Larger-Than-Life Lara Read online

  So on Lara Phelps’s first day, I wasn’t in such a big fat hurry to get to the playground, like I would have been if Joey and Roger hadn’t made their boys-only rule. I just sat on a swing and snuck peeks at Lara as she shuffled down the walk.

  By the time she made it all the way to the playground, the other fourth-grade class got let out too. They came screaming and yelling down the sidewalk. Until they got to Lara. Then they either ran around her—way around her—or they stopped and elbowed each other or put their hands over their mouths or just yelled back at other kids, stuff like

  “Tony, get a load of this!”

  “Megan, look!”

  “Jumpin’ Jumbo!”

  “Truck woman!”

  “What—! Oh, man!”

  And other things. Some of them you can’t put in books.

  But she kept on walking, and smiling, sometimes right at the person who said stuff, sometimes just smiling, like to herself.

  She was breathing heavy by the time she got near the swings. I pretended not to see her, but I could. I could see tiny pearls of sweat on her upper lip.

  I kept swinging and dragging one foot so it made me go crooked.

  Theresa, she was on the other swing next to me, asked, “Laney, is she coming our way? You don’t think she’s going to try to swing, do you?”

  I didn’t answer her. But I’d been wondering the same thing, because the swings were just a piece of canvas or something, like a strap the size of a normal person’s rear end. And I was pretty sure Lara’s rear end wouldn’t fit. And if it did fit, the whole swing would break, and maybe the whole entire swing set. And if the swing didn’t break, how would we ever get her out of there?

  But I still wasn’t looking.

  Then I saw a ball zip past me.

  “Fatty! Catch!” Joey Gilbert had fired one at her.

  I heard the thud of the ball as it hit Lara’s upper arm. So I looked. The white ball seemed to be swallowed up into her flesh for a second. It disappeared, then plopped out to the ground. I knew it had to hurt like Harry. But she didn’t say nothing, and I swear on my middle big brother’s eyes that her smile only disappeared for a second before bouncing back, and even that might have been a twitch. She leaned over—which sent the kids behind her into fits of laughing—and picked up the ball. Then she tossed it back to Joey. The ball made a little arc, like a rainbow, and only got halfway to where Joey was standing.

  Joey had to walk up close to her to get his ball. “Hey, fat girl!” he shouted, although he was so close he didn’t have to shout. “What’s your name?”

  “Lara,” she answered, as if Joey wasn’t a wing nut for not knowing her name, since the teacher had said it a bunch of times. And as if Joey hadn’t just whipped a ball right into her arm. “What’s yours?”

  I stared hard at them then because I knew her asking his name would throw Joey off his guard. He wasn’t asking her name in the “And-what’s-your-name” kind of niceness, like he would have done if Lara had looked like Maddie Simpson.

  “Huh?” Joey said. “What—I’m not—”

  “Go on, Joey!” Wayne hollered. He was standing off with Roger and Eric, huddled together and watching their fearless leader.

  Joey waved them off with his glove. Then he did this kind of snorting laugh and eyed Lara up and down, shaking his head all the while, like he couldn’t believe his own eyes. “I just come over here to warn you to stay off the swings and everything else out here, because you’ll just break everything with your big, fat body.”

  This brought wild laughter from Joey’s all-boy cheering section.

  Ashley and Maddie and their crowd came trotting up too, and formed a line behind Joey. They giggled like they were in first grade instead of fourth.

  Theresa laughed. She’s kind of chubby, and I got the feeling she wasn’t entirely against the idea of having somebody in class who made her look skinny.

  I got to admit that I laughed too. It wasn’t a real laugh, but I guess that makes it worse.

  Joey, you could tell, was loving the audience. He glanced from the guys to the girls, then back to Lara. “Man, you’re the biggest doggone kid I ever did see! Lara, huh? Larger than life.”

  Lara probably didn’t get it, but it came from a story Mrs. Smith had read to us the first week of school. She’d said the characters in that story were larger than life.

