Hope Is a Ferris Wheel (7 page)

“Our brother goes to Sarah Borne, too,” Genny told me. “He got picked on at his old school. It was so bad, he'd cut class all the time, so he failed everything.”

“Half brother,” Denny said, like that didn't make them real brothers at all. “And he got picked on because he wore makeup.”

“It was eyeliner,” Genny said. “Oh, and nail polish. And he has a lip ring.”

I couldn't picture this so-called brother. I kept seeing an older Denny, but an older Denny would never wear makeup or nail polish or any kind of ring. “Can we take a field trip to your house?” I asked. “I have to see this to believe it.”

Genny pumped her fists like this was a great idea, but Denny stood up so fast his chair flew backward, making Mr. Savage glance up from his stack of papers.

“You're not allowed to come to our house,” he said, grabbing Genny's arm, “and neither is your sister!” He stomped out of the room, dragging Genny, who looked as confused as I felt. After the door closed behind them, Mr. Savage raised his eyebrows at me for an explanation.

“Um. He had to go. Suddenly.”

“Okay, then.” He went back to his papers, humming,
scratching his beard with his pen, and I went to pick up Denny's chair.

Honestly, I didn't care that Denny hated me so much, since the feeling was pretty mutual. But how could he hate Winter?

He'd never even met her.

Star Mackie

October 2

Week 3 Vocabulary Sentences

1. These sentences are
complicating
my life a bit, so I'm going to sit here on my bed and just find stuff in my trailer to write about.

2. Mr. Savage, your weird, old-fashioned words that haven't been used for a hundred years make me want to
defenestrate
my dictionary. Why is that even a word, when you can just say, “I'm going to throw my dictionary out the window”?

3. If I stretch out of my bed a bit, I can see to the back of the trailer, where Mom has hung a
glimmering
crystal in the window. The same window I may end up throwing my dictionary out of.

4. Our trailer is
immobile
, because it never moves, despite having wheels. For some reason this trailer has only two wheels, which are in the middle, so we have to prop our home up with cinder blocks to keep it from becoming a seesaw.

5. I don't know if I would call anything in our trailer
lavish
except for maybe the collection of fancy soaps
in the bathroom. Mom won them in a raffle, and no one is allowed to use them. They just sit on the bathroom sink looking pretty.

6. I
presume
that if I used the fancy soaps, my hands would smell good and feel like a bed of fresh-picked rose petals. I would also be grounded.

7. Therefore I would
regret
using the fancy soaps, since the grounding would last longer than the good-smelling hands.

8. I promise this will be the last sentence about fancy soaps, but it's your fault for choosing the words: I would
ruefully
promise my mother that I would never again use the fancy soaps.

9. There's a picture on the fridge that Mom calls Gloria vs. the
Ultimate
Donut. It was the
ultimate
donut because it weighed three pounds and also because it was the only donut Gloria could never finish.

10. My sister and I share a
wardrobe
, kind of. I get all her old clothes, but mine wouldn't fit her. Have you ever read the book The Lion, the Witch and the
Wardrobe
? I haven't, but why are a lion and a witch sharing clothes? How does that work?

I
really wanted to turn in my sentences this week. They turned out pretty good, and I made extra sure they did not include things about junkies and dads and bills.

I had them out, ready to hand to Mr. Savage as he passed my desk. But before he got to me, he was in front of Meg Anderson—the fourth-grader who was always cleaning out her desk and who always had her homework ready—and she told him that she'd left hers at home.

“Meg, I'm disappointed,” he said, which didn't sound bad, but judging by how red Meg's ears turned, she didn't like hearing it one bit.

“Yeah—well—but—” Meg said, her ears turning redder
with each word. Then she pointed to me and yelled, “Star didn't turn hers in either!”

I gasped, and it was the only sound in the room. Mr. Savage turned his beard in my direction, and I knew from the way he clenched his jaw that I was in trouble. Before I even had time to point at Meg and remind him that she was the one who left her stupid sentences at home, Mr. Savage stomped his way over to my row.

“This is not acceptable,” he said. We all shrank down in our seats. I don't think we'd ever seen Mr. Savage mad before. “Don't think I don't know what's going on. Maybe the vocabulary words don't seem that important. Maybe because I've been letting certain people get away with not turning them in, week after week.”

I hated how he'd said that,
get away with
, like I was some kind of juvenile delinquent. And I hated that everyone in the room knew who he was talking about, because they all turned in their seats to look at me.

“So, everyone else who doesn't have sentences today, raise your hands,” Mr. Savage said.

At first, no one did. Maybe it was out of fear. I thought, for a second, that it was just Meg Anderson who'd forgotten, and that she'd actually forgotten, because even smart people forget things sometimes. Like the one time Winter
left her pepper spray in her locker, and the next day happened to be the day the principal searched it.

