The first chance I got to talk to Winter alone since the world's worst vocabulary sentences was on Saturday. Mom said she had a score to settle with the Food Bank, which meant she'd lost her card again and would have to argue a bag of food out of them. Gloria had a bunch of appointments booked, but she'd stopped by that morning to heat up a donut sandwich in our microwave. (Her microwave is haunted.)
When they were both gone, Winter told me she was going to the library.
"Can I go?" I asked.
She was still getting her coat and brushing on eye shadow, so she didn't answer. Not until she put on her giant sunglasses. Then she said, "Are you coming or not?" And luckily I was already dressed.
In the truck, Winter tried to find a decent radio station, but she gave up when she almost hit Mrs. O'Grady's trash cans. Besides, ever since the antenna fell off, the truck's reception isn't great.
"Why are we going to the library?" I asked.
"I need to look something up on the Internet," Winter said.
We used to have a computer and Internet, but the computer died, and then Mom said we didn't need the Internet anyway. Winter kept telling Mom that we needed a new computer so that she could type up her schoolwork, and Mom kept saying she'd put it on the list, right below dental insurance.
Then one day Winter mentioned computers again, and Mom's eyes shrank to raisin size, and she said, "If you want a computer so bad, sell the truck." Mom would love that, but the pickup belongs to Winter. Dad had given it to her right after I was born, before Winter could even drive. It was a few months before he got married to someone else, Gloria told me later. I think it was an apology present because we weren't invited to the wedding.
So Winter would never sell it, even to get twenty computers, and now we use the computers at the library. They give you a whole designated hour all to yourself, but there's usually a long list of names to wait behind. Luckily, when we got there, the sign-up sheet only had one name that hadn't been crossed off yet.
"Where do you want me to find you?" Winter asked. I couldn't tell where she was looking because of the sunglasses, but I knew she wasn't looking at me.
"I'll be in nonfiction," I said. "I need to read about clubs." Winter didn't say anything, so I added, "I started a club at school," not sure if I'd told her yet.
"A club? Oh, right, so they'll stop with the mullet jokes." Then she adjusted her sunglasses and said, "Why is it so bright in here?" before racing off to the bathroom.
So I wandered around the nonfiction section, looking for club books. I was hoping a title would pop right off the shelf, something like Clubs for Fun and Profit! Or, even better: How to Get Everyone in School to Join Your Club!
But this library doesn't have exciting books like that, just boring ones about bird-watching and lighthouses. When I hit the seventeenth aisle, I wondered if maybe I should go find one of the catalog computers and make sure this library even had books about clubs.
Discouraged, I went back to find Winter. She'd finally gotten on one of the computers, but when I came up behind her, she closed the browser she was looking at. "No books on clubs?" she guessed. "Well, go upstairs and see if there're any decent movies. Something from after 1980, if possible."
"What kind?" I asked. "Comedy? Romance? Adventure? Zombies?"
"Whatever," she said. "I don't really care. Nothing matters anymore."
The word why was on its way out of my mouth, but Winter was already back to the computer, so I trudged up the stairs, wishing Winter wasn't so miserable. Heavenly Donuts! Was it really that bad at Sarah Borne? She'd never complained much in the summer, but I guess in the summer she hadn't thought she'd need to stay that long. I hoped she didn't have to finish high school there.
Besides, now that the school year had started up, there were probably ten times as many delinquents running around at Sarah Borne. Pregnant girls snapping gum in the hallways. Girls with bald spots where chunks of their hair had been pulled out during a fight. Boys with long hair and eyelid piercings.
And she wasn't allowed to have her writing club. Even if she was, who would join? She said most of the kids there didn't even know how to write.
In the movie room I picked out A League of Their Own, which is about a pair of sisters, although these two are not at all like Winter and me, because they're constantly fighting over who's better at baseball. Winter told me it was a good choice, but when we were watching it that night, she left halfway through to go to bed.
I wanted to tell Mom that she should maybe consider putting Winter back into public school, but she was already shrunken from dealing with the Food Bank, and without Gloria there to calm her down, I knew it was a lost cause.
