“You’re bossy, Betti,” said Lucy. “These are
my
dolls, not yours. Jimmy Dale goes to the beach, see? He gets tan.”
“It is game. Do you want to play? Or not.”
“Yeah, but . . . I don’t want to burn my house.”
I gathered all of her dolls under the tent except for Jimmy Dale. “Your Melon soldier has gun. But we are all mermaids.”
George knew the English words “soldier” and “gun.” In our real language he said, “Some soldiers are nice, Babo.”
I sighed. “This is
my
game. This is
my
country.”
“Your country is scary!” Lucy crossed her arms against her chest.
After I taught George what a mermaid was, he waved Jessie Lynn up and down as if she was diving in and out of the river. I made mine swim too. We flew our dolls all over the place, through the air and over the bed. Then George skipped off to the bathroom. When he ran back into my yellow room, Jessie Lynn and her wedding dress were dripping wet from swimming in the sink. George laughed like crazy.
“Now ... all of circus people mermaids swim away. Saved.”
“Banana,” said George in English, meaning to say “fish.” George made his hand into a big fish. “Soldier be eat.” His hand ate Jimmy Dale in about one second and George threw the doll over his shoulder.
“And the ghosts in sky . . .” I said dramatically, “scare soldier. Forever.”
George and I danced around my bedroom making “whoooo whoooo” ghost sounds. We jumped up on the bed and waved our arms around.
“NO!” shouted Lucy. “I HATE this game! I—”
George and I shook the blanket tent up and down and Lucy got caught under it. She flailed her legs and let out the loudest piercing screechy scream! It shook the house and made Rooney put his paw over his head.
Perfect.
If Lucy hated me—and my scary ghost games—she’d tell the Buckworths and they’d send me back to my country. Immediately.
She kept screaming and was wildly dashing out of my room, when . . .
She crashed into Mr. Buckworth. He stood in my open bedroom door chuckling. Mr. Buckworth probably thought we were having so much fun together, that I was teaching Lucy so many important things.
“I SCARE LUCY!” I cried.
Mr. Buckworth looked at Lucy and then at me. “Did you get scared, Luce?”
Lucy shrugged. “Nah. We were just playing. It was fun.”
I sighed.
And Lucy forgot about horrible me, and my horrible games in about one second, because Mr. Buckworth had something hidden behind him. “Guess what, kids?” he said with a sly smile. “I have a little surprise!”
There were way too many surprises in America.
“What IS IT?” Lucy shouted, jumping up and down like crazy.
Then Mrs. Buckworth walked up behind Mr. Buck-worth. She saw Mr. Buckworth’s surprise first and gasped. “Larry, no! Not
another
one!”
It was a dog. Another one.
Mr. Buckworth told us that he had stopped at the store to pick up something for the special food that Mrs. Buckworth was going to make. “I couldn’t just leave her there, could I? She looked so sad. All by herself. Just look at her!”
We all looked at her. I’d never seen such an ugly dog. She had big bald spots all over her chunky body, and crooked chewed ears, and one blue eye and one black eye. Mr. Buckworth put the dog on my bed, where she started to scratch like crazy until flakes of dry skin and patches of fur flew off.
“She’s so CUTE!” squealed Lucy.
“CYOOOT!” cried George.
Which must’ve been the word for very, very ugly.
Mrs. Buckworth sighed. “Larry, we need another dog like we need a hole in the head.”
“Just until we find her a good home—”
“And this one looks sick!”
“See? That’s why I couldn’t leave her outside the grocery store.” Mr. Buckworth shook his head and flicked dog hair off his fancy suit. “She’s just a sad little sick puppy.”
“Larry,” said Mrs. Buckworth with her hands on her hips, “that dog is at least fifteen years old. She is not a puppy. She is an elderly grandma!”
I didn’t understand what an old dog had to do with a hole in the head, but just then the ugly dog jumped off my bed, squatted on my floor, and made a yellow spot. Ew.
“Let’s call her Puddles!” cheered Lucy.
“Putdes!” repeated George.
Mrs. Buckworth sighed. She pointed out my bedroom door and told Mr. Buckworth to take
his
new dog outside so
his
new dog could learn to use the bathroom. Mr. Buckworth led the parade, with Rooney and Puddles and Lucy and George running after him.
