The Glass Castle_ A Memoir - Jeannette Walls [108]
I began going to just about every extracurricular event at the school, and the kids who shunned me before now accepted me and even sought me out, posing and clowning in hopes of getting their picture in the paper. As someone who could make them famous among their peers, I was no longer a person to be trifled with.
Even though the Wave came out only once a month, I worked on it every day. Instead of hiding in the bathroom during lunch hour, I spent it in Miss Bivens’s classroom, where I wrote my articles, edited the stories written by other students, and counted the letters in headlines to make sure they fit the columns. I finally had a good excuse for why I never ate lunch. “I’m on deadline,” I’d say. I also stayed after school to develop my photographs in the darkroom, and that had a hidden benefit. I could sneak into the cafeteria once everyone had left and dig through the garbage pails. I’d find industrial-sized cans of corn that were nearly full and huge containers of cole slaw and tapioca pudding. I no longer had to root through the bathroom wastebaskets for food, and I hardly ever went hungry again.
When I was a junior, Miss Bivens made me the editor in chief, though the job was supposed to go to a senior. Only a handful of students wanted to work for the Wave, and I ended up writing so many of the articles that I abolished bylines; it looked a little ridiculous having my name appear four times on the front page.
The paper cost fifteen cents, and I sold it myself, going from class to class and standing in the hallways, hawking it like a newsboy. Welch High had about twelve hundred students, but we sold only a couple hundred copies of the paper. I tried various schemes to boost the circulation: I held poetry competitions, added a fashion column, and wrote controversial editorials, including one questioning the validity of standardized tests, which provoked an irate letter from the head of the state Department of Education. Nothing worked.
One day a student I was trying to get to buy the Wave told me he had no use for it because the same names appeared in the paper again and again: the school’s athletes and cheerleaders and the handful of kids known as slide rules who always won the academic prizes. So I started a column called. “Birthday Corner,” listing the names of the eighty or so people who had their birthday in the coming month. Most of these people had never appeared in the paper, and they were so excited to see their names in print, they bought several copies. Circulation doubled. Miss Bivens wondered aloud if. “Birthday Corner” represented serious journalism. I told her I didn’t care—it sold papers.
Chuck Yeager visited Welch High that year. I’d been hearing about Chuck Yeager all my life from Dad, about how he’d been born in West Virginia, in the town of Myra on the Mud River over in Lincoln County, about how he joined the air force during World War II and had shot down eleven German planes by the time he was twenty-two, about how he became a test pilot at Edwards Air Force Base high up on the Mojave Desert in California, and about how one day in 1947 he became the first man to break the sound barrier in his X-1, even though the night before, he’d been up drinking and had been thrown from a horse and cracked some ribs.
Dad would never admit to having heroes, but the brass-balled, liquor-loving, coolly calculating Chuck Yeager was the one man in the world he admired above all others. When he heard that Chuck Yeager was giving a speech at Welch High and that he’d agreed to let me interview him afterward, Dad could hardly contain his excitement. He was waiting on the porch for me with a pen and paper when I got home from school the day before the big interview. He sat down to help me draw up a list of intelligent questions so I wouldn’t embarrass myself in front of this greatest of West Virginia’s native sons.
What was going through your head when you