Hope Is a Ferris Wheel (12 page)

The first thing I said to Mom when I got off was, “Who was that man?”

She hesitated for a second. Maybe she thought I hadn't seen him. “Your father.”

“Where did he go?” I asked.

“He had to leave. I'm sorry, Star, but I knew you really wanted to ride the Ferris wheel.”

The Ferris wheel! Of course I'd wanted to ride the Ferris wheel—I was six! But I wanted to see my dad more. Mom should have known. I could have ridden the Ferris wheel anytime, but that was my one chance to meet Dad. It's weird: I didn't feel so bad about it while we were at the fair, aside from throwing up on the Gravitron, but as soon as we got ready to go home, I began to cry.

Winter tried to make me feel better by saying that he hadn't said much anyway. And that he was old and smelled kind of like rubber.

It did make me feel a little better. And when we got to the car, I leaned down to smell one of the tires so I'd know what he might smell like. Besides, the way Mom had always talked about him, it never seemed like he cared about me at all, so I tried hard to not care about him either.

But since then he'd hoped I was doing well. And I hoped that he would be happy to see me.

“So,” I said, at the end of my story, “hope is a Ferris wheel, because you can be far away from something, really wanting it, and the wheel can bring you closer. And sometimes you can step right off, but sometimes the wheel doesn't stop spinning, and you keep moving around and around in a circle. But you never lose sight of what you
want.” Even though I had lost sight of Dad that day, I thought that was pretty fitting.

Everyone nodded after I finished. I looked over at Langston, and he had another piece of paper. Guess what he was drawing.

We read a few more Emily Dickinson poems, which Langston said all sounded the same. Eddie smirked at me, and I knew he was smirking about his stupid
America's Best-Loved Poems
. But I smirked right back, because I'd taken charge of my club.

And now I could convince other people to join.

Star Mackie

October 23

Week 6 Vocabulary Sentences

STILL NOT TURNING THESE IN!

NOT NOW, NOT EVER!

1. I have
accumulated
a lot of sentences so far. By the time I get to the end of these, I will have
accumulated
sixty sentences! (Even more! Because usually I write more than one sentence for each word, despite the instructions.)

2. I am
deliberately
not turning them in, but they're still fun to do. The best part will always be throwing them away, though.

3. Which is a little sad, considering all the time I'm
forfeiting
just to do them. All the time it takes to look up the words and make sure they're alphabetical and think of the best way to put them in a sentence—I could be doing a million other, better things.

4. Like planning my club. Next week's meeting is
looming
, and I still don't know what I'm going to do to keep everyone interested and stop them from interrupting
just because they think they know more than I do.

5. And by everyone, I mean the four other people in the club, the club that was supposed to be a lot more
prosperous
than it turned out to be.

6. And I just spent ten minutes looking up the word
quagga
, and it's a zebra. Wait! It's an extinct zebra. When am I ever going to use—okay, fine. I rode a
quagga
to school in South Africa two hundred years ago when that was still possible.

7. All that time spent looking up
quagga
could have been spent packing for our trip on Saturday. We're going all the way to Oregon, and we're finally going to see Dad. What I've packed is
scant
. I'd like to bring all sorts of things, but we can't fit much in the truck. So what should I bring to show him?

8. I can't bring
trinkets
. I should bring something really important instead. Something that will let Dad know what I'm like. I have to pick out an outfit, too. Something clean without any holes.

9. So it is nice to do these sentences, to be able to write everything out and keep myself off the
verge
of panicking.

10. But I'm still not turning these in, even after spending all this time on them, because that is my
wont
, and I don't think it will ever change.

I
t took me forever to get my Dad bag packed, and I ended up packing hardly anything. Just a couple of homework papers and projects I got stars on, and my Emily Dickinson poem—the one Jared said sucked. I'm pretty sure Dad will like it better.

I spent Friday's detention making a list of things I wanted to talk to Dad about, like my club (hopefully he'll have some good advice), and how Mr. Savage is a terrible teacher, and what Mom was like when she was younger. Maybe he can tell me how they met, because Mom won't tell me anything except that they went to community college together.

Other than that, detention was pretty dull, and even if
I wanted to talk to Eddie, he was working on some math paper the whole time. Miss Fergusson gave him a big smile when he turned it in at the end of detention, but I'm not sure he noticed. He caught up with me in the hallway and asked if I'd read any other poems yet.

“I've been busy,” I told him.

“Oh, okay,” Eddie said, and I thought that's what he really meant and that he'd drop the whole poem thing, but a couple of steps later he started to recite this poem from memory. It was short and kind of funny, but it didn't make any sense. He said it was by someone named
Gwendolyn Brooks and asked me what I thought.

“I think Emily Dickinson wrote two thousand poems,” I said. “I think if we do one poem a week, we'll be set for life.”

We were almost to the front steps, when Eddie put a hand on my shoulder and shoved me a little bit. Not enough to knock me over, just enough to steer me into the edge of the hallway.

“What was that for?” I asked.

“For being so stubborn,” he said. “Is that why you're in detention? I've been wondering, 'cause it's not like you're a bad kid or anything.”

