The Hole in the Wall - Lisa Rowe Fraustino [4]
The sight of Odum’s triangle of wasteland made a crappy start to the school day. Much better to look out the right side where ORC hadn’t turned nature into an ashtray. Off to the right, the land looked the way the gore used to—rolling hills with big old trees and boulders wherever the land hadn’t been cleared for gardens or homes. Pretty. Lots of wildlife. Turkeys had often wandered through Grum’s backyard with their heads bobbing. They made me laugh. And Pa did, too, when he used to take me and Jed trout fishing in the brook out behind Grum’s, telling us the adventures he and little Stanley Odum had while growing up in the gore.
No fish in that brook now.
As soon as I strapped myself in next to Rico, I knocked three times on Barbie’s head. “Hello, can I borrow a pencil?”
“Quit it! Only if you aren’t going to ask me to forge Ma’s signature.”
“I can’t believe you’d even think that. Can I borrow your math?”
“Do your own math.”
“What if I pay you?”
“You don’t have anything I want.”
Oh, didn’t I! Wouldn’t she love to know about my hideout, the Hole in the Wall. Barbie would have to give me her math and sign Ma’s signature every day for a year to make it worth sharing my best secret with her. I went there every chance I could sneak away from the house.
“You know the deal,” she said. “You give me your shoe, I give you my pencil.” This was so I’d remember to give her the pencil back. Usually when I stepped in a mud puddle. Which was often. We got a lot of rain in Kokadjo.
“Aw, c’mon, do I have to?”
“You’d lose your own belly button if it wasn’t tucked in. Your shoe or no pencil.”
No choice. I threw my holey sneaker into her lap.
As Barbie dug for a pencil I leaned over Rico and let him pull on my curls so I could watch for Cluster Dogstar to emerge from the woods on the right. It was better than looking the other way and getting all depressed.
Cluster Dogstar, the new kid in eighth grade, was the only one besides me and Barbie who rode the Rust Bus. Her parents used to homeschool her until Cluster crossed her arms and said, “I’m never going to read another word or multiply another number or speak to you ever again unless you put me in a school with other kids, and you can’t make me change my mind.” Then she clamped her lips shut and waited for September. On her first day of school she discovered computers, and she didn’t want to go home.
The Dogstars all had weird names. Blue Moon was Cluster’s unexpected baby brother, Marigold was her mother, and Goldenrod was her father. Marigold had changed her name from Mary Jane, and Goldenrod had changed his name from Rodney, but Cluster and Blue Moon were the kids’ real names.
Cluster walked like a deer, picking her steps carefully. Which made her more fun to watch than doing fractions. Maybe she just did that because the path she walked had actually been made by deer. There wasn’t a driveway to her house. I’d never been inside, but everyone knew that the log cabin where the Dogstars lived didn’t have electricity or indoor plumbing. At least I had a television to watch, even if Pa hogged it, and I could brush my teeth over the sink when Grum wasn’t in the bathroom. Sebastian wasn’t a great name, but it wasn’t Blue Moon.
“Peace, my friends.” Here she was, floating into the Rust Bus like an apple blossom in the wind. Cluster always talked like a grown-up flower child, and she always seemed to be floating like some kind of petal.
“My goodness, Sebastian, you are looking upright this morning,” Cluster said.
“Yeah, it must be all that cold milk I drink,” I said. “What’s new with you?”
“We already had a visitor at the Love Shack this morning.” Cluster called their house the Love Shack. People in town called their place Zensylvania or just “the commune.” Pa called them whacked-out yippie-hippie-doo-da-dopeheads and