Making Friends with Billy Wong by Augusta Scattergood

Author:Augusta Scattergood
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Scholastic Inc.
Published: 2016-08-29T04:00:00+00:00

For the first two minutes after I woke up the next morning, I believed I’d dreamed everything. Then Dr. Wiggins X-rayed my grandmother’s arm. Told her not to budge all day. And I knew it was real.

Pushing Grandma Clark’s wheelchair home from his clinic, I was shaking so hard I worried about falling flat on my face on the cracked sidewalk. What if she found Willis and Lizzie hiding in her garden shed? Sleeping all night in a place she told us to stay away from. And I hadn’t told the truth.

Once my grandmother was resting, I put on a fake brave smile and said, “I’m in charge now. I’m taking over.” But truly, the last thing I wanted to be was in charge of anything.

She twisted the bedsheets back and forth between the fingers of her good hand. “Don’t be such a worrywart, dear. It’s a sprain. I’ll be better soon.”

It sounded like she was trying to make herself believe it.

“Yes, ma’am,” I answered.

Sitting with the knobby bedspread’s bumps pressing on my sweaty legs, I smoothed out her pillow. Grandma Clark fiddled with her sheets again, then closed her eyes. “Thank you, Azalea,” she whispered.

I might faint across her bed hearing those three words.

Instead, I slipped into the hall and picked up the phone. “Reverse the charges,” I said when the operator asked me what I needed. I wasn’t about to say to the nosy telephone lady what I really needed: somebody to help. Mama to tell me what to do.

I let it ring a thousand times before I placed the heavy black phone back on its cradle. I pictured Lulu sprawled on her favorite chair, listening. The thing is, my cat can’t talk. Nobody was at my house in Texas to help. So I did what my grandmother would do if she wasn’t in bed with a sprained arm. I walked outside, took the key off the hook, and checked the shed for damages. The bed was neatly made up. The chair was under the desk, the teacups and plates undisturbed, lined up perfectly. Willis and his sister were gone, and you’d never know they’d been there. Except that I knew.

Sitting under the tree outside, I tossed a hard green tomato up and down. Up and down. Worrying about everything under the sun. But before I had time to figure out where Willis and Lizzie would sleep tonight or whether I’d be in Paris Junction till Halloween, Billy opened the back gate.

I didn’t know what to say. But after he handed me a whole cooked chicken and yesterday’s Little Rock newspaper, Billy talked first. “Dr. Wiggins came in the store early this morning. My great-aunt sent this. You’re my last delivery. I can stay awhile.”

“Did you get in trouble? About your bike?” I asked.

“Not yet. But Azalea? I’m never going back out there. Willis is dangerous.”

I turned Willis around in my head with that word, dangerous.

“Sorry I made you ride to his trailer. We never should have gone out there.

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