The Glass Castle_ A Memoir - Jeannette Walls [38]
At dinner that night, I started telling everyone about Billy Deel’s disgusting dad and the ugly dump they lived in.
Mom put down her fork. “Jeannette, I’m disappointed in you,” she said. “You should show more compassion.”
“Why?” I said. “He’s bad. He’s a JD.”
“No child is born a delinquent,” Mom said. They only became that way, she went on, if nobody loved them when they were kids. Unloved children grow up to become serial murderers or alcoholics. Mom looked pointedly at Dad and then back at me. She told me I should try to be nicer to Billy. “He doesn’t have all the advantages you kids do,” she said.
The next time I saw Billy, I told him I’d be his friend—but not his girlfriend—if he promised not to make fun of anyone’s dad. Billy promised. But he kept trying to be my boyfriend. He told me that if I’d be his girlfriend, he would always protect me and make sure nothing bad ever happened to me and buy me expensive presents. If I wouldn’t be his girlfriend, he said, I’d be sorry. I told him if he didn’t want to be just friends, fine with me, I wasn’t scared of him.
After about a week, I was hanging out with some other kids from the Tracks, watching garbage burn in a big rusty trash can. They were all throwing in pieces of brush to keep the fire going, plus chunks of tire treads, and we cheered at the thick black rubber smoke that made our noses sting as it rolled past us into the air.
Billy came up to me and pulled my arm, motioning me away from the other kids. He dug into his pocket and pulled out a turquoise and silver ring. “It’s for you,” he said.
I took it and turned it over in my hand. Mom had a collection of turquoise and silver Indian jewelry that she kept at Grandma’s house so Dad wouldn’t pawn it. Most of it was antique and very valuable—some man from a museum in Phoenix kept trying to buy pieces from her—and when we visited Grandma, Mom would let me and Lori put on the heavy necklaces and bracelets and concha belts. Billy’s ring looked like one of Mom’s. I ran it across my teeth and tongue like Mom had taught me to. I could tell by the slightly bitter taste that it was real silver.
“Where’d you get this?” I asked.
“It used to be my mom’s,” Billy said.
It sure was a pretty ring. It had a simple thin band and an oval-shaped piece of dark turquoise held in place by snaking silver strands. I didn’t have any jewelry and it had been a long time since anyone had given me a present, except for the planet Venus.
I tried on the ring. It was way too big for my finger, but I could wrap yarn around the band the way high school girls did when they wore their boyfriend’s rings. I was afraid, however, that if I took the ring, Billy might start thinking that I had agreed to be his girlfriend. He’d tell all the other kids, and if I said it wasn’t true, he’d point to the ring. On the other hand, I figured Mom would approve, since accepting it would make Billy feel good about himself. I decided to compromise.
“I’ll keep it,” I said. “But I’m not going to wear it.”
Billy’s smile spread all across his face.
“But don’t think this means we’re boyfriend and girlfriend,” I said. “And don’t think this means you can kiss me.”
I didn’t tell anyone about the ring, not even Brian. I kept it in my pants pocket during the day, and at night I hid it in the bottom of the cardboard box where I kept my clothes.
But Billy Deel had to go and shoot his mouth off about giving me the ring. He started telling the other kids things like how, as soon as I was old enough, me and him were going to get married. When I found out what he was saying, I knew accepting the ring had been a big mistake. I also knew I should return it. But I didn’t. I meant to, and every morning I’d put it in my pocket with the intention of giving it back, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it. That ring was too darn pretty.
A few weeks later, I was playing hide-and-seek along the tracks with some of the neighborhood kids. I found the perfect hiding place, a small tool shed behind a clump of sagebrush that no one had hid in before. But just as the kid who was It