Free Chasing Orion by Kathryn Lasky Page B

baton.” My mom was well into her thirties when she had us, thank the Lord! I couldn’t imagine anything worse than having a teenage mom. Some girl who hadn’t even made it through algebra one. No matter how much teenagers impressed me, I did not want one to be my mother. And it would probably be a dumb teenager who would put Coca-Cola in my bottle, blow cigarette smoke in my face while she fed me, and never change my diapers. Ick! The whole idea made me nauseous. In fact, it gave me real bad malaise.
    I was standing in the pantry thinking about all this when Grandma sailed in to get the dish for the butter beans.
    “What’re you doing, Georgia?”
    “Nothing,” I said.
    “You’ve got a funny look on your face. It’s just a stud bull up there on the calendar.” She guffawed. “Why don’t you go out and practice baton?”
    “Too hot.”
    “Not under the beech tree, it isn’t. Junior high’s coming faster then you think. Got to be ready when tryouts come up for the Hoosier Twirlers. Can you do an arm roll yet?”
    “Almost,” I lied. Was she already thinking of a replacement for Velma’s pregnant daughter?
    “You’re going to look so cute in those new skirts the girls wear now.”
    I was not going to look cute at all. The whole idea of me in the short sparkly skirt made me want to puke. I had very skinny legs and knobby knees and of course the stubby hair and let’s not forget the nose that turns east. But it was especially when I thought of myself as a Hoosier Twirler that I began to have doubts about my legs lengthening and the other mysterious transformations that I dreamed about, most specifically my hair. All the twirlers wore their hair in either glistening pageboys that fell in straight orderly sweeps to their shoulders and then curved under perfectly or in wonderfully swingy ponytails. Stubby hair does not swing. It doesn’t fall. It will not curve. It springs. I couldn’t even make a part in my hair — that is how confused it was. To get rid of the cowlicks, I would have had to start all over with a new scalp, a new arrangement of hair holes in my scalp so the hair could grow in a straight, orderly fashion. What we were talking about was major scalp surgery. Once I had suggested to my mom and grandma that I could go down to the colored part of town and get the Madam Walker hair-straightening treatment. When I said this, you would have thought I had asked them if I could smoke a cigarette and a take a shot of whiskey on the side. In any case, I didn’t argue with Grandma. I went to the closet and selected one of about a dozen batons and headed for the beech tree. I wasn’t really going to practice. I’d just climb up to one of the low-spreading limbs that joined the trunk at an angle that was perfect for reading. Of course, I didn’t have anything to read. Well, I would just think. Maybe about that poem I had heard Phyllis’s mom reading the first day I wandered into the grove and heard her voice threading through the mechanical breaths of the Creature. I wanted to find that poem. I had meant to ask Phyllis the name of it. But when she started talking to me about liking Emmett and could I find out, I was so excited I just forgot. I climbed up in the tree and reclined against the trunk. I looked up through the deep copper leaves as pieces of sky floated overhead. I was trying to remember some of the words from the poem, but other words, not the poet’s, came to me instead.
    “Remember what I said, Georgie: you’ve got all the air in the world, the whole sky up there. I have eighty-seven cubic centimeters of air, but you have the world.”
What had she meant exactly? I didn’t want to ask Emmett, although I was sure he understood. But Emmett had been kind of weird ever since we met Phyllis. It was going to be hard asking him what he thought of her. I think he’d been back over once or twice since we met her, but I wasn’t sure.
    Emmett was late now to dinner at Grandma and Grandpa’s.