Bernice Buttman Model Citizen Read online

  For a hot minute I thought I heard angels singing, but then I realized it was just an amazing idea rolling around in my head.

  Darn the library for being closed on the Lord’s Day. I had to wait until Monday after school to get my plan rolling. I entered the dim coolness of the ancient building and took in a noseful of dusty books and lemon furniture polish. That just might be my favorite smell in all the world.

  There wasn’t time to hang out and sniff, though. When I came to the library, I always tried to stay inconspicuous (that means out of sight). People might get the wrong idea if they saw Bernice Buttman spending time between stacks of books for fun. Bullies don’t hang out at the library unless they’re drawing devil horns on all the picture book characters.

  I tossed my dirty black backpack under the computer desk and looked around like a kid with her mitt in the cookie jar. The handful of library-goers had their noses stuffed in books, so they didn’t notice me. I turned to the dusty screen and moved the mouse to wake it up.

  The first time I’d come here was the summer after first grade. Momma would kick us out of the trailer as soon as she woke up in the morning, and my brothers would ditch me to shoot BB guns at tin cans or sneak into the public pool. The library was on my short list of “places that have air conditioning and welcome loitering.” In case you don’t know, loitering is a big word for standing around and bugging real customers and not buying a thing.

  Once the perky librarian, Ms. Knightley, had shown me how to look things up with a search engine, I was under her feet all the livelong day. Knowledge was only a click away. I could know everything if I asked enough questions. Which would mean I’d always be right. I’d taken to writing down questions in a green notebook I carried in my backpack, so I’d know what to ask when I got to the computer.

  Now I took out the rippled notebook and looked at the previous week’s page.

  45. How to make cherry bombs

  46. Why do I fart?

  47. Why do dogs eat grass?

  I flipped to the next page, where I’d only scrawled one question. It was a big one. Next summer’s entire destiny depended on the answer.

  “Hard at work there, Bernice?” Ms. Knightley leaned against the edge of my cubicle, and I jumped. I snapped the notebook closed, and she raised her eyebrows.

  “Yup. Tryin’ to find out what makes Pop Rocks pop.” Oh, snap! I grinned at my own fast thinking. That question wasn’t even on my list! I’d add it later.

  “Interesting. Let me know what you find.” Ms. Knightley always asked me what I’d learned from my searches. She said I had a knack for research. No other adults ever said I had a knack for anything. Except my fourth-grade teacher, who’d said I had a way of making the simplest group project a nightmare.

  I nodded at Ms. Knightley, and guilt twisted my guts. My plan wasn’t exactly legit, and I was pretty sure I knew what she’d say about that. But if I was going to get to Hollywood Hills Stunt Camp this summer, I needed some generous strangers to dig down deep and give from their hearts.

  Ms. Knightley still hovered nearby. Her hair is cut short like a pixie’s, and she always wears sweaters, even in the summer, because she says the air conditioner gives her a chill.

  She smiled and tilted her head to one side. “Is there anything you need to confess?” Her voice was quiet but with a sharp edge. My heart started banging around like a squirrel in the dryer, and I shoved my hands under the desk so that she couldn’t see them shaking.

  “Confess?” I squeaked. Normally I do bad things and I don’t feel bad about them. But Ms. Knightley makes me want to be a good person. I don’t want her to look at me like a clump of mud on her shoe like everyone else does. I think she might actually like me. But that’s probably because she’s never seen me steal milk money from the kindergartners.

  “You’re holding out on me,” she said, extending her hand.

  I stared at her jangly bracelet and thought about handing the notebook over. I thought about slipping her a bribe. I thought about writing out a confession letter of everything bad I’d ever done and plopping it in Ms. Knightley’s hand.

  “Your gum, Bernice,” Ms. Knightley said kindly. “You know the library’s policy.”

  I let out a long breath and spit my hunk of Hubba Bubba right into her hand.

  She winced a little bit, but her smile came right back. “Thank you. Let me know if you need any help.”

