Betti on the High Wire (2 page)

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.”

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.

I’m skinny too. My ribs stick out like a skin-‘n’-bones chicken. It’s not pretty when a girl looks hungry all the time. But I don’t complain because some of the other leftover kids have it worse. George is missing an arm and has extra-large ears, Toro’s hearing is messed up, and a couple of kids got knocked in the head so their brains are out of order. Almost everybody has one broken thing or another, but that’s what happens during a war.

Once I asked Auntie Moo what happened to my eye and she said it was hard to know for sure. Maybe I was born this way. Or maybe it happened in the war, or maybe it happened in the circus a long, long time ago.

“Maybe the foreigners won’t care if your eye is broken, Babo,” said George. He sighed and looked down at himself. “Maybe they won’t care about my arm.”

“Maybe,” I said. “It doesn’t really matter anyway.”

George was having a hard time getting the dirt out of his good shirt, so I took it out of his hand and beat it on the side of a rock. Water flew all over us and we shook it off like wet dogs. George giggled.

“There.” I grinned. “Good enough.”

 

LATER WE WERE all getting fidgety in our special occasion clothes. There was only so long we could wait politely for the Melons. And that’s when Auntie Moo asked me if I would play a quiet game with the leftover children.

“But, Babo”—Auntie Moo smiled slyly—“try not to get them dirty? Like last time?”

Last time I made them perform like my dad, the famous alligator man, with flips and flops in the murky swamp halfway down to the village. Hundreds of frogs and bugs bounced on top of the furry algae. That time the leftover kids’ hair was all green for the Melons, which I thought was very, very funny.

The time before that, I made up a game where black-bottomed circus monkeys took over the world. I told the leftover kids to put a little mud on their faces—just a little—to look like monkeys. Then we hid in the trees and dropped onto my pretend soldiers, Toro and George. We dragged the soldiers into the Hairy Bear Boy’s old skeleton of a tent, where I made them do headstands and we tickled their toes. But that time Toro got a black eye and the leftover kids had a mud fight and soon mud was dried all over our monkey faces like chipped cement. I thought we didn’t look so bad when the Melons arrived, but Sister Baroo didn’t think it was a bit funny. She made me sit on the Mission floor in the village and pray for three hours that I wouldn’t be so bad next time.

Sister Baroo always wants to help us too, just like the Melons. She runs the Mission down in the village, which used to feed all the poor people. Before the poor people could eat their free meal, Sister Baroo would make them take baths in a big rusty water trough and comb their hair and pray for three hours on the Mission floor. They had to pray that they’d be able to pay for their own food and have cleaner lives in the near future. So the poor people got fed up with Sister Baroo and decided that they’d rather live dirty and hungry in the street. That’s when the circus camp and the leftover children became Sister Baroo’s new mission. Just our luck.

Sister Baroo wouldn’t like my new game at all. This time I tied an old rag over George’s eyes. “Now, you’re the animal trainer, George,” I told him. “And the rest of us are the circus animals. But we’re mad at you. So we refuse to do any more shows.”

“Why, Babo?” George tilted his head.

“Because,” I said, “you make us get clean, and you comb our hair, and you make us perform for the fancy Melons. Every night. So we want a vacation.”

George pulled the rag off his eyes. “I would never be mean to the circus animals, Babo.”

“George! It’s just a game!” I pulled the rag back down. “Do you want to play, or not?”

“Yes, but I don’t want to be the animal trainer. He’s mean.” George frowned. He didn’t like mean people. “What do the animals do to me, Babo?”

“We run away. And you have to find us.”

“But—”

“Okay, GO!” I shouted.

All of us started crawling around. Crawling around a little couldn’t get us too dirty. We were funny monkeys and rainbow birds and singing lions and hairy bear boys and dancing elephants.

“Miss Lion?” called George, still standing in the same exact spot. He stretched his arm out. “Bird? Here, Mister Bird!” He twirled in funny circles, while the rest of us covered our mouths so we wouldn’t laugh.

Then I had a brilliant idea. I made the leftover kids crawl behind me into the pig yard. The pigs were drinking at the river, so they couldn’t get us dirty. “Sssss. Sssss.” We teased George like snakes. “ROARRRRR.” We sang like lions, we spoke in funny languages like exotic birds, and George tried to follow us. “Caw caw, cheep cheep, grrrrrrrr.”

“Here, animals!” cried George. “Don’t run away!”

We all hid behind the pig trough that Auntie Moo filled with slop. “Don’t touch it!” I whispered to the kids who were dipping their fingers already. “We can’t get dirty! Not now.”

George heard my whispering and he smiled.

I’d never seen him move so fast. He marched straight for the trough with his arm out. His bare feet stepped right into a pig pile, but he didn’t care. “Babo?” he called. “Caw caw?”

The rest of us ducked down, and there was ... silence.

“George?” I stood up and looked around. He wasn’t anywhere. “George!”

Just then, from the woods, we heard Sister Baroo. “CHILDREN!” she hollered in her husky, irritated voice. “Babo!”

George suddenly stood up from the other side of the pig trough and scared me so much that I screamed.

“Look, Babo! I trained a circus animal!” George proudly puffed out his chest and handed me his animal. Six feet long and thicker than a leftover kid. I screamed like crazy and threw the huge snake into the air. It conked its head on a branch, spun around, and landed in a spooky lump on a pig pile. Then I accidentally crashed into the pig trough, which tipped straight over and covered us all in sloppy slop.

George plopped down to check on his snake because he was worried about it. And me? I RAN. The other kids chased after me through the woods, leaping over brambles and baby monkeys. I was running so fast that I forgot all about Sister Baroo, who’d stomped up from the village in her black boots and her boring black dress.