Hope Is a Ferris Wheel (19 page)

“There's something wrong with you,” Denny whispered to me. I didn't bother answering. “You're acting different.
It's like something really horrible must have happened to you or your sister or something.”

That was surprising. Out of everyone in the whole school, Denny was the one who'd noticed. I almost took back every horrible thing I'd ever said about him, until he added, “It's pathetic.”

The librarian shushed us back into silence.

Denny's mom showed up first—dark-haired and blue-eyed and kind of glare-y, like her son, and with a tattoo on her arm, like her daughter. Denny followed her into the principal's office.

Mom showed up about two minutes later. Obviously she'd been in the middle of getting highlights (to match her lowlights, I guess) because she still had the tinfoil in her hair.

“What is the matter with you?” were the first words out of her mouth. When the librarian shushed her, Mom said, “Are you watching my kid, or are you reading a book? And don't you dare say
both
!” The librarian left her alone after that.

Mom sat down on her heels next to me, but I wouldn't look at her. I only heard her voice—and everything packed inside it: confusion, anger, concern.

“Why are you getting into fights?” she asked, even
though it hadn't even been a real fight. “You're acting like Winter,” she said, even though Winter didn't get into any fights, so how was acting like her a bad thing? “You've been so quiet lately. Why aren't you talking to me?” she asked, and I didn't say a single thing.

A minute later, the principal called us in for a conference or something. I don't think either Denny or I was listening, and we still weren't saying anything.

At one point I heard Denny's mom say, “This is just so abnormal for him,” which made me laugh out loud. The whole office was silent while she glared at me.

The meeting ended with both our moms agreeing that Denny and I would write apology letters to each other. I guess since the principal couldn't get us to talk, he'd make us write. If Denny's eye-roll was any indication, he thought this was as dumb an idea as I did.

Oh, and we were dismissed for the day, which was better than being suspended or expelled, I guess.

“Honestly, Star,” Mom said, walking through the parking lot with her fists jammed into her pockets, “you and your sister are really testing my patience right now. I can't believe you would do this to me. What if you'd been expelled?”

I didn't think anyone had ever been expelled for throwing
food before. I touched my hair, still a little greasy from the mayonnaise, as we got into Gloria's car. Neither of us even bothered picking up the napkins and smocks on our seats.

“I just don't understand how this could happen,” Mom went on. “You're lucky Gloria didn't have to work until one today. I had to ask if I could borrow her car, and I know the whole trailer park heard when I said I needed it because you'd gotten into a food fight. I don't even want to show my face around there anymore.”

It was getting harder and harder for me to keep my mouth shut. I just couldn't believe she was lecturing me, when she'd been lying to me my whole life. She was even doing it now. She never had to ask Gloria if she could borrow the car; Gloria just gave it to her. The more I looked at her, the madder I got, so I turned my head to look out the window and saw Denny and his mom walking to their own car.

She'd
never lied to
him
. I could tell by the way she guided him to their car with her hand on his shoulder. Denny had grown up knowing that Allie wasn't his full brother. Of course, that just made him hate Allie, and now it was making Winter hate me.

I thought maybe I could at least do something for Winter.

Mom was still talking as we pulled into the street, so I
made my voice loud enough to fill the whole car. “You said Winter could go to public school after summer ended.”

“We're not talking about Winter right—”

“It's
November
!” I said, pointing out the window at the shiftless gray clouds that looked like they were on the verge of a downpour. “Maybe if you let Winter back into public school, she wouldn't have so many problems!”

“We're talking about you, Star. What I decide for Winter is none of your business anyway. Besides, you don't know the whole story. You don't know your sister as well as you think you do, and you know nothing about high school. So I think, out of the two of us, I'm the better judge of what's best for her!

“Now, whatever reason you had to throw food at that boy, I'm sure there was a better way you could have resolved it.”

I said nothing, only crossed my arms hard against my chest.

“Well?” Mom asked. “Was there a better way you could have resolved it?”

Maybe it was because pouring that chocolate milk over Denny's head had felt so good, but I couldn't hold back anymore. I needed to say something horrible and mean, so I took Mom's words and turned them around on her. “It's none of your business. You don't know what's best for
me
, and you don't know Denny at all. So, out of the two of us, I'm the better judge of whether I should have thrown food at him!”

I waited for her to yell back. When she didn't, I turned away from the window to see why. Tears trailed down her cheeks from under her glasses.

And I thought,
So what?
She didn't know how much I'd cried because of her. But listening to her breathing through her mouth as she turned up the radio and rolled down the window, almost made me want to apologize, or maybe give her a hug.

Which made me hate her even more.

She was still crying when we pulled into Treasure Trailers. She stopped right at the entrance and got out of the car, and I glanced over at the tinfoil man's trailer. No movement, and the jack-o'-lantern was gone.

Mom didn't get back into the car, and it was running, and Gloria hated that, I knew, because it wasted gas. I looked around for her and found her standing in front of the mailboxes, staring down at some letters in her—

I jumped out of the car, flew over, and grabbed the whole stack from her hands.

There, on the top envelope, was my name.

M
om hadn't shrunk at all, but when she spoke, I could tell she was angrier than ever before. “
What is that?
”

I ran. All the way into the trailer. Where I locked myself in the bathroom. As I ripped open the letter, my hands shaking, Mom's fist hammered against the door. “
Star, you get out here this instant!
”

There was one piece of paper inside the envelope, folded neatly down the middle, just like mine had been. Heart pounding, I unfolded it and read the first line.
Dear Dad
.

