Free Ferris Beach by Jill McCorkle Page A

she was standing at the head of the stairs. “Misty is on the phone, and then you need to come set the table.” Now the window was empty, just the stark white of the wall showing through. Misty was calling to say that she couldn’t talk on the phone that night, that her family and Betty and Gene Files were going to see
Airport
over in Clemmonsville. “I would’ve invited you,” she said. “But there’s not room enough in the car. That brat kid of theirs is going, too. They
say
he’ll sleep in a dark theater. Oh brother. Well, I gotta go. Listen to NightBeat and see if they play a song for anybody we know.” She paused, and I could hear lots of voices in the background, Mo’s laughter. And then she whispered, “You are not going to believe how purple this carpet is. Oh man, it is
purple”
    At the Halloween carnival that fall, Misty draped herself in the carpet remnants and went as the One-Eyed Purple People Eater, and I painted my face red and went as the devil. R.W. Quincy and Dexter Hucks came as themselves, which everyone agreed was the
worst
they could be. Todd Bridger, who came as Ironside, won first prize; if he had not borrowed his grandmother’s wheelchair he wouldn’t have stood a chance. “Originality is nine-tenths of the prize,” Mrs. Poole said and grinned at Todd, handing him a five-dollar gift certificate to The Record Bar in the Clemmonsville mall. “And though you look
nothing
like Raymond Burr, you
are
original.”
    “And I’m not?” Misty whispered to me, just as Merle Hucks, dressed in white coat with a round piece of aluminum foil stuck to his forehead, passed. We weren’t sure if he was supposed to be Marcus Welby or a spaceman and no one asked. After the judging, he took the circle and coat off anyway and spent the rest of the night keeping apples in the bobbing tubs and loading empty Coca-Cola crates in the corner of the cafeteria. Heseemed oblivious to everything going on around him, even when R.W. Quincy stole Todd’s wheelchair and pushed Dexter around and around before running him into the wall. Todd was standing there laughing nervously, acting like he wasn’t worried about anything, though it was clear that he was. Without his wheelchair, he was just a little guy in a suit, and in that moment as fear and lack of courage drained his face, he looked as insignificant as I always felt at these functions. I looked for Misty so I could tell her about this realization and spotted orange hair and purple shag at the other end of the cafeteria, where she was cheering and clapping for more stunts from R.W. and Dexter. Mrs. Poole’s hand was moving like crazy in her purse, and it was just a matter of minutes before she ran to the teachers’ lounge where she could sit primly like a lady and suck on a Salem, leaving my mother in a state of bewilderment as she attempted to oversee the carnival and explain to R.W. Quincy why he had to stop doing wheelies in the wheelchair.

Five
    “It’s a birthmark,” my mother said over and over. “Lots of people have birthmarks.” She had said it so many times that by the time I was in the eighth grade, those words made me sick. I always wanted to say that if it was a
birthmark
it must be
her
fault, in the same way she was to blame for my legs getting so long that I was a head taller than almost every boy in my class. I wanted to tell her that I’d rather take my chances drawing a mother out of a hat, that I wished Mo Rhodes would adopt me, wished I was an orphan like Angela.
    “Think of the birthmarks some people have,” she said, holding my shoulders so that I had no choice but to look at her. “Some people are born without limbs. Some people are born without brains.” I hated her right then. I hated her for not simply saying, “I’m sorry. I am truly sorry that this bothers you.” But no, instead she wanted me to think of everything in the world which wasworse, famine and earthquakes, the young black woman recently murdered in the