Read Online Betti on the High Wire by Lisa Railsback - Free Book Online Page A

But I wasn’t going to like it a bit because I wasn’t going to be at the Buckworths’ house for long.
    After dinner, when Lucy showed me my new bedroom, I peeked out a window and saw the sky turning dark blue and black. I squinted and saw a perfect square of real grass. Old Lady Suri said that my village used to have real grass too, until the soldiers stomped the grass down to nothing with their brown boots. An arched metal thing stood in the center of the Buckworths’ grass with two hanging empty seats.
    “Your window looks at the backyard and mine looks at the front. My room’s right there, see?” Lucy pointed to an open door across the hall. A pink room. “But maybe Mom’ll let us have slumber parties and I can sleep in your room. In a sleeping bag.”
    Then Lucy pointed to something on my bed. It was the best thing in my whole room! “He’s for you. He’s so cute, don’t you think?” Lucy picked up a stuffed bear that had a red ribbon around his neck. She kissed its black plastic nose.
    I reached out to touch its fuzzy fur. Its wide-open eyes stared back at me and his thready mouth smiled.
    “I picked him out myself!”
    It was a CIRCUS BEAR, kind of, even though it was fake. So I pulled my circus doll out of my orange bag and dusted her off. I set her carefully on my bed next to my circus bear.
    Sometimes Melons donated boring white socks that we never wore and soapy teeth paste to the leftover kids, but I’d never been given a present that was just for me. “Thank ... you,” I said, just as Auntie Moo had taught me to say when the Buckworths did something nice.
    Lucy started bouncing up and down on my new bed, which made me very dizzy. “My mom said that your eye got hurt.”
    “Yes.” I shrugged. I carefully pulled my jar of circus dirt out of my orange bag and set it down on a little table next to the bed. “It got broken.”
    “But how did it break?”
    I was too tired to explain how my eye got lost in the war or the circus, so instead I said, “Ghost named Hairy Bear Boy tell me my fortune. He say I have to go to America. Good luck or bad luck, it is hard to say. Next day I wake up and my eye falls out. And my hair. And my toes fall off too.”
    Lucy’s eyes grew huge. “Did he use a magic potion?”
    “Yes, he did,” I said dramatically. I wasn’t sure what a magic lotion was, but I was sure that the Hairy Bear Boy must’ve used it.
    Lucy tilted her head and plopped down on my bed. She scrunched her forehead. “But you’re not bald now, and your eye is still here, sort of, and most of your toes—”
    “They growed back.” I laid my everyday pants from the circus camp at the bottom of my bed. “They just growed back funny.”
    “I wish I had an eye like yours, Betti.” Lucy looked up at my fish eye as if she was looking at a funny painting. “Last year ... mermaid ... for Halloween ... do you have Halloween, Betti?”
    I had no idea what a halloweenie was, and I hoped I’d never had it.
    Lucy swirled her finger around on her face, and up past her eyes. “Mom let me wear ... makeup ... my eyes. Blue ...”
    I could understand most of Lucy’s Big Mouth words, but others were plain gobbledygook.
    “But Mom says ... no makeup ’til ... I’m really old. Ninth grade ... Only Halloween ...”
    “What does it mean? Merrrr-Made?” I asked.
    “Mermaid? It’s a half girl, half fish. She has a tail and she’s the same color as the ocean.”
    “She ... swim?”
    “She has to. She doesn’t have any legs. A mermaid only has a tail.”
    Mermaid. I thought about all the people who floated away from my village. They were all probably mermaids by now, waving their tails at the bottom of the sea.
    “Lucy!”
    The Buckworths loved to scream back and forth to each other. Maybe their ears were out of order.
    “Shhhh!” whispered Lucy as she put her little finger to her lips. “My mom wants us to go to sleep. But now that you’re finally here I don’t wanna go to sleep. Do you? We