Betti on the High Wire Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  My Circus Life

  Bad Eyes and Short Toes

  Lucky Snake

  Monkeys and Melons

  The Horrible Unhappy Promise

  The Buckworths and a Boom

  The Last Wave

  Red Teeth and Hot Spots

  The Biggest Bird

  Foreign Goop

  Home Sweet Melon Home

  Moms and Mermaids

  Eggs and Drool

  Leftover Dogs and Plastic People

  Sloppy Slop

  Gobbledygook and a Dress

  Trapped

  Santy Claws and the Fairy with Teeth

  Crazy America

  Summer Six

  Dude and Brown Bag Food

  Roller Derby Lucy

  Another Broken Kid

  Fat Feet and Disco

  The Hiding Place

  Disaster

  Little Traitor and My Trip

  Invasion of My Circus Camp

  My Leftower Friend

  Frankenstein and the Jungle Wars

  Birthday Cake

  Lost in America

  The Best Circus in the World

  A Note from the Autor

  Acknowledgements

  DIAL BOOKS FOR YOUNG READERS

  A division of Penguin Young Readers Group

  Published by The Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014, U.S.A. Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4P 2Y3 (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.)

  Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R ORL, England

  Penguin Ireland, 25 St. Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd)

  Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd)

  Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi - 110 017, India

  Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, North Shore 0632, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd)

  Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R ORL, England

  Copyright © 2010 by Lisa Railsback

  All rights reserved

  The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

  S.A.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Railsback, Lisa.

  Betti on the high wire / by Lisa Railsback.

  cm.

  Summary: Firm in her belief that her missing parents will return to the bombed-out circus camp where she lives with a group of “leftover” children, ten-year-old Babo has no desire to leave her war-torn country.

  eISBN : 978-1-101-43716-2

  [1. Abandoned children-Fiction. 2. People with disabilities—Fiction.

  3. War—Fiction. 4. Conduct of life—Fiction. ] I. Title.

  PZ7.R1287 Be 2010

  [Fic]—dc22 2009040046

  http://us.penguingroup.com

  FOR

  THE GREAT FISH

  My Circus Life

  A bright light shines on the beautiful girl. Everyone is watching as she walks carefully on a line that goes up into the sky. Her mama smiles at the top. Her mama is the Tallest Woman in the World with a Tail. And her dad, the famous Green Alligator Man, waits below. They will catch the beautiful girl if she ever falls. But she never falls, of course. She’s a circus star.

  The audience claps and claps every night and shouts for more. They shout for her to keep going, to go higher, to touch a fancy bird in another sky. The beautiful girl is brave. And they love her because she makes them forget things ... for just a minute or two.

  MOST OF THE leftover kids have nightmares. But me? I dream about the circus.

  My name is Babo.

  The leftover kids call me Big Mouth Babo because I have an opinion—or a Big Mouth story—for just about everything. They like my circus stories best. By now they feel like they practically know the Hairy Bear Boy and the clowns who all have red hair and the Snake Lady and the Teeny-Tiny Puppet Man and the rest.

  They especially love the long story about my mama, the Tallest Woman in the World with a Tail, and my dad, the bumpy Green Alligator Man. This story, I tell them, is absolutely true, and it will definitely have a happy ending once the war cools off and the circus comes back again.

  And the true story about me? Well, my story started when Auntie Moo spotted me alone at the empty circus camp when I was about three. Now I’m about ten, I think. Auntie Moo found me eating lizards and drinking rainwater from the elephant bowl, toddling around just like I owned the place. Pots and pans littered the ground, old makeup was thrown in the dirt, and the canvas circus tents were flaming like a bonfire.

  Auntie Moo named me Babo and the name stuck, and I’ve been at the empty circus camp ever since. She got stuck too, sort of. You can’t exactly leave a toddler toddling around by herself, especially during a war. And before long, more leftover kids were left here, so we were all stuck together.

  I’ve asked Auntie Moo at least a hundred times about what happened to the circus. She says that the soldiers were probably afraid of the circus freaks, so they burned everything down. But while things were burning, three of the soldiers got squished by the elephant, one soldier got chewed by the lion, one got squeezed to death by the big snake, and another got swallowed. And the circus animals and the circus people disappeared.

  That’s why the villagers say our circus camp is haunted.

  They say that circus ghosts are still flying all over the place. They can still hear the circus music floating through the woods on windy nights. Sometimes they think they hear gasps and claps from the audience, and faint, happy singing from the circus people. The villagers won’t visit our circus camp because they’re afraid.

  That’s what happens during a war. Everyone is afraid of everything.

  But I’ve been here forever and I’m not afraid, even though sometimes I hear the old circus music too. I’ll never be afraid because I was here first, so that makes me the leader. I’m the brave one. Besides, there’s nothing left for soldiers to take and nothing left for them to burn. And nobody cares about the leftover kids at the leftover circus camp anyway.