  “Hey!” Joey exclaimed, looking like a lightbulb just went off inside his head and was burning his pea brain. “That’s a great name for you—Larger-Than-Life Lara!”

  5

  I KNOW GOOD AND WELL that if Mrs. Smith is reading this, she’s real disappointed about me not having any setting to speak of and we’re already to chapter five. But I don’t think it’s all my fault. I mean, school classrooms are about the most boring places you can write about. What would I say so as I could have some setting for the story? Four walls, two with blackboards on them—only they’re really whiteboards, and instead of chalk, big markers sit on little silver ledges? Big interesting set. All classrooms look alike. That’s how come you can get so mixed up when you’re a really little kid and you keep going into the wrong classroom because they all look the same.

  Or I could say that the floor is made up of blondish, skinny boards. And the chairs and desk arms are all brown. And now would be the first time I could describe how our room looked a little different from the other rooms in Paris Elementary, because Mrs. Smith went and got a special-made desk for Lara. That twenty-second desk was really a big teacher’s chair and a folding table that fit in front of it.

  So that’s a little interesting, but there’s not much more setting at school, if you ask me. And not too much more happened the rest of Lara Phelps’s first day either, because by the time we got back from afternoon recess, there wasn’t enough school left for anything interesting to happen.

  When school got let out, I watched Lara waddle to an old, blue minivan. She climbed up into the back of that van, even though that was no easy thing to do and there wasn’t no other person in that van except for a regular-sized man driving. And it turned out that was her daddy, and he picked her up every single day after school.

  I bounced out of there fast after that and headed home. I walked because I hate the school bus. There’s a lot of setting on that bus, but none of it’s good. It takes me twenty minutes to walk home, but it’s better than two minutes on the bus with the likes of Joey Gilbert and three fifth-grade boys who think they own the place.

  The sun was still full-strength hot, with not so much as a cloud hanging in the sky. Some of the leaves on top of the maple trees were starting to burn brown.

  After I turned off School Street, which is the real live name for it, I lost the sidewalk and took to the left side of the gravel road leading out of town. Nearly every step stirred up grasshoppers. That’s how dry it had been all summer. Locusts buzzed in bushes as I walked past the Methodist church. Some people call it singing, what those crickets and locusts do, and I suppose that would make for a prettier piece of setting all right, but it still sounds like buzzing to me.

  A few kids walked as far as Orange Street ahead of me. But I was the only one who kept going past the old railroad tracks, on beyond the cemetery, and around the fork to our place.

  There’s a lot of setting at my house.

  My house is a peeling white box made of boards, with two windows in front. The funny thing is that the windows are different sizes. One’s tall and thin, a rectangle. The other’s short and fat, a square. So when you look head-on at our house, it seems like the house is winking at you. There’s a front porch that needs a rail and maybe new steps. But we don’t go in the front anyway. Two rusted-out cars propped up on gray blocks sprawl out over the weedy lawn. There’s a lilac bush out back that grew all by itself, but it didn’t have any flowers on it.

  Nobody was home when I walked in through the back door, which wasn’t locked, like it never is. Daddy says anybody fool enough to steal from a Grafton ought to have his
head examined. My brothers are only in seventh, eighth, and ninth grade, but they’ve already got themselves a reputation. So does my daddy. He works at the parts factory and has won more than his share of fights. Sometimes I hear about them at school. I’ve never seen the inside of the parts factory, but I’d bet my middle big brother’s eyes that there’s a whole lot of setting in there.

  I opened the fridge because I was real hungry. But I already knew everything that was in there because I do all the grocery shopping. Chocolate pudding in plastic cups. An opened can of spaghetti. Apples, some of them mushy. Hot dogs and baloney in the meat drawer.

  I shut the fridge and just got peanut butter out of the jelly cupboard and ate a couple of spoonfuls of that.

