Winter was acting weirder than ever. She'd sleep in, then get up and not even shower and put on clothes that were lying on the floor, clothes that didn't even go together. Then she'd come home late, with droopy eyes, and half the time she'd say a couple of words, but the other half she'd just head straight to bed.
I started recording Winter's behavior in my club notebook, since I wasn't doing so great a job of putting club stuff in there. The first page had a list of pros and cons about trailer parks, most of which I'd gotten from other people:
Pros
? Cheap rent (Mom)
? Donut shop down the block, even better than Heavenly Donuts (Gloria)
? Christmas lights up all year long, looks pretty at night (me)
Cons
? Have to keep stuff in storage (Winter)
? Hate walking and driving on gravel (Winter)
? Lots of weird neighbors (Winter)
I never finished, though; I was going to ask Mrs. O'Grady when she was in one of her good moods, and slip a note to the guy in the tinfoil-covered trailer who lives next to Gloria, but that never happened. I just flipped my pros-and-cons page and started a new page all about Winter.
She was still vegetarian, but I could tell sometimes she didn't like it, like when Gloria would come over to heat bacon in the microwave and the whole trailer would smell so, so good that I'd beg Gloria to break me off a piece. The only thing better than the smell of bacon is the taste, and I knew Winter hated being able to smell it and not taste it.
Another thing that seemed weird: Winter was letting her roots grow out. She has blond roots, which are extremely noticeable when you dye your hair black. That's not a problem with my hair, because midnight blue and black are both dark colors, but Winter has to dye her hair every month or it looks bad.
Also, I never saw Winter doing homework. But I thought, maybe that's why she was out so late—she was doing homework. Just not at home.
I filled pages and pages with observations, which I knew would have impressed my second-grade teacher, who had made us study worms. My plan was to show Mom the notes and hope she was equally impressed. Then she'd realize that she had to pull Winter out of Sarah Borne once and for all.
Unfortunately, it kind of took away from my club-planning time, so when the Trailer Park Club met for the very first time on Wednesday, at 3:05 in Mr. Savage's room, I was a little unprepared.
But it turned out that didn't matter at all, because despite the extra flyers I'd put up in the outside hallway and on the door and next to the bookcase, the only kids who showed up were Genny and Denny Libra. And I'm pretty sure Denny was only there because he didn't want Genny to be the only member.
"You want to take the minutes?" I asked him, but he just glared back at me, so I decided I'd probably be better at the minutes taking.
3:05 Meeting started
3:06 Denny did not want to take minutes
3:07 I introduced myself
3:08 Genny said I don't think you have to record every minute
3:09 Silence
Then Genny took the minutes from me and said she'd do them, which was good, because I couldn't talk and do minutes at the same time. In the corner, at his desk, Mr. Savage gave a small cough. He was grading papers, I think, and not really paying attention to the meeting.
"So," I said, "this is a club about trailer parks."
Denny rolled his eyes, and I couldn't blame him. Even I knew this was a horrible start. Genny scribbled something in the notes and asked, "Are we ever going to take a field trip to the trailer park?"
I hadn't thought about that, but Denny said, "No," so I said, "Yes," much louder. "But not until another meeting."
On the minutes Genny wrote, Field Trip TBA. Then she asked, "What's Treasure Trailers like?"
"I made a list of pros and cons!" I'd only just remembered that, so I dug the notebook out of my backpack and opened it to the first page.
"Donuts is a pro?" Genny asked after half a minute.
"That's from Gloria," I explained. "She's like my godmother, because she and my mom are best friends. We used to eat at this place called Heavenly Donuts in Oregon." I was so busy talking, I didn't even notice that Denny was writing on my list. "Hey!" I snatched it away and read what he'd written in the cons column: Next to the dump.
"It's separated by a very high chain-link fence with barbed wire and everything," I told him. "It's not like we have junk lying all over the place." Which was kind of a lie, because the trailer across from ours had rusted lawn chairs scattered in front of it, and even though Mrs. O'Grady had put up portable fencing around her trailer, I'd seen filled-to-the-brim trash bags piled in her designated driveway.
The rest of the meeting went flaming down a cliff from there. Every time Genny asked a question, Denny tried to answer it before me, and his answers were completely untrue. He said the reason we leave Christmas lights up all year long is because we're too lazy to take them down, and that everyone in the trailer park lives off welfare.
"Not the tinfoil guy!" I corrected him. "He doesn't trust the government, so he doesn't take anything from them!"
To make matters worse, Genny recorded everything we said in the minutes.
After an hour Mr. Savage kicked us out, saying that he wanted to go home. I again offered to lock the classroom and leave the keys in the drainpipe, but Mr. Savage didn't even answer, and within a few minutes we found ourselves outside, in the hallway, watching the rain splatter against the cement. Mr. Savage was gone in another minute, whipping out his umbrella and reminding me about my vocabulary sentences, which I hadn't even done yet, before he headed out to the parking lot.
For a while, the only sound came from the rain hitting the roof of the hallway. To break the silence, I said, "I like your tattoos," to Genny.
"Thanks!" she said. "They were a gift from our brother's girlfriend."
It made me sad to think there was another Denny running around, and sadder to think there was some poor girl dating the other Denny.
"I'm gonna get a real one someday," Genny said. "I don't know what, but I want it to cover my whole back. And then I want—"
"You're not getting any tattoos," Denny said, and without saying good-bye, he grabbed his sister's arm and dragged her away. Genny waved back at me with her other hand and said, "See you tomorrow!"
"See you," I said. It was too bad, because Genny was really nice. She just had the misfortune of having the world's worst brother. But Genny's being nice was not going to keep everyone from teasing me about my stupid mull—layered cut.
The wind picked up, taking down a corner of the flyer I'd taped to the outside of Mr. Savage's door. I went ahead and ripped the whole thing down to save the wind the trouble.
Maybe if I canceled the club now, no one would remember that I'd ever tried to start it in the first place.
