Betti on the High Wire Read online

  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.

  “Betti, your dress—”

  “It is me. It is mine!”

  When Mrs. Buckworth kneeled down and put so
me goop on my head and scrunched it around making lots of bubbles, I splashed and splashed.

  My dress fell out of my hand and into the water. It floated. So I ducked my whole head under the water, and sat on my dress, and that made everyone quiet.

  I was a mermaid. Some water went into my open mouth and it didn’t taste anything like the piggy river. It was good water, clean, so I swallowed more, making bubbles like a blowfish.

  From underwater I heard Lucy say, “See? It’s not that bad, Betti.”

  It was bad. My dress was clean just like the water, just like me.

  This was war.

  Gobbledygook and a Dress

  “SOMETIMES ... MAY HAVE to do things . . . don’t want to do . . . Not trying to be mean, Betti . . . You can believe . . . that. Just part of ... being a little girl ... here.”

  Mrs. Buckworth had tried to dry me off with a fuzzy towel before I ran from the bathroom clutching my dress. I’d slammed the door to my yellow room. I’d thrown on my wet circus dress and jumped into my bed.

  “Don’t worry . . . work it out together. Day by day . . . learn about each other, okay? Never . . . never do anything . . . to hurt . . . you . . .”

  Gobbledygook.

  The Buckworths looked upset as they stood over my bed. Mrs. Buckworth put her hand on my cheek and brushed wet hair out of my eyes. Mr. Buckworth sighed.

  “We love you, sweetie.”

  “We really do.”

  Maybe the Buckworths’ brains were out of order. They didn’t seem to understand that I was bad. Very, very bad. I talked about ghosts and I didn’t like to use a fork. I hated baths and I told Lucy about guns and soldiers and falling-out hair.

  “No,” I said. “Do not love . . .” I pulled the covers over my head and said in a scratchy muffled tiger voice, “Me.”

  Finally they turned out the light and left. I was quiet in my bed, in the dark. I waited until the whole Buck-worth house was very quiet. And that’s when I threw off those stupid covers and stood up shivering in my wet dress. I went to the secret door and opened it so I could stare at all of my new Melon clothes.

  Trying on my new clothes for a second couldn’t hurt anything.

  I took off my circus dress and very carefully put on a blue special occasion dress. Then I put on my red buckle special occasion shoes. I pointed my toes gracefully and walked back and forth on an invisible line with my fingers curled up. Just perfectly, just like a circus star. Even though I wanted to show Mrs. Buckworth how I looked in my new dress—she’d probably tell me again how pretty I was, the most beautiful girl in the world—I was still mad. Very, very mad.

  I twirled and twirled on the fuzzy fake grass, and twirled some more. I was just going to try on another brand-new dress, when I discovered . . . the glass on the inside of the door. My face stared back at me. I was pretty sure it was me. I used to see my face in the river, but the water was murky and so was my face. But here? Way too clear.

  I put my nose right up against the glass. It was definitely a girl with a normal eye and a fish eye. Me.

  Both of my eyes were gray like smoke. My good eye blinked, but my bad eye was looking somewhere else. At something very important. My bad eye had probably seen all sorts of things before it got hurt. It made me look like a foreign monster, a freaky mermaid that crawled out of the sea. Everyone in my country looked sort of freaky, in one way or another, but in America nobody had an eye like mine.

  Lucy was right. My circus doll would never fit in. And I would never fit in either, which was fine by me. I couldn’t be a Melon because I didn’t want to be a traitor.

  Someday soon the leftover kids would be very happy with our new clothes. They’d take turns wearing the birthday party dress and fight over the pajamas. They’d skip through prickly vines in the red buckle shoes and giggle in the swimming suit as they rode on the pigs.

  But for now I was still here and they were still there. They didn’t have a whole bunch of clothes hanging like empty people. They didn’t have a room as big as the lion cage. They didn’t have spaghetti snakes and bread toes. They were hungry like I used to be hungry.

  I took off that stupid blue dress and put my wet circus dress back on. I opened my jar of circus camp dirt and sprinkled a little all over my dress so it’d stick like mud. I slipped my flip-flops back on, put my potato sack under my arm, stuffed my circus bear and my circus doll and all of Lucy’s smiling dolls in my orange bag and flung it over my shoulder.

  I was very good at walking so softly that no one could ever hear me. I used to walk like this—and sometimes I ran—all the way to the village to find out what was happening. I had to tell Auntie Moo and the leftover kids if our village was on fire. I had to go door to door in the village and warn people. I was a messenger. I was used to the dark and I never made a peep.