  Nobody except my mama and dad, of course. All I know is that they must’ve left me here because they had to. Because they’d be back to get me any day.

  Bad Eyes and Short Toes

  “PSSST. GEORGE?”

  I was the only one awake when the sun hadn’t started beating down on us yet. We slept in the old lion’s cage because that’s where we could all fit. It was the best animal cage out of all of them because we could see straight up to the sky, so we always knew if something was coming.

  “George! Can you hear it?”

  “Go back to sleep, Babo.”

  George was taking up too much space, like a little pig. His arm flung out to the side and his legs were split like a wishbone. The rest of us were crunched into the corner, as usual. Nine of us, but there used to be ten before the foreigners started coming.

  “It’s another one.”

  “I don’t hear anything, Babo.”

  “George, wake up! I’m sure. There’s another one coming.”

  George rolled over and covered his face with his potato sack. He mumbled something, but I couldn’t understand. George didn’t like mornings, and on this morning, sure enough, it was going to be impossible
to sleep. Because I was right.

  The bars of the lion cage started shaking and the sky was grumbling like a noisy monsoon.

  I covered my ears and pointed up. “See? George, look!”

  George finally sat up and rubbed his eyes with his hand. “Oh!” He jumped to his feet and hiked up his baggy shorts. “You’re right, Babo!” He waved his potato sack in the air like a flag. “It is a plane!”

  The little ones started waving too. Some of them were so excited that they had to jump up and down while the wind was blowing their hair all over the place. “Hallooooo, Foreeenerz. Hallooooo!” they shouted in so-called English. I rolled my eyes. I was the only smart one who knew that you say “hello” and not “hallooo” and that not a single foreigner could hear from so high up in an airplane.

  “Stop waving!” I hollered. “We don’t want them to come here! REMEMBER?”

  The noise was so loud that none of the leftover kids could hear me. Or they didn’t want to hear me. So I shouted again: “STOP! STOP IT! STOP!”

  And finally, that lousy plane was gone. It left a dusty cloudy trail in the sky and George kept staring up and smiling, even though the sun was hitting him straight in the eyes.

  “STOP!” I cried louder, but they had already stopped and everything was already quiet.

  George looked at me with his dark eyes and tilted his head. “Why, Babo?” His potato sack dropped to the floor. “Why don’t you want the foreigners to help us?”

  “You really think the Melons want to help us, George?” The Melons was my very special name for the foreigners. They usually had pink faces, and everyone from my country, especially at the market, tried to squeeze money out of them like juice. I took a deep breath and started pacing back and forth. Being the leader was such a big responsibility. “I already told you. A million times. You think they’re nice?”

  George nodded, a little.

  I laughed dramatically. “George ...”

  George’s eyes got huge and he backed up.

  “Do you understand what happens to leftover kids once they’re in a foreign country? Do you?”

  He shook his head.

  “Well, for one, those countries are always way too big. If you get lost, you’ll never find your way home. Lost forever. And the Melons? They’re so used to getting new things and throwing out old things that they wouldn’t even care if you got lost. That’s what Old Lady Suri at the bean stand said. They’d just get a brand-new kid. Just like that.”

  George gulped.

  “And ... if you say something wrong? If you say ‘horse’ when you mean to say ‘mama’? Do you know what those foreigners do?” I swung around and looked all the kids straight in the eye. They bit at their dirty fingernails and shuffled their feet. “They throw you behind bars!” I pointed at the bars to make my point.

  “Like the lion cage?” asked George in a tiny voice.

  “Worse. Much much worse. They call it ‘zoo,’ and normal Melon kids come and stare at you. And laugh. And you’re locked in forever.” I put my hand over my good eye and bugged out my bad one. I made funny sounds and shook at the bars of the lion cage. “And another thing,” I said, “is if you have a Big Mouth. If you talk too much and tell too many stories and you tell the Melon children all the secrets about the war—or the circus—well, they put your whole face in a square box.”

  “In a box?” squeaked George.

  “They call it a ‘telee-vi-zion.’ It’s scary, George.”

  “They laugh at my face?”

  “I’m afraid so.”

  “You made that up, right?” George tried to follow me back and forth, but he kept running into my heels. “Did you hear that from Old Lady Suri too? That’s just a story, Babo. Right?”

  I shrugged mysteriously.

  George was worried. He crinkled his eyes. “It is, isn’t it?”

  “Maybe. Maybe not. But worst of all, George?” I stopped pacing and thought about things. “Is when they try to turn you into a Melon. Just like them. They take your head and turn it inside out so you can’t even remember who you are.”

  “Inside out? My head?” George itched his head.

  “You’ll walk differently and you’ll dress differently and you’ll eat scary food. Even your face will look different, George. The Melons make you take baths, and they scrub and scrub and scrub you clean until you’re blue and raw and wrinkled like a baby elephant. See, they make you forget everything. They make you forget where your real home is. Even your real parents!”

