Hope Is a Ferris Wheel (10 page)

Before I even had time to think
layered cut
, Genny was
leaning over her desk with her arms out, like she wanted to choke someone. “Her name is Star Mackie, not Mullet Girl, okay? And you have the stupidest hair here, so you can just shut up!”

I think if Mr. Savage had popped in at that moment to tell us all that I was his number one student, I couldn't have been any more surprised.

“Genny!” Denny said, whirling on his sister, and she settled back into her seat, eyes blazing. I could tell then that the glare ran in the family but that Genny only used it for good, unlike her brother. Unfortunately, it had no effect on Langston, who put his feet up on the desk and leaned back in his chair.

“He doesn't know when he's being insulted,” Eddie said to the group, and then, as if he were in charge or something, added, “So what're we gonna read first? How about
‘Because I could not stop for Death'?”

“We have to take minutes first,” Genny said, as if
she
was in charge.

“We are going to introduce ourselves,” I announced, slapping my hand on the desk so hard it stung. “That is what we are going to do. And we're all signing in.” I grabbed one of the papers off Genny's desk and wrote my name on it in huge letters. “I'm Star,” I said, handing the paper to Langston.

“We should also say one thing about ourselves,” Genny said, which was a good idea. Why hadn't I thought of that?

“Okay. I'm Star, and …” I couldn't think of what to say. It was obvious that I liked Emily Dickinson, and telling people I lived in a trailer park had not gone very well before. So I said the next thing that popped into my mind: “I'm going to see my dad in a couple of weeks. My sister and I. We're both going.” I paused. “It's going to be a lot of fun.”

“Cool,” Langston said, still writing. “I'm Langston. I probably won't see my dad again until June. We always spend the summer together.”

“Eddie,” said Eddie. “My dad's black.”

We all stared at him.

“I thought we were talking about dads or something,” he said, shrugging.

Genny waved and introduced herself. “My dad builds chicken coops and stuff,” she said. “We see him every day.”

Denny was last. His glare had faded away. He said, “I'm Denny.” We waited. “Genny and I have the same dad.”

“O
kay!
” I announced, maybe a bit too loudly, but only because we'd already wasted two whole minutes and we had a mountain of poems to read and categorize. Every one of Emily Dickinson's poems fit in one of three categories: nature, God, or death. The plan was to vote on which ones belonged where. “We're going to start
with”—I flipped through the papers for a poem that was
not
“Because I could not stop for Death”—“Aha! Here we go. ‘A bird came down the walk.' ” I took a deep breath to start the poem.

“‘He did not know I saw,' ” Eddie said. “‘He bit an angleworm in halves and ate the fellow, raw.' ”

My breath stalled in my throat. He was saying the same words that were on my paper. He was saying the poem
from memory
. “Wait a second,” I said, halfway through the second stanza. “How did you …?” I didn't know what to ask, exactly. “Did you go to the library?”

Eddie laughed, kind of like a dog barking one sharp, loud bark. “We're not allowed at the library since
somebody
”—and he stared very pointedly at Langston—“got caught drawing bras on the covers of all the magazines.”

“I'm not ashamed,” Langston said. “And if Emily Dickinsworth were alive today, I think she'd be okay with it. I'm very good at drawing bras.”

“Say the word
bras
one more time, and I'm kicking you all out of my classroom,” said Miss Fergusson, without looking up from her papers. Genny wasn't even taking minutes, I noticed—she'd locked her hands over her mouth to keep from laughing.

And Denny was glaring at me like this was all my fault.

“Okay, we're not talking about—” I almost said it. “
B-r-a-s
.
We have poems to read.
Read
, as in
read
from a paper!” Taking the papers in one hand, I rustled them at everyone in turn. When I got to Eddie, I asked, “How did you know that poem?”

“I know a lot of poems,” he said.

Winter once had to memorize a poem in junior high, and I remembered that she'd practiced for hours in front of the mirror before she had it down. “Are you really smart or something?” I asked, which set Langston off. He nearly tumbled off his chair laughing.

“Smart!” he said. “He got held back in first grade 'cause he didn't know how to read!”

I expected Eddie to start punching, but he just crossed his arms, frowning. “Yeah, I didn't know how to read until I got Mrs. Flower in second grade. She made me stay after school so she could teach me how to read with a bunch of poems and crap. Easy rhyming ones, not the hard ones. She had this big book full of poems in her desk, with goldrimmed pages and everything, and she said I could have it if I could read one of the poems inside without any help.”

He unzipped his backpack then and took out a thick red hardcover book. The pages gleamed gold, and so did the title,
America's Best-Loved Poems
. “When we're done with Emily Dickinson, we can use this,” he said.

“What do you mean,
when we're done with Emily Dickinson
?”
I asked. “This is the Emily Dickinson Club. We're never going to be done with Emily Dickinson!”

But no one was listening, and Genny was already reaching out for Eddie's book, and next to me, Langston had somehow gotten ahold of the paper with all our names on it, and at the bottom he was drawing a girl in a bra.

