Hope Is a Ferris Wheel (5 page)

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.

T
hat 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 fell 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.”

10. I only have one memory of my dad, and it's sort of
vague
. We were at the county fair, and I was on the Ferris wheel, so I only saw him from far away. The thing I remember most clearly about that day is that after I got off the Gravitron, I threw up.

I
didn't turn in my sentences again this week.

Why? Because when I handed them to Winter Thursday morning so she could look them over before she left, she read through them and handed them back, saying, “Do you want Social Services knocking on our door?”