And stopped.

And read again.
Dear Dad, This is your daughter, Star Mackie. I'm ten years old now, and in fifth grade.

That was my handwriting, not Dad's. This was my letter, the one I'd sent out last Monday. I threw it down on the bathroom floor and picked up the envelope from my lap, seeing what I should have seen the second I pulled it out of Mom's hands.

It was my envelope. The address in the center was Dad's. I had just been too excited to notice. Stamped across the bottom in big red letters was
RETURN TO SENDER
along with
REASON: REFUSED
.

Mom kept yelling and banging. “Star! Come out right now!”

What did that mean,
REFUSED
? I knew what
refused
meant, but what did
RETURN TO SENDER
, in red, in all capital letters, on an envelope that was supposed to go to my dad, mean?

“Star, please open the door.” Mom's voice was quieter, and I could tell she had started crying again. “Tell me where that letter came from.”

“Tell me what it means,” I said, and I slid the envelope under the door for her. Mom would know. She knew about all that post office stuff. She knew that people actually did work there on Sundays, even though everyone thought the postal service was completely shut down for the day.

“What is it?” Mom asked.

“A letter to my dad,” I said. “My
real
dad.”

“And how did you figure that out?”

“It was on my birth certificate.”

She cursed. As much as she hated Robert, I'd never heard her curse about him.

“Tell me what the ‘Return to Sender' means!” I said.

“Well, that's obvious,” Mom said. The trailer shifted and creaked, and through the crack under the door, I saw her sit down. “When people return something, usually it's because the addressee doesn't live there anymore.”

My heart swelled with hope that set the Ferris wheel spinning again.

“But in this case, Frankie, or maybe his parents, took it to the post office and refused it. Sent it back, unopened. It means he didn't want this letter, Star.” She paused. “And I could have told you that.”

“You never told me anything!” I sank onto the cold toilet seat with my head in my hands, the Ferris wheel slowing to a complete stop. “You lied to me, my whole life. I always thought Dad just didn't care about me, that he loved Winter more. And you let me believe it! Does Frankie even know who I am?”

“Of course he does, Star,” Mom said. “I thought he'd be different from Robert, but he turned out to be even more of a deadbeat.”

“Robert's not a deadbeat. He sent Winter a birthday
card, and you were the one who wouldn't let him talk to her, and—”

“It's easier this way, Star,” Mom said, and I could hear the anger snaking into her voice, could practically hear her shrinking down.

“Easier for
you
!” I shouted back. “What about
us
? What about Winter and me?”

For a few moments, Mom was quiet. Then she said, “Maybe you're right, Star. Maybe it was just easier for me. But just because Robert sent one birthday card doesn't mean he knows how to be a father.”

“But what about the truck?” I said. “He gave her—”

“He gave her a truck that was going to the junkyard anyway,” Mom said. “I tried to talk him out of it. This was back when we were still on speaking terms, before his wife was in the picture and making things even worse.”

In my head, I listed all the things about the pickup that didn't work. Passenger's-side door, radio, air conditioner, heater, window crank, fifth gear. Broken side mirror. How loud it was. Were cars supposed to be that loud? Gloria's wasn't.

“Sometimes I'd ask him for help,” Mom went on. “This was before you were born. Anyway, he'd never call me back, but a few days later there'd be a check in the mailbox.
That's the kind of father Robert is, Star. The kind who throws money at problems until they go away.”

He had given Winter money after she told him she was pregnant. It was weird, now that I think about it; parents are supposed to be mad when that kind of thing happens, but Robert hadn't seemed even the tiniest bit upset.

Did he even care about what happened to Winter?

“What about my dad?” I asked. “What about Frankie?”

“Well, he was a lot like Robert, actually,” Mom said. “Except it was his parents who wrote the checks. He was young, younger than me. He didn't have his own money yet. Probably still doesn't. That's his parents' address here,” she added, sliding the envelope back under the door. “It could have been them that refused it. They didn't like me very much. It has nothing to do with you. They just couldn't live with the fact that their spoiled little boy had knocked up some white-trash girl who already had a kid.”

I picked up the envelope. It felt like nothing in my hands. Because it
was
nothing. I still didn't know who he was, really. “Tell me something good about him.”

She was silent for so long, I was afraid there wouldn't be anything at all, but finally she said, “We took a poetry class together, at the community college. He really liked it, and he was good at it. Sometimes he wrote his own
poems. He said they weren't very good, but he wrote one for me once, and I used to carry it around with me. Not anymore,” she added, quickly. “I shredded it years ago.”

I nodded, even though she couldn't see.

“I can't believe you figured it out,” she said. “I was so careful. And if it makes you feel better, I wasn't just lying to you. I was lying to myself. It's easier to pretend that you're both Robert's than it is to admit that I got pregnant twice by two different guys who didn't care about anyone but themselves. Anyway, I am sorry.”

“Sorry that I found out?”

“Sorry that I screwed up,” she said. “Sorry that I let Winter know who her dad was, but not you. If you really want to, someday, I'll take you to meet him, Star. I owe you that much, at least.”

But I didn't want to meet him. Things had gone so horribly wrong with Robert, and the fact that I was holding a
REFUSED
envelope in my hands told me that things weren't going to go so well with Frankie either.