Mrs. Buckworth went to the window in my room. She pulled back one side of the cloth covering the window and I pulled back the other. Mr. Buckworth was trying to get Puddles to sit, and finally Puddles sat and peed on Mrs. Buckworth’s purple flowers. George was running around the backyard hollering WOOF WOOF. Lucy was trying to get Rooney to jump over an empty swinging seat, but Rooney wanted to itch his ear with his paw. Mrs. Buckworth looked at me and sighed.
She explained that Mr. Buckworth had a little problem with saving animals. He was the Vice President of a bank, but he would really prefer being the Vice President of a home for lost dogs.
That’s when I thought: This is bad. Very, very bad. If the Buckworths saved an ugly elderly lost dog, and didn’t send her back to the grocery store, I was never going to get sent home.
Sloppy Slop
WE PLAYED OUTSIDE all day.
Mr. and Mrs. Buckworth pushed George and Lucy and me in the swinging seats, and I felt like I was going to shoot straight over their house and into the sky. George squealed like a flying baby monkey.
There was also this game we played called something like “hide-and-squeak.” I squatted and hid in the bushes. When Lucy found me, I danced around like a ghost and squeaked and squeaked, but she wasn’t even a bit scared this time. She just giggled.
I didn’t know if it was a good thing or a bad thing to be “it,” but when Mr. Buckworth was it, and he found me, he let out a roar that almost made me jump out of my flip-flops. I screamed like crazy and ran around the Buckworths’ yard.
I forgot all about being bad. I wanted to swing on the seats. I wanted to play hide-and-squeak.
We started to play this Melon game called “bad mitten” where Mr. Buckworth put up a net, and told us we had to hit a birdy. George’s bottom lip stuck out and he said he didn’t want to hit a birdy, when suddenly Lucy started sniffing with her nose in the air. Then George and Mr. Buckworth and I sniffed too. It was a very funny smell. Coming from the kitchen.
“Ew,” said Lucy. “Pew. PU.”
Lucy plugged her nose, so George plugged his nose too. “Pee You,” said George, which must’ve been the Melon words for rotten vegetables that had been trampled by pigs during a drought. That’s when Mrs. Buck-worth called us inside for a special dinner.
“MY NAME MISTER Buckworth,” said Mrs. Buckworth.
George and I raised our eyebrows at each other. He covered his mouth with his hand.
“Me name . . . is Larry,” tried Mr. Buckworth. “Me love . . . dog.”
Mrs. Buckworth snorted.
Then George’s mommy spoke: “My baby’s name . . . George. He ... beautiful.”
George puffed out his chest and beamed while I scrunched my eyes at him. He was way too old to be a baby. And
beautiful
?
“I am . . . a . . . cockroach?” said Mrs. Buckworth, flipping through the pages of the big book. George tilted his head and I made a little groan. We had no idea what Mrs. Buckworth was trying to say.
Mr. Buckworth thought really hard and itched the top of his head. “I have ... bug hairy hair,” he spit out. I bit my tongue and George laughed like crazy because he couldn’t help it.
George’s mommy and the Buckworths were trying to learn some words in our language.
“At least they’re trying, Babo,” said George quietly.
At least they were trying. Even if they sounded like three-year-olds from our country. With bad brains.
Unfortunately, Mrs. Buckworth was also trying to make food from our country. She found a recipe in the big book on the living room table, which was also where she found the language lessons.
We stared at the pretty bowl that Mrs. Buckworth put on the table. What was inside the bowl wasn’t pretty at all. Brown mush. Enough for about twenty leftover kids.
“Vomit,” said Lucy.
“Vahmitt,” repeated George.
Which must’ve been the word for pig sloppy slop in a bowl.
We all put a glob of it on our plates.
“You guys actually eat this stuff every day?” Lucy asked George and me, scrunching up her whole face. “Don’t you even mix it with sugar? Or jelly? Or anything?”
George and I shrugged and looked down at our bowls as Mr. Buckworth raised his glass and announced, “This is a toast to Betti and George! To your new lives in America!”
I scanned the table for cooked bread toes, but didn’t see a single piece. There was only mush.
“A toast to Betti and George!” cheered Mrs. Buck-worth and George’s mommy. “We’re so happy you’re here!”
“Me too,” said Lucy. “’Cause Betti likes to play with me.”
I sighed.
Rooney licked George’s hand under the table and Puddles stood up and howled. Everyone clinked glasses together, so I clinked mine too.