The whole time, Denny kept glaring at me, except his mouth had twisted into an evil little smile. He knew as well as I did that the first meeting of the Emily Dickinson Club had gone horribly, horribly wrong.

I was going to need a word ten thousand times stronger than
vexation
.

I
popped into Miss Fergusson's room during lunch recess for the next few days to ask if anyone else—anyone at all—had asked about joining the Emily Dickinson Club. She told me there had been “no further interest as of late.” She also said that Eddie was a nice boy and to give him a chance, but then I saw him at recess shoving Jared into the tetherball pole and cussing out one of the playground monitors while Langston stood nearby laughing, and I thought,
Nope
.

“Did you ever have anyone in your writing club who you didn't want to join?” I asked Winter Wednesday afternoon while we shared a plate of carrots and ranch dressing. Normally she wouldn't have been home, but
she'd been sick with the stomach flu for the last few days. She wasn't supposed to be eating anything either, since everything she ate made her throw up, but she was feeling better today and was going to risk it.

“No,” she told me. “I just didn't let people in if I didn't like them, so it worked out pretty well. Or not, you know, since I still got expelled. You mind if I put some mustard in this?”

I shrugged, wondering if I was anywhere close to expulsion. “They can't expel you for not doing homework, right?” Winter said they couldn't, and I relaxed a little. I told her about Eddie and Langston, who were probably way closer to being expelled than I was. I'm positive the reason no one else will join the club now is because of them. They were scaring people away. “And now they're taking over my club and making it about bras and … and other poems … and they act like they're the ones in charge …”

“So be in charge,” Winter said, picking up a big glob of mustard with her carrot. “It's your club.”

She was right. It was my club. I'm the one who started it, and I'm the one who needed it. But how was I supposed to take charge of it?

I think if I'd known that this club would be so much work, I wouldn't have started it in the first place. But of
course now that I'd gone through all the trouble of keeping it alive behind Mr. Savage's back, there's no way I'd ever give it up.

Not even to Eddie.

(Unless he tried to punch me.)

Star Mackie

October 16

Week 5 Vocabulary Sentences

I'M NOT TURNING THESE IN!!

HA-HA-HA-HA-HA!!!!

1. I will
commence
turning in sentences when Mr. Savage shaves his beard. (This is not going to happen, because he loves that beard and scratches it at least three times a day.)

2. Until then I am
confined
to the classroom during recess, where Mr. Savage makes me wash desks. I don't think they can get any cleaner at this point, but he doesn't seem to care.

3. Washing desks is the opposite of
exhilarating
, so while I'm wiping my rag back and forth, I think about other things so it doesn't seem so boring.

4. Meanwhile, Mr. Savage sits at his desk, which has probably not been washed in a million years, considering the
mound
of papers and the dying plant on it.

5. Because I am
perpetually
dipping my hands in and out of a bucket of water, it has chipped off all my
midnight blue nail polish. I'd repaint my nails, but they'd just chip again in no time.

6. I have a whole
phantasmagoria
of things I'd rather be doing running through my head while I wash desks, like throwing my bucket of dirty water on Denny and taking all of Mr. Savage's weird, old words and throwing them into a volcano.

7. I also think about the day when everyone in class stops
ridiculing
me. It hasn't come yet, but I think it's close. I mean, no one's called me Star Trashy for, like, two days, and that's a record.

8. I also think about how I can get more people to join the club. I don't even need everyone to join it, I realized—just a
significant
number of people. Enough to make everyone else want to join.

9. For that to happen, I need to be absolutely
swaggering
, the way Eddie is. I even practiced in the mirror a little bit, but Gloria just asked me why I was acting so scared of my own reflection.

10. For now I just have to
tolerate
Eddie and Langston being there, at least until someone else joins or I figure out how to keep them away.

I
sat in my usual spot in detention, near but not next to the rest of the detention junkies, on the opposite side of the room from Eddie. But Eddie, who did not have his thousand-page paperback book in front of his face today, got up from his usual desk and sat next to me.

Which made all the other detention junkies pick up their things and move to the other side of the room.

They
were
afraid of him!

“Hey, listen,” Eddie said to me, and Miss Fergusson was cutting us some slack, I think, because detention was about to start and Eddie wasn't even trying to whisper. “Miss Fergusson said I should apologize for interrupting you and being loud and all that other crap at your Poetry Club.”

“Emily Dickinson Club,” I said.

“Whatever.” He pulled the red hardcover out of his backpack and put it on my desk. “Here, you should borrow this. It's got a bunch of different poems in it, and they're all really good.”

I opened the book to the table of contents and said, “Does this have any Emily Dickinson poems in it?”

“You're really obsessed with her,” he said, shaking his head.

I started to tell him how she reminded me of Winter, but Miss Fergusson apparently decided she was done with the slack and shushed us from her desk. Detention had begun.

Eddie dug his big coverless book out of his pocket and started reading, and because I had nothing better to do—and
only
because I had nothing better to do—I flipped through
America's Best-Loved Poems
. The book was obviously bogus, because it only had one Emily Dickinson poem, “Hope is the thing with feathers.” Which I already knew by heart but reread anyway.