I said it was none of his business why I was in detention, and he muttered, “Yup, I knew it.”

We sat down on the steps, and Eddie started another poem. This one was by Robert Frost, and it was almost as good as one of Emily Dickinson's poems, but when I told Eddie that, he said, “I hate Robert Frost.”

“Then why did you even recite it?”

“Because I knew you'd like it, since you have the worst taste in poetry,” he said, and I felt like shoving
him
just a little bit, enough to knock him down a step.

Langston appeared then, plopping down right next to me and saying, “Hey, Mullet.” I wondered if he even remembered my name.

While Eddie recited some more poems, Langston used a wood chip to chisel the dried mud out of the lugs of his boots. At one point he asked me how long my fingernails were and if I would mind trying to dig into this one little crack in his sole, because he was pretty sure there was a rock there, and he'd do it himself except he had a bad habit of eating his fingernails. Eating his fingernails.
Eating his fingernails
.

I used my pencil instead. Langston asked if eating fingernails was one of those things that boys did that girls did not like, and I looked him right in his sunken eyes and said, “
Yes
.”

When I finally got home, I couldn't believe it was 5:30. But the microwave said it, and so did the clock on the wall,
and so did the answering machine when I checked the messages. I even asked Mom and Gloria, who were sitting at the built-in table talking about some girls they'd gone to high school with, and they both said the same thing.

I just couldn't believe I'd spent a whole hour sitting on the steps with Eddie and Langston, talking.

Why couldn't they be people I actually wanted to be friends with?

W
hile Mom made dinner, something noodle-y with bell peppers and carrots, I checked on my Dad bag, which I'd hidden under my bed. It felt like something was missing. What else was I supposed to bring? Since Mom had never taken us on a Dad trip, I had no idea. I tossed in my club notebook, in case Dad had any ideas for it, and, at the last second, Eddie's big red poetry book. I was determined to find a poem, a good poem, so that he would have to take back what he'd said about my taste in poetry.

“Do you have a favorite poem?” I asked Mom as she dumped a Gloria-sized portion onto my plate.

She chewed on the end of her wooden spoon for a
moment, then she said, “‘Two roads diverged in a yellow wood …' ”

“No, no,” I told her. “That won't work.”

“What about ‘ The Raven'?” Gloria said. “‘Said the raven, Gimme more!' Isn't that how it goes?”

“That doesn't sound like a good poem,” I said, and then I told them both to forget about it, but of course they didn't, and they just came up with one bad poem after another, their laughter shaking the table. Luckily Winter came home a few minutes later.

“Ah, Winter graces us with her presence,” Gloria said.

“Don't you have an appointment to go ruin somebody's hair?” Winter said back to her. Then, letting her backpack fall to the floor, she turned to Mom. “I was thinking maybe I could take Star to the redwoods park tomorrow.”

“Redwoods,” Mom scoffed. “You know we had redwoods in Oregon? California acts like they own all the redwoods in the world.” We'd never visited the redwoods when we lived in Oregon, but I think sometimes Mom likes ragging on California the way the rest of us do.

“So can we go?” Winter asked.

“I don't know why you're asking me,” Mom said, dropping her fork on the table. “Usually you just do whatever you want, and I find out about it later.” Which was unfair, because if Winter was doing whatever she wanted, she'd
be sneaking off to the public high school every day.

Still, I hoped Winter would not start a fight with Mom. An angry Mom would not let us go anywhere tomorrow, and we'd be stuck inside with nothing but Gloria's rented copy of
Beverly Hills, 90210: The Third Season
.

Winter swallowed, took a breath, and said, “Well, I apologize. May we please go to the redwoods tomorrow?”

Mom stuffed a forkful of noodles into her mouth and chewed slowly. We all watched her throat bob as she swallowed. “Fine.”

I smiled at Winter, and she smiled right back before heading straight for the fridge. “I made this vegetarian, you know,” Mom told her, but Winter said she really wanted a grilled cheese sandwich and asked if there were any pickles. We only had the sweet kind that Winter and I hate, but she ate some anyway.

Once I was done eating, and after Mom went to walk Gloria back to her trailer, I checked my Dad bag one last time. “Is there anything else I should bring?” I asked Winter. I wanted to bring him our whole trailer. I wanted him to see all the things he'd missed for the last ten years.

“It's not like we're gonna stay overnight,” Winter told me. “Just bring yourself. That's what I'm doing.”

So I zipped up my bag and put it in the truck and worked on my outfit. I had a couple of clean skirts but figured the
black one would be best so I could match Winter. And I grabbed the one shirt I owned that Mom had bought at a department store clearance sale instead of at St. Vincent's, along with my least-frayed pair of tights.

But my combat boots were a problem. They were so old and scuffed. I reached under my bed for the high-tops Mom had bought for me. They really did look almost new. I put them on, just to try out, and, yup, they still made my feet look flat. Maybe Dad was like me and would like the combat boots better. Even if they weren't as new.

I put the boots with the rest of my outfit and chucked the high-tops back under my bed, making sure Mom wasn't watching. And then there was nothing left to do but wait for tomorrow to hurry up and get here.