Betti on the High Wire Read online

  I took baths too, because the water was very warm and clean. And so far I hadn’t turned raw and wrinkled and blue. A few baths couldn’t hurt anything. On my fourth day in America I even sang a long, sad song in the bathtub about the war in my country and how it never stopped.

  After my bath, Mrs. Buckworth tried to comb out my hair nice and straight in front of the bathroom mirror. “Would you like ponytails, Betti? Like Lucy?” asked Mrs. Buckworth. Lucy’s hair stuck out both sides of her head like red horns. Pony tails. But my hair is very unique, that’s what Auntie Moo says. Circus hair. So I said no to Mrs. Buckworth because I didn’t want to look like a pony or a tail or a Melon.

  On my fifth day in America, Mr. Buckworth took George and me shopping. He was supposed to be the Vice President somewhere, but Mr. Buckworth said that he would much rather be riding around with George and me than sitting behind a “big old boring desk, at a boring bank, with boring bank people.”

  Instead, Mr. Buckworth liked to point at things as we were driving around in the wagon.

  “Do you see that, kids? That’s called a bicycle. We’re going to get you one soon, Betti, okay? And look, there’s a house in the tree! It’s called a ‘tree house.’ Kids climb into it, see? For fun.”

  George and I nodded. A bicycle. A tree house.

  Mr. Buckworth was driving very slowly, like Big Uncle in his taxi, so lots of cars zoomed by us and honked. He waved out his window at a woman rolling a baby on wheels. After we drove by, Mr. Buckworth said, “That baby looks sort of like a monkey, wouldn’t you say, kids?”

  He also pointed out a skateboard and a stop sign and a motorcycle driven by a woman in a striped hard hat. A garden and a park and some ducks quacking around a pond.

  “Quack quack,” said George.

  A mailman. A mailbox. A dog peeing on a mailbox. George and I giggled.

  “Look there, kids.” Mr. Buckworth pointed. “That’s called a porch.”

  I looked up at the tilted porch in front of the tilted house.

  I saw the very same girl who’d been reading a book on the porch when I first came to America. The girl who was maybe a circus girl, even if she was a Melon. This time the girl was building a tower in a tall jungle of grass that came up to her waist. It was a tower made out of pots and pans and rusty cans and who knows what else. She looked up at me and I waved, because I didn’t know what else to do. She waved back and her hand stayed there, just like that. Then her tower crashed down and got buried in grass.

  That’s when something rang in Mr. Buckworth’s pocket that nearly made me jump out of my circus dress. “Hello?” said Mr. Buckworth, talking into the little magic thing.

  “Hi. Halloo,” answered George.

  Actually, Mr. Buckworth was talking to himself. He asked himself questions and then he waited and answered himself.

  George and I looked at each other and shrugged. Crazy.

  “Sorry, kids,” said Mr. Buckworth. “That was just boring business.”

  Americans seemed very, very busy doing busy-ness, zooming around, talking to themselves, even though I wasn’t sure exactly what anyone was doing. I poked the side of Mr. Buckworth’s seat so he’d stop itching his head and talking to himself.

  As Mr. Buckworth was parking the wagon, I asked if this was his village market. He said yes. Sort of.

  Once a week Auntie Moo would walk down to the market, and all the leftover kids would follow behind like ducks. It was our favorite day of the whole week. People came from everywhere to sell vegetables and meats and sweets. Once Auntie Moo had her bag of oats stolen at the market from a man who poked her in the back.

  And me? Usually I listened to Old Lady Suri tell long stories about the Melons and America at her bean stand.

  “Little funny one,” she’d say to me in her crackly old voice as she chewed on a big hunk of tobacco, “our people leave this country and never come back. They just disappear.” Old Lady Suri shook her head as she shook her beans. Her hundred-year-old hands plucked out the dirt and crawly bugs. “It makes our ghosts very upset, you see. That is why our country stays haunted with bad luck.”

  “Are you guys hungry?” asked Mr. Buckworth. George and I nodded, but we were always hungry, so that didn’t mean much. Mr. Buckworth took us to a special part of the market where they gave food to people who sat in plastic orange chairs at shiny blue tables.

  “Is food free?” I asked.

