Hope Is a Ferris Wheel by Robin Herrera Page B

a while to drive there, you know.” Then Mom gave Winter a few dollars for lunch, and we headed out the door.
    â€œHey, Winter,” Gloria said as she set her bags on the table. “When are we going to deal with those roots of yours?”
    â€œI think I’m just gonna let the dye fade out,” Winter said. Already Winter’s hair had faded into a rusty sort of reddish-black, but it was permanent dye, so it still had a couple of months before it finally croaked. So that was doubly surprising, especially since Winter hated having blond hair. It made her look too nice, she always said. No one was going to buy bloodbath horror novels from a girl with blond curls.
    As we got into the pickup, I thought about letting my dye fade out, too, but once the blue faded, I’d be left with a bunch of white streaks in my hair. I’d look like some kind of mutant skunk. Langston would call me Skunk Girl.
    Mrs. O’Grady came out of her trailer while we were buckling our seat belts. We could barely make out her head over the portable fencing. “Tell your mother to stop stealing my newspapers!” she yelled, and then her hand appeared, shaking a broom at us.
    Winter yelled back, “Okay, Mrs. O’Grady!” And then muttered to me, “Who steals some old lady’s newspapers?”
    We drove out of Treasure Trailers. I guess since it was now less than a week until Halloween, everyone was decorating. Some people replaced their Christmas lights withorange and black Halloween lights. Even the guy in the tinfoil-covered trailer had a tinfoil-covered jack-o’-lantern sitting in front of his steps.
    â€œAre you really not going to dye your hair again?” I asked. “I thought you liked black.” I know
I
liked Winter better with black hair, because it made us look more like sisters.
    â€œI just want it to grow out a bit,” she said. “I’ll dye it again eventually. I just … don’t know when.”
    â€œWhen you go back to public school?” I asked.
    â€œ
If
I go back to public school.”
    Of course she’d go back to public school. I told her that, but she didn’t reply, and her lips pursed tightly together like she didn’t want to say anything at all.
    Maybe she was as nervous as I was. But I wanted to talk, talk, talk. I wanted Winter to tell me about the time she’d talked to Dad at the fair, or any other time she’d seen Dad. Hadn’t she seen him when she was really little, before I was born?
    Instead, I opened the glove box and let all her stories fall into my lap. Winter reached over, plucked one from the pile, and held it out to me. The paper was bright and new, the folds crisp. A brand-new story! Maybe the first that Winter had written since school started in September.
    â€œWhat’s this one rated?” I asked.
    â€œProbably R,” Winter told me. “But only for violence. And some language.”
    The story was about a girl who’s at a party with a boy she likes, at a house by a dark and dreary lake. The boy dares her to drink some of the lake water, which is icy cold going down her throat. The next day she feels sick, but her mom won’t let her stay home. She goes to school and feels sicker and sicker and sicker, and it feels like her insides are being sliced apart. But no one believes her when she says how much pain she’s in. Finally, at the very end of the story, she goes to the bathroom, thinking she’s about to throw up. But instead, a giant gross maggot bursts out of her stomach.
    That’s how it ended.
    â€œSo, she’s dead?” I asked. “And then, does the maggot get bigger and bigger and start eating all the girls who come into the bathroom?”
    Winter laughed and said, “Hey, that’s pretty good! Maybe you should write some stories.”
    â€œI wrote a poem,” I said, thinking about my Emily Dickinson poem. The first one, about Winter, was tucked