  She strolled back to the information desk, depositing my gum in a trash can along the way.

  I took a deep breath and turned back to the waiting search bar. My fingers flew across the keys as I typed my question, and I scratched some notes in my notebook. This didn’t look that hard. It almost looked too easy.

  If stunt camp was gonna be in my future, I would need a round-trip bus ticket, plus payment for camp. And some money for snacks and smoke bombs. Subtract out the twenty-two dollars in my savings account (I’d opened it when I turned eight with the twenty-dollar bill my aunt had sent me), and that meant I had to scrounge up just under two thousand five hundred dollars. I was too young for a job (plus who in the world would hire me?), and Momma would laugh in my face if I asked her. I had to come up with the money on my own. But I had a plan.

  I would get people to give me the money. Just like when they passed the basket around in Sunday school. It would be as easy as shaking down the kindergartners.

  First, I went to a website called Fund Me Up! and set up a fake profile. I stared at the screen for a minute, thinking about what kind of person other people wanted to help. Nice families, like the Smiths from church, usually got people’s attention. Or maybe a sick kid? I’d probably need to know all about some kind of disease for that to work, though.

  Then it hit me up side my head, like my brother Busey does when he catches me wiping boogers on his pillow.

  People go nuts for dogs. Puppies. Little sick puppies.

  Google gave me just what I needed, and ten minutes later my charity was live. I leaned back in my chair and clicked on the page to view it like everyone else would.

  At the top of the screen was the picture I’d found when I searched for “ugly dogs.” The mutt had actually won some contests for being so unattractive. He was a small brown dog with mismatched, crossed eyes, a few snaggly teeth, and a tongue that hung out the side of his mouth. I’d named my pretend dog Farkle, and the heading at the top of the page read “Help Farkle Smile Again.” In the description section I’d written a heart-tugging story about how I’d found Farkle in a sewer pipe near my house and the vet said he needed surgery to make his tongue go inside his mouth instead of lolling out. I set the goal amount of the fund for two thousand four hundred ninety-seven dollars and sat back, congratulating myself for my genius.

  The only thing that made me cringe was my real name at the bottom of the page. I had to use my real name so the money raised would go in my real bank account. But it seemed pretty risky putting the Buttman name on anything I needed people’s cooperation with.

  I stared at the ugly dog and prayed no one would notice his owner. He did seem like the kind of dog my family would have, anyway. And the more I stared at his hairy little face, the more I felt like the two of us could be kin.

  I glanced up as Ms. Knightley helped a preschool kid find a book. Probably a book about fire trucks, because the kid wanted to be a firefighter when he grew up. She’d tell him he absolutely could, even though he was a scrawny little wimp. She always tells kids they can be whatever they want to be.

  If I decided I wanted to be a Hollywood stuntwoman and I told Ms. Knightley, she’d glow with excitement. She’d tell me to chase my dreams and give me a stack of books about being a stuntwoman.

  But I wasn’t sure what I wanted to be when I grew up. It all seemed like a lot of hard work: finishing school, getting a job. All I really knew was I wanted to get out of the tra
iler and away from Momma. I wanted a break from my smelly older brothers. I wanted to learn how to ride a camel backward while shooting at low-flying airplanes.

  Ms. Knightley might not approve of my fundraising methods, but she would want me to chase my dream. Bernice Buttman was gonna be the star of Hollywood Hills Stunt Camp, just so long as nobody recognized that ugly mutt.

  By the time I rolled past the Lone Star Trailer Park mailboxes, the sky was deep purple, like a bruise. I threw my bike in the front yard, next to the garden trolls and the cast-iron bathtub full of weeds, and clumped up the path to our Palace on Wheels, as Momma called it.

  “There’s Bernice! She can be the judge!” The voice belonged to my oldest brother, Austin, but I couldn’t figure out where in the blazes he was.

  I stood frozen to the spot, looking in every direction for my pack of brothers. You didn’t want them sneaking up on you, that’s for sure. An empty bottle of Mountain Dew clunked me in the head, and I yelped in pain before spotting the dark outline of four huge lumps on the roof of the trailer.