  There were two little boxes of macaroni and cheese mix, which I thought about making for supper. That’s one thing I don’t have to do—cook for everybody. Daddy says we’re all big enough to fend for ourselves, and that’s what we do. I don’t see any reason why I should cook for my brothers, just because I’m the girl. And I’m not making their beds either. They can just go and get themselves a maid, if that’s what they want. That’s what I tell them. When I told Matt this, he threw his pillow at me and hit me in the head with it, but it didn’t hurt. Then he threw his boot at me, but I ducked and it missed. That would have hurt if it hit.

  But tonight, I wanted to cook up the macaroni for Daddy and me because I had to ask him something that I thought he might be more likely to say yes to if he had a nice, hot plate of macaroni and cheese in front of him. The thing I had to ask him about was Mrs. Smith’s play. I wanted to try out to be in it.

  Joey Gilbert says plays are stupid. I never let on in school, but I love those plays. I even checked out a written-down play by that Shakespeare guy. I had to take it back to the library the next day because the English they talked back then wasn’t easy to understand like our English. But the stuff I could understand was really good and some of it even rhymed, which is not easy to do in case you never tried it.

  I might be an actress when I get out of school. I know this sounds like something a little kid would say. Then all the grown-ups would say back, “How cute” or “Isn’t that sweet?” Except for if I said this to my daddy, he would probably say I should stop being a dumbhead and that people like us don’t make a living like that. This was why I knew I needed the macaroni.

  Mrs. Smith’s play was called Fair Day, and there were lots of girl parts. Some of the characters in that play come and visit the fair. And other of the characters have animals they show at the fair. Mrs. Smith said we couldn’t have real animals. But it would still be a really good play. Joey Gilbert said Fair Day sounded like the dumbest play he’d ever heard of.

  This would be my first official play, but I acted all the time. Like when Daddy asked me, “How’s school?” I’d say, “Fine,” and he’d believe me. And when Mrs. Smith or somebody asked, “How are things at home?” and I’d say, “Just fine,” they’d believe me too. So I figured I was a pretty good actress and always had been.

  I pulled out the macaroni boxes and hid them behind the cereal in the cupboard over the sink.

  The door slammed. I recognized the footsteps of my littlest big brother, Luke. “Hey! I’m starving!” he screamed from the back porch. He stomped into the kitchen and threw his backpack on the floor. Luke never says hi or how are you, like a normal person. “What’s there to eat?”

  “Pepperoni pizza, bacon cheeseburgers, chocolate milk shakes, and homemade brownies,” I answered.

  “Shut up, Laney,” he said.

  I almost forgot to say that our kitchen has an old stove on one wall. It’s white, but it has a chip out of it up front, and there’s a Band-Aid over that chip, and it’s been there for as long as I can remember. Only two of the four black burners work, but we don’t care. Under one small, smudged window is a sink with a dripping, snake-necked faucet. There’s also an orangish-brown refrigerator, and I already told you what it had in it. And a wooden table with four chairs that don’t match each other. If we ever did want to eat together, we’d have to pull in a chair from the living room. The floor is gray linoleum with red and white specks in it, which comes in handy because when there’s food or dirt on the floor, it pretty much just looks like the specks in the linoleum.

  Whoever had the house before we did painted all the rooms lime green, and we figure they must have gotten that paint at a supersale, and no wonder it was on supersale because who wants lime green? But we got used to it.

  Luke grabbed two puddings from the fridge and took them to the silverware drawer for a spoon.

  Then the next person who stormed in hungry was Robert. Robert’s in high school, ninth grade, and he doesn’t look much like Luke or Matt. People say Robert got the good looks in the family. He’s tall and has blond hair, instead of brown like the rest of us. But he’s got Daddy’s squinty, hard eyes. I don’t know who I look like, but I hope I got some of my mama in me. It’s hard to tell with only the one picture of her, and that’s hid under magazines in a bottom drawer. But she’s not dead. Just run away. So someday I’ll see her and can tell if we look alike or not.

  Robert went straight to the jelly cupboard instead of the fridge. He also got the brains in the family. I was glad I’d seen to the macaroni and hidden it already.

  “Didn’t you get anything good to eat, Laney?” he growled.