  Most of the leftover kids couldn’t remember their real parents anyway, but that didn’t matter a bit.

  Just then Auntie Moo rushed over and called, “Hurry, children! We have to hurry! The foreigners are coming today!”

  And that was the end of my important lessons.

  Auntie Moo had been sound asleep by the fire circle when the plane flew over us. She wiped her perfectly clean hands against her faded skirt and said, “I didn’t know they were coming so soon.” She shook her head, and her long gray braid shook too.

  “The Melons?” I groaned. “Not here. Not again.”

  “Babo ...” Auntie Moo gave me a sly smile. She didn’t like my special nickname a bit.

  “I know.”

  “You need to put on your special occasion clothes. We’ll wash the dirt off and comb your hair.”

  The leftover kids forgot my lessons in about one second, because they ran out of the lion cage as if they were about to meet some royal princess. All of them except for George. He was still sitting in the corner. He was upset about zoos and boxes and getting lost.

  And me? I moaned, “But whyyy?”

  “Why, why,” Auntie Moo laughed. “Because, Babo. We want you to have a chance to go to another country. That’s all.”

  “Why would I want to do that?”

  Auntie Moo laid one hand on my shoulder and pointed at the ground with her other hand. I sat down and she sat next to me. “You’ll go to school there,” Auntie Moo explained in her very soft voice. George listened too. “You’ll have a family, Babo, and a home. All sorts of food, and—”

  “A ‘better life,’ I know.” I folded my arms across my chest and kicked my bare heels. “Well, I have a good enough life already. And you’re my school. So I don’t WANT to go!”

  “Babo,” Auntie Moo sighed as usual and brushed hair out of my eyes. “We don’t have much time.”

  Lucky Snake

  THE LEFTOVER KIDS were running around like crazy. They were combing their hair and washing their faces and scrubbing the dirt off their toes. This was their big chance. They wanted to be adopted.

  “Big deal,” I mumbled as I walked to the river with my special occasion dress thrown over my shoulder. My enormous dress was the most special of all. Auntie Moo had found it crunched up in a ball after the soldiers burned the circus camp down. It was sun-faded orange, even though it used to be red. There were holes in the sleeves and around the neck, and the bottom of it was jaggedy with thread strings hanging off like moss. A few tiny silver sparkles barely clung on and glittered when I pretended to be a star in front of the fire circle.

  I held my special occasion dress very, very carefully as I hopped over patches of prickly vines. The Melons could never understand how special it was.

  THE WAR HAS been my country’s bad luck for so long that no one remembers exactly how it started. Things keep getting blown up and rebuilt, and blown up and rebuilt, so we’ve all just gotten used to holey roofs and skeleton walls. Then the war got worse and the foreigners wanted to help. They even want to help us, the leftover children. Or that’s what they say.

  “Wait, Babo. Wait for me!”

  George was running after me as usual. He was just about the slowest runner in the whole world.

  “Can I wash my clothes with you?”

  “Sure.” I shrugged as I reached the bank of the river and kneeled down. “But it’s a big fat waste of our time, George.” I plugged my nose and dipped the sleeve of my dress in the water
. “The Melons won’t adopt us anyway. You know how it is. They always want the pretty children.”

  George plunked himself down next to me. His bottom lip stuck out like he was about to cry. With his special occasion shirt in his hand, George tried to see his face in the murky water. The water was even dirtier than usual because our village hadn’t had any rain for a month; the pigs and the people still had to wash in it, rain or no rain.

  “That’s just the way it is,” I told him. “They want the children who have all their fingers and toes.”

  “What about Sela, Babo? She got adopted. She was one of us.”

  “Sela was a pretty one. The foreigners loved her pretty curls, remember? And her eyes? She didn’t have a single thing wrong with her, George. Prettier than all of us put together. Remember?”

  George nodded and we were quiet. He dunked his whole shirt in the water and swished it back and forth.

  We know we aren’t the pretty ones.

  Both of my eyes are the color of smoke or a gray rainy day. But one of them doesn’t work. It stares off like a washed-up fish. I’m also missing my big toe on one foot and my baby toes on both. No one notices my missing toes very often because my toes are dirty and people probably just think I have little feet. Besides, most people in our country are missing at least one finger or toe, so I’m not strange.

  Auntie Moo said I’d be fine without all my toes. The only reason I’d need them, she said, was if I lost both of my hands and would need to write urgent messages with my toes. I hope this will never happen.

  My hair is a funny color—a mishmash of colors, really—and it goes crazy every morning and flies all over the place. Sister Baroo from the Mission grumbles and swears when she tries to comb my hair for the foreigners. She says that my hair is way too wild, but Auntie Moo says that it’s very unique. I say that only circus people have hair like mine.