  “Dang it, Chucknorris. I said toss it near her, not brain-damage her! Come around back, Bernice. We got a job for you.” There have been times in the past when my brothers have conned me into doing things that were probably not all that smart. But they were always fun, and curiosity usually won out. Austin’s wicked grin almost glowed in the dark, so I tromped through the brown grass to the backyard and nearly ran into a huge trampoline.

  “Whoa! Where’d you get this?” I yelled.

  “Don’t worry about that,” Austin said. He was a senior in high school, and most of my brothers’ worst ideas came from him. “We need you to give us scores on our jumpin’.”

  I crossed my arms and crushed my eyebrows together. Jumping off the roof? The trailer groaned under their combined weight. There was no way that trampoline would be able to snap back from an airborne Buttman.

  “I don’t think that’s—”

  “Look out below!” Gordon said, flinging himself off the roof and sinking deep in the center of the trampoline before crashing into the brown grass of the neighbor’s yard with a thump.

  “Woo-hoo! That’s what I’m talking about!” Chucknorris said. “What’s Gordo’s score, Bernice?”

  Gordon moaned from the neighbor’s yard, but he waved to let us know he was okay. “Um, seven?”

  “Watch and learn, little brothers,” Austin said. “This is how Stone Cold Austin Buttman does it!” He looked like a meteor hurtling at the ground, but he did manage to stay on the trampoline. It sprang him high as the trailer, and when he was done bouncing, he lay on the trampoline and laughed his head off. Chucknorris and Busey clapped and cheered from the roof. I gave Austin a nine.

  “A nine?” he grumbled. “That was a thing of beauty.”

  “You lost a point for your butt crack showing.” I shrugged. Austin put me in a headlock.

  “Baby brother’s turn!” Austin yelled up to Busey. He might be the baby brother, but he was the tallest and widest of any of us. He hitched up his pants with determination before flinging himself off the roof.

  And broke the legs right off the trampoline.

  He lay there on the tangle of black fabric and bent-up metal poles and for a second no one moved.

  “I’m okay!” he said weakly, which sent all of us into a fresh round of applause. It also ended the game. Chucknorris seemed relieved he didn’t have to jump. By the time he’d climbed down the back side of the trailer, he was sweaty and red.

  “Y’all are lucky I didn’t get to jump,” he mumbled. “I woulda wiped the floor with you.”

  * * *

  Momma and her boyfriend, Lloyd, were watching TV when I followed my limping brothers through the front door. She didn’t look up from her plate of microwave burritos or the reality TV show she was glued to. Lloyd only nodded at us.

  “Hey, Momma,” the boys said, filing past her to go scrounge up some dinner.

  “Hey yourselves. Thank God you’re done making that racket. I thought the roof was gonna rain down on my head.” Momma shifted her plate, which was balanced on her NASCAR T-shirt. She called it her belly shelf.

  Lloyd scratched and let out an enormous burp, and I chuckled. Momma gave him a punch in the arm. “That smelled like pork rinds. Blow it the other way next time.”

  “You like it.” Lloyd rubbed his almost-bald head and leaned back in the recliner. His white tank top was scattered with BBQ stains, like a fairy had fallen, butt-over-elbows, all down the front of him.

  Momma let out a sigh, which was directed at the TV. “This show is terrible. Who wants to watch people survive in the jungle? They need to make a show about us.”

  My brothers returned from the kitchen with bags of chips and sloppy peanut-butter-and-Marshmallow-Fluff sandwiches. Austin got the La-Z-Boy, and the rest of us plopped down on the floor in front of the TV.

  “Being on TV is my life’s dream,” Momma said, her mouth full of burrito. “Bringing Up Buttmans would’ve been a smash hit.” Momma’s frown made her look like she had about a million chins.

  “Oh, not again,” I grumbled.

  “All family reality shows need a cute kid. We’ve missed our window.” Momma’s eyes shot laser beams at me.

