked, but she'd stopped by that morning to heat up a donut sandwich in our microwave. (Her microwave is haunted.)

When they were both gone, Winter told me she was going to the library.

“Can I go?” I asked.

She was still getting her coat and brushing on eye shadow, so she didn't answer. Not until she put on her
giant sunglasses. Then she said, “Are you coming or not?” And luckily I was already dressed.

In the truck, Winter tried to find a decent radio station, but she gave up when she almost hit Mrs. O'Grady's trash cans. Besides, ever since the antenna fell off, the truck's reception isn't great.

“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.

W
hen 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.

W
inter 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.