I was still planning on handing Mr. Savage my sentences, with one of those smiles that says,
See? I'm totally not a delinquent like you think I am, even though I haven't redone the last two weeks yet
, and then—

To my left, a hand went up. And to my right, a hand went up. And somewhere in the back corner, another hand went up. Three whole hands. Maybe Mr. Savage was right and they really had decided not to turn in their sentences because of me. Because I was
getting away with
it.

I felt this hard poke right in my back, and Delilah hissed at me, “Star! Raise your dang hand!” And Denny was turned all the way around and glaring with full force, and even stupid Jared was telling me to put my hand up. Mr. Savage's eyes stayed on me, and he made this “up” sign with his hand so that he was saying it, too, and everywhere I looked, someone else was saying the same thing.

Everyone really thought I was some kind of juvenile delinquent.

So I put my hand up, because I was tired of having to prove that I wasn't. I wondered if this was how Winter had felt last year, after her third and final trip to the principal's office. Did she know that no matter how much she tried, no one would ever look at her the same way again?

But that wasn't true. There was one person who didn't think Winter was a delinquent, besides me, because he hadn't seen her in years and hadn't even said anything to her since she was thirteen.

That must be why Winter wants to see Dad so much.
Hope you and your sister are doing well
. It doesn't seem like much, but he hopes. Maybe because he knows things will get better.

When the bell rang for lunch, I dropped my sentences into the trash, and hoped.

F
ifth-graders have detention on Fridays in Miss Fergusson's room, which is next to Mr. Savage's room on one side and the school garden on the other. Miss Fergusson's room has a couch with a quilt that you can tell was handmade. There are names stitched into it, and before she told me to sit my butt down, Miss Fergusson said each name was done by one of her former students.

I wish I'd gotten Miss Fergusson for fifth grade. Her hair bounces when she walks, and she has kind, brown eyes that match her skin perfectly. Plus, when some big-eared jerk asked why my hair was so stupid, she told him
that if he didn't have something nice to say, he could write it on the whiteboard in perfect cursive one hundred times.

But no, instead I'm stuck with Mr. Savage, who sent only me to detention and let all the other kids who didn't do their sentences finish them at recess. At recess, he made me wash desks. And then after class he said that
obviously
I couldn't hold any club meetings in his room until I had turned in all my sentences.

But that was kind of a relief. Now, instead of having to say that my club was so bad that no one wanted to join it, I could tell everyone that, actually, Mr. Savage had just canceled the whole thing before anyone could join.

I bet Miss Fergusson wouldn't have canceled my club. And I bet she never would have told me it was a terrible idea for a club, even though it was.

I ended up sitting in a back corner, far away from the other delinquents, who all looked like they lived in detention. There was one kid sitting next to me, though, and I couldn't figure out why he was in there. For the whole hour he did nothing but sit at his desk and read a book. And not a normal book, either, but one of those thousand-page paperback books that are starting to yellow with age, the ones that always pop up at porch sales. This one didn't have a cover, though. Someone had ripped it clean off.

I wanted to see what he looked like, but the boy had his book so close to his face that all I could make out was his hair exploding out of the top, dark brown and curlier than Winter's. His hair was just a little bit darker than his hands, and he seemed a little taller and a little wider than all the other fifth-graders. When detention ended, I thought I'd see his face finally, but he left with it still buried in the book.

Outside, all the other detention junkies from the fourth and sixth grades stood around in their little groups, talking. Book Boy was out on the lawn talking to some sixth-grader with a mohawk. They were talking about the coverless book, I could tell, because Book Boy kept pointing to it, and Mohawk Boy kept throwing his hands up in the air. I got close enough to hear Mohawk Boy say, “I think it was him,” and then I had to jump out of the way, because Book Boy came barreling right past me and up to a group of sixth-graders.

The group stopped talking, and he held up his book and said, “This look familiar to anyone?”

The whole group took a big step backward, except for one boy, whose whole face had stretched into shock. “Eddie, I didn't know it was yours,” he said, and before he could say another word, Eddie slammed his fist into the side of the boy's head.

I gasped. I couldn't help it. Eddie swiveled on the spot and squinted at me, like he couldn't believe anyone would have the nerve to be even remotely surprised at the sudden punching. Then his mohawked friend came and grabbed his arm, and he forgot all about me.

By the time I got to the trailer, I still hadn't figured out which was worse: doing three weeks of sentences for the world's worst teacher or spending another Friday in detention with a boy who probably wanted to punch me, too.

A
pparently Winter got a job on Tuesday and didn't tell me, but Saturday was her very first day of work. I wanted to go with her to the mall, and I promised I'd stay out of the way and only come by once an hour, but Winter said she had to face this one on her own. She did promise to bring me home a soft-baked pretzel with hot mustard, though.