  “Well, yes,” replied Mr. Buckworth. “You don’t have to pay for it, Betti. You don’t have to worry about that, okay?”

  I was worried, but not for long, because soon food was on the plastic table in front of George and me. We each had a cardboard box with pictures of funny monsters. French fry, Coca-Cola, hot dog, Mr. Buckworth told us as I gobbled up the french fry and drank the free Coca-Cola.

  I stared at my hot dog. It was probably a tail. Rooney and Puddles were okay. For Melon dogs. They came outside with me at night and listened very carefully to my stories. I didn’t think it was very nice to eat a cooked dog, but George didn’t care. He stuffed mine in his mouth in about one second.

  When Mr. Buckworth went to get more free Coca-Cola, a Melon woman walked by. She looked at me, and then at my bad eye. She tried to look away, but she had to look at my bad eye again—a sad second look—as if I’d just exploded in a puff of smoke. I bugged out my eye at her to make her really scared, and then dumped a whole bunch of french fry in my orange bag. George and I had to store up in case Mrs. Buckworth wanted us to eat more mush. And ... I had to save lots of food for the important day we’d run away.

  Inside each of our boxes was a tiny plastic toy with green teeth and a head that bobbled back and forth. George and I poked the heads of our new toys over and over again.

  As it turned out, Melons had about a hundred village markets.

  There were markets for coffee and markets for ice cream and markets for flowers and markets for toys. We stopped at a market that was just for Rooney and Puddles and bought them food, and then we stopped at an enormous market with nothing but people food.

  Crazy.

  In the people food market, giant icy coolers held mysterious frozen foods with pretty pictures. Lines of shelves held all sorts of other shiny foods that I’d never seen in my life. Mr. Buckworth would walk down a row and throw things in a big metal cart on wheels as George and I stood frozen in the same exact place staring at all the food.

  American food didn’t look like food because it was hidden in a box or in a plastic wrapper or in a can. Old Lady Suri at the bean stand would’ve been very upset to see her beans in a can. The chicken didn’t look anything like a chicken because there were no feathers, and the vegetables had no bruises and bugs.

  When Mr. Buckworth was busy itching his head about which box of milk to buy, and a kid stopped to stare at George’s missing arm, I grabbed George’s hand and whisked him around the corner. “Let’s go, George.”

  “Where are we go—”

  That’s when we almost crashed into the girl. The same girl who’d been building the falling-down tower.

  “Oh sorry,” she said, and threw a can of something into her almost empty cart.

  “That is ... okay,” I said.

  She tripped on nothing and pushed her crooked pink glasses back up on her nose. I watched as she kept rolling her enormous cart down the aisle, looking up at the tall towers of food.

  I turned back to George. “Now, you are Big Uncle.”

  “I am?”

  “Yes.” I found an empty cart and pushed it over to George. “And you are driving your Chevy taxi, as usual.” George wheeled it back and forth with his hand. He stood on the back of the cart and made “achoo-achoo” sounds like the taxi’s sick horn.

  “Suddenly,” I said dramatically, “your taxi hits a hot spot. Your tire explodes. BOOM!”

  I knocked the cart into a pile of boxed food on a stand. It teetered and so did George.

  “So you need a new job. But you don’t care. You hate your taxi.
You want to join the circus. You want to sell snacks like the black bottom monkeys. Coca-Cola and hot dog and french fry. ‘Cause food is free.” I took a box of something and a can of something off a shelf and stuck it in the new “backpack” that George’s mommy had bought for him.

  “It is?” George scrunched his eyes. “Are you sure, Babo?”

  “In America it’s free. You saw that girl? That food in her big basket? She’s a kid, like you and me.”

  George nodded.

  “So you don’t have to worry.” I spotted a plastic bag of noodle snakes and stuck it in my orange bag. “The leftover kids and Big Uncle are sick of being skin-’n’bones skinny. In the circus you can be fat and full. Like Melons.”

  “Big Uncle is hungry.” George poked his bony belly. He took more bags and cans and boxes off the shelf and stuffed them in his backpack. “Are kookies free too, Babo?”

  “Kookies? Of course.”

