Savvy: Chapters 1–8

My brother gripped the edge of the picnic table as the wind kicked up around him, gaining momentum and ripping the wrapping paper out of his hands, sailing it high up into the sky with all of the balloons and streamers roiling together and disintegrating like a birthday party in a blender.

Rain pelted us like gravel thrown by a playground bully as windows shattered and shingles ripped off the roof.

“Girls don't get the powerful jujubes,” said Rocket, running one hand through his dark shock of unkempt hair with a crackle of static.

“Girls only get quiet, polite savvies—sugar and spice and everything humdrum
 savvies. It’s boys who get the earthshaking kinds of savvy.”

I wasn't the youngest or the smallest in the family; broody Samson was a dark and shadowy seven, and doll-faced Gypsy was three.

Across from me, Gypsy prattled endlessly, counting the make-believe creatures she imagined seeing in the room, and begging me to help her name them.

She sank to the floor, looking for all the world as if she were staring right through the checkered brown and blue linoleum to behold the burning hot-lava core at the very center of the Earth.

A gust of wind burst from Fish’s side of the table, blowing everyone’s hair and sending our paper napkins flying pell-mell onto the floor.

"Momma?" Rocket ventured. The air around him crackled with static, and his T-shirt clung to him like socks to towels straight from the dryer.

To make amends for my selfish feelings, I sat quietly and ate every last unwelcome green bean from beneath my mashed potatoes, as Fish’s rain lashed against the windows and Rocket caused every lightbulb in the house to explode with a live-wire zing and a popping shatter, sending shards of glass tinkling to the floor and pitching the house into darkness.

Later that night, as I lay awake in the dark bedroom I shared with Gypsy, I listened to my sister’s even breathing and to the steady patter of Fish’s worried rain.

I had to poke and prod broody Samson up the long, soggy boggy road toward our mailbox, which had fallen over in the night after getting pushed ten feet farther to the west from all of Grandpa's worried rumbling.

“She's going to stay home so that no one can see what a friendless freak she is,” Ashley sneered.
“What a freak she is,” mimicked Emma like a spiteful parrot.

“Your mother should have called me the moment she found out about your poor father,” Miss Rosemary said, dusting the last jar with a flourish.

When she reopened her eyes, she gave us a stern and solemn look.

Bobbi was shuffling through a stack of Momma’s half-finished paintings and Will Junior, holding one of Gypsy’s wooden blocks, was prodding Samson’s dead pet turtle where it lay inside a glass aquarium, pulled tight and unmoving into its shell.

Sitting at that table just then was like sitting in a pressure cooker—thanks to Fish; the air in the room went hot and taut.

“I'm your friend, Mibs,” Will Junior said with earnest.

Since Rocket was Momma and Poppa’s first child, and Poppa came from an ordinary, everyday family with no special talents except that of losing all their hair before turning thirty, Rocket feared that he’d take after Poppa—and wind up with no savvy and no hair on his head either.

His skin looked pale in the early-evening glow, and he hunched over his armful of glass jars, staggering like someone had just thrown them all at him.

But why had that turtle picked that peculiar, persnickety moment to wake up—there before dawn on the morning of my most important birthday, with me in my nightgown, balancing frosted cereal on my knee?

All buckled into the van, we bumped and jolted up the rutted road toward the highway, on our way to the church for my uninvited party.

My brother’s funk and squall of wind made me doubt myself for a second.

Fish let me go, but he gave me a look like the sharp end of a stick, and punctuated his meaning with a smattering of abrupt, uncontrolled raindrops from the clouds overhead.

Red-faced and mortified, I just stood there. I couldn't believe those girls had just called me that horrible name in front of Will Junior.

Fish scowled at the two girls, and a burst of wind hit us all so sharp and sudden that it sent them scurrying from the open doorway to check their hair and to fix up all their froufrou frippery.

He led us past the doors of the sanctuary and past the open door to his daddy’s office, where his smile faded as we paused for a moment, peeking in. I glimpsed Pastor Meeks, all tall and buttoned up, talking to some man and thumping a big pink Bible in his hands.

Even when he wasn’t there, Rocket’s dark good looks and mysterious reputation won him admirers; the second girl squealed with giggles at the mention of my brother, and the first pretended to swoon.

I couldn’t fathom how Bobbi had managed to get a tattoo.

I woke up to the sounds of quarrelsome voices. My head still felt muddled and muzzy, and there was arguing going on from every direction.

“When I agreed to order Bibles, no one at Heartland Bible Supply told me they were going to be pink!” spat Pastor Meeks. “What do you think we are? A church full of mollycoddled sissies?”

Then, as if two squabbles weren’t enough, a third ruckus overlapped the others from out of nowhere.

But to my distress and dismay, the voices sounded pretty surely like they might be coming from inside my head.

I tried to think over the noise of so many bickering voices both inside and outside of my head.

Hearing that singsong whisper again, quiet, quiet in the backs of my ears, I saw Bobbi leaning up against the bus, all alone and chewing and snapping her gum like some kind of standoffish rebel.

The Heartland Bible Supply truck had come from no place in the world other than Salina, Kansas; it said so right there on the side in stark black paint for all the world to see.

And, heeding that, I figured that if the bus had come from Salina, it was bound to be going back to Salina.

“Then I'll tell them about how you hoodwink the school secretary by pretending to be Mother on the phone to excuse yourself whenever you ditch.”

“You think I care?” Bobbi dared him.
"She cares," said the wily voice, and I imagined that angel tattoo twirling its devil's tail.

“What’s going on in here?” Fish demanded, as he too clambered up into the bus.