Betti on the High Wire (11 page)

“Betti, your dress—”

“It is me. It is mine!”

When Mrs. Buckworth kneeled down and put some 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.

“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.”

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.

“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 parted 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.”

“Outside?” asked George’s mommy, as if this was the strangest thing that had ever happened in America.

“I just don’t think she likes it here. She seems so unhappy.”

“George,” I said, grabbing him by the hand and pulling him off the sofa. His cookie fell out of his mouth onto the fuzzy floor. He looked back at it. “I have to show you something.”

I walked him straight to the television TV and plunked him down in front of it.

“It is called TV, Babo,” said George. “I like TV”

“I know what it’s called.” I sighed and started pacing back and forth. “George, you’re still a little kid, and you don’t understand English. But it’s just like I told you before. See, George, these people in the TV are saying, ‘Help! Help me!’”

George put his nose up to the television. “They are?” He knocked on it. “Halllooooo. Hallooooo.” There was a Melon boy on the TV with his hair parted just like George’s.

“They can’t hear you. They’re trapped. The Melons put them in there.”

George looked up at me. He was very worried. “What did they do that was so bad?”

“I’m not sure exactly. Maybe they said they weren’t afraid, just like the circus people. So the soldiers took them and put them in TV jail. Prisoners of War in America. Like our country, but different.”

“But Auntie Moo said there was no war in Amer—”

“You’re not listening. This is very important.”

George leaned back on his ankles and rocked back and forth. He pressed his hand gently against the TV and tried to follow a TV person with his finger. “I’d help them if I knew how to get them out. I’d let them go free, Babo.”

“Me too.”

We both scooted behind the TV to see if there was a secret door that we could open. But there was no door and no people. Just black plastic. I poked my finger through a hole in the back, and George stuck his eye into another hole. “I can’t see anybody, Babo.”

“No.” I shook my head. “Those poor, poor prisoners.”

“Scary,” said George.

“Very scary.”

We looked at each other and shrugged.

“But Babo,” said George, “they look sort of happy in jail.” The people were singing and dancing, smiling the biggest, whitest smiles I’d ever seen. “They don’t look sad.”

I sighed. “That doesn’t mean much at all.”

Then we heard the DONG DONG noise at the front door. We heard Mrs. Buckworth and George’s mommy say “hello hello” and we heard a stranger’s voice.

“The nice lady!” cried George. “She must be here.”

I jumped up and pulled George with me. “Come on. Hurry.”

“But—”

I picked up the whole plate of cookies and we ran into my yellow room. I went immediately to the secret skinny door in my bedroom. First I took out my orange bag and opened it and threw half the plate of cookies inside. Then I made George sit down next to me so we could stare straight into the mirror glass.

“Now look, George. Look at you.”

George looked at himself. He tilted his head one way, and then the other.

“Scary.”

“I know. You’re very scary. See? The Melons are trying to make you an American already.”

“I like Amair-ee—ka, Babo,” said George.

“That’s not the point!”

George kept staring into the mirror. He slowly traced his finger along the glass. “Look, Babo! It’s like I have two fingers that match! I have two arms and two hands. They’re exactly the same.”

I rolled my good eye. “George, you do not have two arms. It’s a trick, see?”

George wasn’t listening because he was too busy wiggling his ears and looking at them in the mirror. He giggled. He flapped his arm like a bird, and smiled a big smile even though his teeth were dirty from cookies. George was fascinated with himself, as if he was the most beautiful boy in the whole world.