  “I can’t help it if I’m grown! Maybe it was because you tried to rap in all your audition videos!”

  “Don’t you sass your mouth at me, missy.” Momma set her empty plate down on the couch. “Those tapes were golden. I bet nobody important ever saw them, though. And now we don’t got an ounce of cute in this house, so my dream is gonna curl up and die.”

  She was right there. They’d have to be crazy to put our ugly family on TV. But Momma never thinks about anything else.

  “I was born to be famous,” she sighed. Lloyd nodded in agreement.

  “There ain’t no one deserves it more than you, sugar.”

  Lloyd’s been around for about a year now, and I guess we’re all kinda getting used to him. He’s okay as long as you don’t sit downwind of him. None of us know our real daddies, anyway. Momma named the boys after the celebrities that most closely resembled their fathers. She named me after her great-grandma. Lucky me. I’d have rather been named Kidrock Buttman (after my daddy’s look-alike) over Bernice any day.

  Chucknorris and Busey started punching each other and rolling around on the floor. Busey wasn’t acting right, and I wondered if landing flat on his back had given his brains a jiggle.

  Lloyd and Momma argued about what show to watch next, and Austin and Gordon snuck out the back door in all the chaos. Probably to go cause more chaos.

  I looked around at this mess of people that were supposed to be my family and wondered if I really and truly did fit in here. When I grew up, was I gonna turn into an exact replica of Momma, complete with bad attitude and mean spirit? I was a Buttman, after all, and I didn’t think it was in any way avoidable. I thought about Farkle, my imaginary pet dog, and I smiled. This summer I’d be on a bus to California. I would be greeted at stunt camp by piles of new friends. I’d win them over with the variety of songs I could play with only my armpits, and my ability to perform every stunt perfectly on the first try. The rest of the Buttmans would be stuck here in the Lone Star until the end of time, and they could kiss my grits.

  I checked Fund Me Up! at the library every day that week and watched the red progress bar get closer and closer to the goal. It was working. My plan was actually working. The only comments people had left on the page were nice.

  “Hope Farkle is smiling soon!”

  “Good luck with your operation, doggie!”

  “What a sweet dog! I bet he has a wonderful personality.”

  I snorted at that last one. I was booger-eating proof that just because you’re ugly, don’t mean you automatically get a wonderful personality.

  “Bernice? Is that you
?”

  I turned around slowly in my chair and saw Oliver staring at me in that openmouthed way he had. I wondered if he swallowed many flies, what with his barn door open all the time.

  He was so short we were practically eye-to-eye even though I was sitting and he was standing. That’s when I realized he wasn’t looking me in the eye at all. He was staring at the blasted computer screen right over my shoulder.

  “Whoa. Is that your dog?” he asked, leaning in. I could smell brownies on his breath. Didn’t his mother do anything except stuff him with delicious food?

  “No.”

  “Why’s your name on there, then?” Oliver squinted and pushed his glasses farther up his nose.

  “Oh, um. Yeah.” I swallowed hard, my throat suddenly tight. My name might as well have been blinking at the bottom of the web page.

  “Gosh. He looks special. Why’s he have his own web page? Does he blog or something?”

  I ducked and weaved, trying to get my body between Oliver and the computer screen, but he was like a snoopy ninja. Sure, you get one imaginary dog and then all of a sudden people come out of nowhere to have a chat. It was the worst possible time, what with my lies on full display, but at least Oliver was talking to me. Maybe there was hope that we could be buddies.

  “And he has to have surgery! That’s terrible. My granny just had a surgery on her heart. She died.”

  I stared at him, eyes bugged out and nostrils flared. What was I supposed to say to that? A friend would probably try and say something comforting, but my mind was drawing a big old blank. I just wanted Oliver to go away so I could close the web page before he blabbed to everyone that Farkle was mine.

  Oliver must have misread my awkwardness for worry about my fake dog. “But I’m sure Farkle will be just fine.” He patted my arm but then backed quickly away. Huh. Kind of nice.