  So the Buckworths definitely didn’t hear a peep as I snuck outside followed by that hairy old Rooney and ugly Puddles. I lay down next to the empty seat swings under the tree. My hair was wet and it smelled funny, but not as bad as Rooney’s breath, which kept blowing in my face. I lined up all the dolls next to Rooney and Puddles on the grass.

  The sky was dark blue and black. I shivered again in my soggy dress, and then I sneezed.

  I thought about things for a long time, and wondered if time at the circus camp was the same as time in America. I hoped that a leftover kid was watching the sky to see if anything was coming.

  Rooney was staring at me. Puddles was scratching herself. I knew they were curious about what happened to my real mom and dad—all the circus people—and why I had to be here.

  “The village people say that the circus camp is haunted,” I told the dogs and the dolls in my real language. “Some people say that the circus people got taken to a prison camp for freaks. Other people think they were sent off on a boat and out to sea so no one except for fish and sharks would have to look at them again. Some people say they were taken across the border and kept in cages where audiences laughed at them instead of clapping. Old Lady Suri from the bean stand says that they just disappeared to a better place where ghosts live. In the trees and in the sky.”

  Puddles put her patchy fur paw on top of my arm.

  “But I’m the only smart one who knows that they escaped. I know that they’re still singing. They’re still saying, ‘Babo and the rest of us may look funny, we may not look alike, but we’re a family and you can never hurt us.’”

  Quiet tears ran from my good eye onto my wet dress.

  That’s when Rooney licked my face with his slimy tongue. It wasn’t quite so nice as having the leftover kids smooshed against me, but the dogs were warm. And I think the dogs, and my circus bear and circus doll, and all of Lucy’s plastic smiling dolls, understood my story better than Melon people.

  I sneezed again and rubbed my arms, which had bumps from the cold.

  America is a cold, cold place.

  And this was only my second day.

  I trudged back into the Buckworths’ house, followed by Rooney and Puddles. We went back to the yellow room. I put my fuzzy warm pajama dress back on, because wearing my pajama dress once in a while couldn’t hurt anything. Then I climbed back into my bed because I didn’t have anywhere else to go. My real home was way too far away.

  Trapped

  “WE’VE GOT TO get out of here.”

  George’s mouth was puffed out from cookies. He grabbed another one. “Why, Babo?”

  It was my third day in America, the next afternoon. Mr. Buckworth was being a Vice President somewhere and Lucy got to go somewhere called “Day Camp.”

  “Can Betti go too, Mom?” Lucy asked at the eating table in the morning. “Pleasssssse?”

  I wondered if Day Camp was like the circus camp, at least a little. I definitely wanted to go. But Mrs. Buck-worth said that I couldn’t go to Day Camp because I had something else to do.

  So George was stuck with me at the Buckworths’ house. He had on brand-new clothes, of course. His hair was slicked back and parte
d on the side. We were sitting right next to each other on the Buckworths’ fluffy sofa swinging our legs back and forth.

  “Haven’t you noticed? People in this country are ... crazy!” I bugged out my good eye, but George just fidgeted in his new striped play shirt. “And it’s very dangerous here, George. And cold.”

  We both ate another cookie. We were supposed to be waiting to talk to some Melon lady, just like we always waited for Melons at the circus camp.

  “You’re going to meet a very nice woman from the adoption agency, kids,” Mrs. Buckworth had told us as she set a plate of little round things on the living room table and kneeled down in front of us. “It’ll be nice for you to talk to her. You can ask her lots of questions, okay? She understands what it’s like to be in a new country. What it’s like to be adopted.”

  George didn’t really care who the nice lady was, and couldn’t understand Mrs. Buckworth anyway.

  I rolled my eyes and translated to George: “This lady is coming to tell us all the reasons we should be Melons.” George tilted his head and nodded. “She’s going to tell us that we better like it here or we’ll be in big trouble.”

  George was more interested in the plate that Mrs. Buckworth had set on the table. “These are called ‘cookies,’ kids,” she said.

  “Koookies?” I asked suspiciously.

  “Koookies,” repeated George.

  “I think you’ll like them.” Mrs. Buckworth smiled. Then she went back to the kitchen, where she was drinking coffee with George’s mommy.

  We both looked at our cookies up close. They were two black circles with white in the center. Perfect animal manure patties. We both bit in at the same time. Hmmmm. We chewed some more. Then we each stuffed a whole cookie in our mouths.

  “Yummy,” I said, to thank the animals for letting us eat their manure patties.

  “Yummy,” repeated George.

  He reached out and grabbed two more cookies and I grabbed three.

  As we were crunching away, I heard Mrs. Buckworth talking to George’s mommy. I couldn’t hear much, but I did hear Mrs. Buckworth saying something about “bath” and “her dress” and “on the first morning we found her outside.”