  Luke spoke up before I could. “Pepperoni pizza, bacon cheeseburgers, brownies . . .”

  Robert smacked him on the back of his head. “Shut up, Luke. You’re not funny.”

  I kept my mouth shut and went to the living room.

  I about had a cow when I saw Matt on the couch. The couch is almost the same green as the paint on the walls, and this is a coincidence. Matt was stretched out on the couch, his dirty legs and bare feet hanging over one arm. There were bowls and newspaper and wrappers on the carpet. Our rug is called “shag,” and that’s a good name for it because it looks like it belongs on the back of a brown, shaggy dog. It smells kind of doggy too. I never sit on the floor in the living room. Plus if I do, my legs itch.

  From the look of things, Matt had been home a long time. I guess I was standing in front of the TV because he shouted, “Get out of the way, zithead!” He pointed the remote at me, and the TV turned on, and I made sure I got out of the way.

  I figured Matt hadn’t bothered to go to school at all. But I wasn’t about to say so. Like I said, Matt is the meanest of my big brothers.

  Robert came in. “What are you doing home, Matt? You ditch again?”

  “You’re not my mother!” Matt said. He pointed the remote, and the volume went up so loud he probably couldn’t hear what Robert said next.

  Which is a good thing, because if I wrote it in this story, this book could get burned.

  The last place for setting is my room, which is where I went so I didn’t have to listen to Matt and Robert yelling at each other.

  Upstairs should be an attic, but we split it into two rooms with a blanket down the middle. Daddy has one room, and I have the other. The roof slants, so there are places you can’t stand up without bumping your head, especially Daddy, because he’s six feet tall.

  The walls are green, like downstairs. Mrs. Smith says that a setting, like a character’s room, should tell you something about your character. I don’t see how mine tells much about me. But here goes.

  My bed is a mattress on the floor against one wall, with a little window above it. Three things are stuck on my walls. The first thing is a shelf made of wood, stained and varnished. My daddy made it himself and put it up on my wall right where I said I wanted it. And it’s the nicest thing he ever gave me. I keep books on it. Sometimes the library has old books for quarters. And our school librarian gives me books she’d have to throw away otherwise. I have The Secret Garden, which is so old the covers aren’t stuck to the pages. And Because of Winn-Dixie, which is a book we read last year and all got us a copy of. Some kids didn’t even want theirs, so I have
three of them. I’ve got a couple of animal books, with rabbits as characters or mice. Mrs. Smith makes us write about people instead of animals, and she would be happy to know that there aren’t any animals in this book so far, unless you count locusts and crickets and grasshoppers. But if I do write a story about animals, it will probably be about turkeys, and they won’t get killed for Thanksgiving. Because I think turkeys have a pretty hard life.

  The second thing on my wall is a tennis shoe. I’m probably the only fourth grader in all of Missouri who has a tennis shoe glued to her lime-green wall. But last year I beat Roger Steeby and Joey Gilbert and every other boy in both third grades in a race our school had for Fitness Week. And it was official. Our teacher started the race by blowing his whistle, and everybody watched it. So when my shoes got too small, which they almost were before the race even, and my toes stuck through, then I glued one shoe to my wall so I wouldn’t never forget what that felt like to have people cheering for me.

  The third thing on my wall is a poster Ms. Gibson, our school librarian, gave me when she fixed up her library with all new stuff. The poster is a picture of a theater. Not the movie kind of theater. The Globe Theatre. It’s where Shakespeare acted out his fancy plays. I really like that poster a lot.

  And looking at it reminded me about the play I wanted to be in and how I would have to get my daddy’s permission to even try out because if I did win a part, I’d have to stay after school and practice. And getting my daddy to say okay to that one was going to take a lot more than macaroni and cheese.

  6

  DIALOGUE is the conversation between two or more people in a book or a play. That’s what Mrs. Smith taught us. It’s really just talk. She said readers like lots of it. I looked back through the first five chapters of my book, and I’m pretty sure that so far I don’t have enough dialogue. So I’m going to try to make up for it now.