George’s mommy was the first to pick up her spoon. She tried a bite. “Mmmm, very tasty.” She puckered her lips together and her eyes grew huge.
Then Mr. Buckworth tried it. “Mmmm.” His eyes darted under the table in search of a dog. “Good work, honey! Mmm-hmm.”
I tried a bite. George and Lucy did too.
We all put our spoons down and drank some milk.
Lucy glared at me like the sloppy slop was my fault. “Ick, Betti,” she said. “This is totally gross.”
“Ick.” I thanked the ghosts for my sloppy slop, even though it was totally “gross.” Which must’ve been the word for strange foods that made people’s fingernails turn orange.
Mrs. Buckworth finally tasted a spoonful and said, “Hmmm. Well ... it is very interesting, isn’t it?” The rest of us nodded, while Mrs. Buckworth smiled at me hopefully. Usually I ate everything on my banana leaf plate. Every single bite.
Sister Baroo told us that we should always eat everything—never waste—because someday we might be starving. We had to store up, just like camels had to store water so they wouldn’t die in the desert. But with Mrs. Buckworth’s special dish I really didn’t want to be a camel.
George and I looked at each other as my stomach growled at me. Even though George is weird he’s still the one who understands everything. Neither of us had the guts to tell Mrs. Buckworth that we’d never seen that mush before in our whole lives. No one was crazy enough to eat that stuff in our country.
“BETTI? IT’s TIME for your bath now, sweetie.”
George and his mommy had just left after the gross vomit dinner. And Lucy and I had just finished our important job of carrying dishes from the table to Mrs. Buckworth, who was washing them.
I dropped three dirty napkins and a fork on the floor. “I take my bath with pigs.”
Mrs. Buckworth laughed. “We don’t have pigs here in the house, Betti, but—”
“I bath in my river.”
Mrs. Buckworth’s smile faded, just a little. “We have a bathtub here, Betti. You’re going to take a bath in the bathtub.”
I picked at a hole in my circus dress. “I bath in my dress.”
“I’ll wash your dress afterward. I’ll get it really clean, okay?”
“I wash my dress.” I knocked my flip-flops together. “On rocks.”
Mr. Buckworth stood up from the eating table. “Come on, little tiger.” He held my hand and started to lead me to the bathroom.
“It’s really not so bad, Betti.” Mrs. Buckworth sounded worried, so it was probably very, very bad.
Mrs. Buckworth didn’t understand anything.
And neither did Mr. Buckworth. Before I knew it, he picked me up in his big hairy bear arms, and chuckled as he bounced me up and down and held me over his shoulder like a sack of potatoes.
Mrs. Buckworth followed and so did Lucy, who was skipping behind us as if this was the most interesting thing that had ever happened at the Buckworths’ house.
I grabbed on to the bathroom door as tightly as I could but my fingers slipped.
And that’s when I starting kicking, just like a little tiger. “I—DO NOT—WANT—BATH!” I accidentally pulled out a few pieces of Mr. Buckworth’s copper coin hair. I bugged out my good eye and made the biggest meanest growl I could straight at Lucy.
Lucy stopped in her tracks and her giggling stopped immediately. “Mom,” she whimpered in a tiny voice.
As Mr. Buckworth set me down and left the bathroom, Mrs. Buckworth put her arm around me and rubbed my back. “I’m so sorry if you don’t like this at first, Betti, but you really do need to take a bath.”
At the circus camp no one cared that I smelled because everyone smelled and that’s the way things were. I used to bathe in the river once a week, of course, just like the pigs. But Mrs. Buckworth said that here little girls bathe every single day because it is summer, and summer is hot, and it is not good to smell.
“I LIKE to DIRTY!” I cried. “I LIKE to SMELL!”
In less than about one second Mrs. Buckworth had pulled my dress over my head and removed my flip-flops and my ratty underwear, and had lowered me into the horrible water trough bathtub. “In you go, my dear.”
None of them understood that I didn’t want to be scrubbed until I was blue and raw and wrinkled like a baby elephant. And I definitely couldn’t take off my circus dress. If my circus dress got stolen I’d have nothing left. If it was washed, the circus camp would be washed away. That’s when I reached over the edge and whisked my circus dress off the floor. I held it over my head and squeezed it and wouldn’t let go.