  We immediately started searching for cookies. But it was hard to tell what was a cookie or not a cookie. Just as I was reaching into my orange bag for some of Mrs. Buckworth’s leftover cookies, a big fat man in a uniform reached out and touched my shoulder. Mr. Buckworth touched George’s backpack. Both of us jumped. When we drove home in the wagon Mr. Buckworth explained that food in America is definitely not free.

  “PETTY YOU’RE NOT going to starve here ...” said the Buckworths that night. “We’re not sure ... what you and George had to do in your country ... survive ... It’s not okay to steal. Ever ... If you want something ... ask us, okay? We won’t always be able to ... give it to you ... we’ll try ... have to believe ... take care of you, sweetie ...”

  Lucy got bored with Mr. and Mrs. Buckworth’s gobbledygook and said, “She understands already, Mom. Stealing is bad, Betti.”

  I nodded my head a whole bunch of times. “Stealing is bad. I am very, very, very bad.”

  Stealing was probably so bad that the Buckworths would ship me back immediately to the circus camp, but not on a ship. On a big bird airplane.

  But before the Buckworths could even think about how horrible I was, Lucy said, “Dad, will you please tell us a story now?” She tilted her head and her ponytails tilted too. “In your bed?” And before Mr. Buckworth could answer, Lucy took my hand and led me to the Buckworths’ big bedroom where we crawled into their big bed.

  I loved stories! One story would be okay. The Buckworths didn’t have to ship me off right away.

  The dogs lay down on the floor. Mr. Buckworth got into bed on one side and Mrs. Buckworth sat up next to me on the other side. Lucy and I were smooshed between them like a hot dog or a cookie. It was almost like the circus camp, with all the leftover kids squished right up against me. But the Buckworths were Melons and we were in America.

  “It’s a slumber party!” squealed Lucy.

  So Mr. Buckworth started telling Lucy and me a story from a book. It was about some poor girl who was a maid a long, long time ago.

  “Is she a mermaid?” I asked.

  “No, she’s a girl, Betti.” Lucy showed me a picture. “She’s all dirty cause she cleans out the fireplace and dusts and stuff.”

  “Her name,” Mr. Buckworth read dramatically, “is Cinderella.”

  “Is she a lion?” I asked. “Half a girl and half a lion? Named Cindi?”

  Lucy turned to me, scrunched her eyes, and gave my arm a poke with her little finger. “Cinderella is just a plain old girl, Betti. Shhh.”

  So basically the rest of Mr. Buckworth’s story from a book went like this: a Royal Prince came to Cindi’s door with an invitation to a Royal Party at a Royal Palace. Cindi really wasn’t invited because she was poor and dirty. But Cindi snuck in anyway because a ghost gave her special occasion clothes and shoes. She danced and danced with the Prince, until she tripped and her shoe flew off somewhere. The Prince came to Cindi’s door with the missing shoe and he liked her shiny special occasion shoe so much that they got married. The Royal Prince was happy. The ghost was happy.

  “But why does Cindi want to be Royal Princess and live in Royal Palace?” I asked. “It is lonely.”

  Lucy sighed. “Because. She can have anything she wants. The Prince saved her.”

  “Can circus people live there too? And the animals too?”

  “No. It’s a palace, Betti. A palace.”

  Mr. Buckworth chuckled and closed his book. “So they lived happily ever after. Blah blah blah. The end.”

  “Now off to bed, girls,” said Mrs. Buckworth. “Go on.”

  But Lucy already had her eyes closed. She let out a snort like a sleeping cow. Then she elbowed me under the covers, so I closed my eyes and let out a snort too.

  Mrs. Buckworth sighed. “Just tonight, girls. You can sleep here tonight only.” Soon the light went out and everyone was quiet.

  From the dark I said, “I believe that ... only American girls get saved.”

  MY EMPTY BOOK.

  Summer Six

  SUMMER IS THE best time of the whole year in America, because school is over and there’s nothing to do. That’s what Lucy told me after I’d been in America for a whole week.

  “Sometimes I get bored, and sometimes I get in trouble,” she said as we were walking on the white cement called “side walk.” It didn’t look like she was walking sideways to me. She told her mom that we definitely wanted to walk to Day Camp alone. No adults allowed. So Mr. Buckworth pretended that he wasn’t walking with us, even though he was walking behind us with Rooney and Puddles.

  Mrs. Buckworth said I didn’t have to go to Day Camp if I didn’t want to, but I was very excited to go to Day Camp! Maybe it was like the circus camp, at least a little. Maybe there were leftover kids. Even though Lenore, the adoption expert lady, said I’d adapt if I met some friends in America—and I definitely wasn’t going to make friends or adapt—I was curious about Day Camp! Staying in America an extra day or two, just so I could go to Day Camp, wouldn’t hurt anything.

  Lucy stopped walking and set her backpack on the ground and bent down to tie her shoe. “Sometimes I watch TV all day, and then Mom gets mad and she makes me go outside.”

  I stopped too and set my orange bag on the ground. Mr. Buckworth had bought me a new pink backpack like Lucy’s, but I told him that I already had a bag. Mine was better.

  “So, this summer? Mom let me to go to Day Camp. So I don’t drive her crazy. I guess that’s why you get to go to Day Camp too. So you don’t drive her crazy.”

  I suddenly imagined Lucy and me driving all over the place—in the wagon—like crazy people. “Drive crazy?” I asked her. “You mean, the wagon?”

  Lucy laughed. “No, you silly. I can’t drive ’til I’m sixteen. And I don’t want to drive that stupid wagon. It’s ugly. But I mean that when, I’m bored I bug my mom. I say, MOM! I’M BORED!”

  “You bug ... her?” These must’ve been the same words in my language for a little gnat that gave old people warts.

  “I mean, my mom, she gets like this ... wooooo ...” Lucy twirled her finger around her head and made googley eyes. “Nuts. She says that if I’m bored it’s my own fault. ’Cause I have an excellent imagination.”

  A magic nation? Nation meant a country, but I’d never heard of a magic country. And nuts? Mrs. Buck-worth was like a peanut? My forehead got all wrinkled. I was trying to understand. I wanted to understand. But English was horribly difficult. And Lucy English was even worse.

  Lucy sighed.

  I sighed.

  “Never mind,” she said.

  “Never mind,” I said.

  And we picked up the packs for our backs and kept walking to Day Camp without saying much at all.

  “WELCOME., BETTI! WE’VE been excited for you to join us!”

  My good eye darted around nervously as I watched Mr. Buckworth leaving. He’d said, “You’re going to be fine, little tiger.” He put his hand on my head. “Finally, after a whole week of being with us, you’ll get to have some fun with kids your own age.”

  He i
ntroduced me to Ms. Stacy, the Day Camp Teacher Lady, who introduced me to the other day campers: five of them sitting in a circle on the grass.

  Ms. Stacy said she called them the Summer Five. Now, with me here, she could call us the Summer Six, which sounded much better. Ms. Stacy pointed for me to sit down in the circle.

  “Can you all say hi to Betti?” she said.

  “Hi,” the campers muttered.

  “Hello,” I squeaked back in a tiny voice.

  Lucy had left me to join her own Day Camp with the little kids. And George was sitting in another circle across the enormous play yard. He was in Day Camp too, and I could see him already giggling with an American girl. George looked like he’d been in Day Camp forever. Which just figured.

  Day Camp happened at Betsy Ross Elementary School. And I’d also be going to Betsy Ross Elementary School in the fall, after the summer. That’s what Lucy said. I’d be in the fifth grade unless I didn’t know enough.

  But I definitely knew enough and I wasn’t going to be here after the summer anyway.

  Lucy also told me that Betsy Ross was some lady who sewed up some flag for some American war a long, long time ago. I thought Lucy was making things up because it didn’t seem as if there’d ever been a war in America. Everything looked too perfect and nothing was broken.

  “You’ve all heard about Betti’s country on TV,” explained Camp Lady Stacy.

  She pulled a map out of her camp box on the grass. She pointed to my country and all the campers leaned forward trying to see it. I tried to see it too. My home was tiny next to all sorts of huge countries. It was light green and shaped like a chicken liver.

  “We’ve all seen pictures of the war ...”

  The campers kept squinting at Ms. Stacy’s map, and then at me. At the map, then at me. At the same time, I was looking at them. They all had different colored skin. Pink melon to charcoal black and everything in between. Old Lady Suri never told me that Melons came in different colors.