Genuine Sweet Read online

  I very nearly went on the offensive. Who are you calling a clabberhead? But her words started to sink in, and I realized she was right. Gram had set that wish cup in my hands for the first time. Gram had taught me to draw down the starlight. Now Gram was gone. The cup was empty.

  And I had no way to fill it up again.

  My knees shook and my hands shook and even my lips and the very skin of my face shook from the inside, as if something sick was trying to get out.

  I wept.

  “Oh, God, Jura,” I managed between gasps. “It’s gone. I threw it away. Oh God, oh God, oh God.” And then it struck me—the most despisable thing of all. “Jura! All those hungry people! No more wishes, no more biscuits. They’re gonna starve!” I let out a moan from the deepest, hurtingest part of me.

  I fell onto Jura and cried so hard that the whole shoulder of her sweater turned wet. She hugged me tight and stroked my hair in a way that reminded me of Gram, which made me bawl all the more. My whole world ended right there in Jura’s kind arms, if you can make any sense of that. When I finally pulled away from her, I felt clean but raw, as if I’d been roughly scrubbed inside and out.

  “Thanks,” I said.

  “Sure.” She tucked a bit of hair behind my ear.

  “Travis might be moving to California.” It was a funny thing, I know, how that came to mind right then, but there it was.

  Her eyebrows shot up. “How come?”

  I told her about Travis’s pa and Miz Tromp’s quandary. “It’s a right fine mess, that’s all.”

  “You know, I bet we can fix it,” Jura said after a time.

  “How?”

  “We could . . . get Travis’s dad a job in town!”

  “Because Sass is just brimming over with jobs?” I teased.

  She paused. “Okay, no. But how about if—what if we applied for some kind of grant? For Wish to End Hunger? And then we could hire—what’s his dad’s name?”

  “Kip.”

  “We could hire Kip to do all the mailing and stuff. Make him our office manager!” She looked at me with big, excited eyes.

  “Jura.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Wish to End Hunger is done. I’m wishless. Useless.” My throat went tight. “Good for nothin’ but scrubbing floors.”

  Jura jerked her chin back. “Genuine!”

  “What?” I asked. “It’s true. I’m nothing but Dangerous Dale Sweet’s shine-less, free-lunch daughter.”

  She poked me on the shoulder. “Quit that! I mean it! You may be wishless, but you are not shine-less! I can’t even count the number of people in this town you’ve helped—”

  I cut in, “With wishes.”

  Jura set her hands firm on her hips. “When biscuit numbers were running thin, did you tell people in need, Good luck with that, Genuine’s off the clock? No! You figured out the whole Sass barter thing—neighbors helping neighbors. That’s what you do! You help! You care! There is nothing useless about that!”

  I was about to deny it. But just then, ever so faintly, in one lone corner of my mind, a few shimmering notes rang out. I could have sworn silver light flashed in the glass of a nearby windshield.

  “Hey, uh . . . Jura?”

  “Stop arguing with me! I’m—”

  “I ain’t arguing,” I told her.

  “You ain’t?” She paused. “You’re not?”

  “No. Hold up.” I waited to see if the notes would sound again.

  They did.

  I know it might have only been a wish that I’d heard it, or a memory of a song I’d known before. But I let it speak to me. And finally, I thought I was starting to understand. All shall be well.

  I reached out and squeezed my friend’s hand. “You’re right kind, Jura, and I thank you. But hush, now. I’ve got an idea. We’ve got to get back to work. Wish to End Hunger might not have to close up shop after all.”

  We called it the Sass Unstoppable Barter Alliance, and it was a way for poor and hungry folks to do for themselves when no one else could—or would—help them.

  “Like Cornucopio,” Jura said, making herself comfortable in the library chair. “But more . . . Genuine.”

  Jura set us up a website where people could volunteer as scouts, as we called ’em. The scouts would go into their towns and start making lists—just like Jura and I had done in Sass. Who had what, who needed what. Then, the volunteers would post their lists at the SUBA site. On our end, Jura and I would watch for “needs” that couldn’t be met locally and start pairing them up with far-off “haves”—farmers with surplus food crops, for instance. The “haves” would have “needs,” too, so everyone got something, and no one felt less-than. It would be tricky, we figured, sometimes rassling the lists of three and four communities to make sure everyone’s haves and needs got met, but with Jura’s computer smarts, we’d soon have a fancy math formula that would do most of the work for us. Much easier that baking biscuits till four in the morning!

  “The main thing is, how do we get a bunch of corn from Pitney, Georgia, all the way to, say, Sydney, Australia?” I asked. “Shipping things that won’t fit in the mail. That’s gonna be the hard part.”

  “Don’t forget, Genuine, you’re a newsmaker!” Jura walked past the dispatch desk and snatched up a New York Times. She flipped a few pages, then handed it to me.

  There it was, right next to an article about unseasonable heavy rains in the South. GEORGIA GIRL GRANTS WISHES. It was a tiny speck of a thing, but maybe it would be enough.

  Jura put on her best Sass accent. “We got to capitalize on all this media ruckus, little missy! Call up that-there Kathleen Kroeger and tell her to make herself useful!”

  “That was terrible!” I laughed.

  “Turrible accent,” she agreed, “but a mighty fine notion.” Switching back to citified Jura, she added, sifting through her satchel, “When we get your message out, people will be lining up to help. Here. I think I’ve got Kroeger’s number written in my—Yes, here. Call her.”

  I gritted my teeth at the thought of another meeting with Kathleen Kroeger, but in the end, it turned out not to be so bad. We held the interview in front of the school, so I was dressed in regular clothes and ol’ Drunken Dale was nowhere in sight. Miz Kroeger was eager to help us promote anything that might bring her the “international audience” she was “born to reach.” Plus, the newswoman was so enchanted by Scree Hopkins—who’d been lured by all the cameras—that she hired Scree on the spot as her rural correspondent and intern.

  21

  A Genuine Sweet

  JURA AND I WERE PUZZLING OUT THE WHATS AND wherefores of SUBA till nearly nine. We knew we were onto something good, and might have even kept on till ten, had the weather not started to turn sour.

  It began with a howling wind—and I mean that. If you’ve never heard a wind howl, you may think it’s a figure of speech, but it ain’t. It didn’t take more than a few noisy gusts to convince us we had to head home.

  By the time we were halfway along Main Street, the rain was pelting down. It was a sudden, heavy storm, with sharp drops that felt like little needles on the skin.

  “We can’t walk home in this!” Jura shouted over the din.

  “Maybe Ham will give us a ride. He’s just closing.” I began splashing my way across the street. The sock in my sole-broken shoe turned instantly soggy.

  Ham’s door was locked, but our frantic knocking brought him out of the kitchen. He squinted at us through the door, saw who we were, and let us in.

  “Creation! Get in here!”

  We hurried inside.

  “Can you give us a ride home, Ham?” I asked, dripping all over his freshly mopped floor.

  He nodded. “Gimme two shakes. I was just locking up. Y’all grab yourselves an apple fritter.”

  A few minutes later, Jura and I squeezed into the cab of Ham’s truck.

  “I don’t know if your daddy’s apt to be home, Genuine,” Ham said as we drove. That was his nice way of saying, Your dad
dy could be dead drunk, anywhere. “I don’t like the thought of you alone in all this weather. Think your ma would mind if Genuine spent the night, Jura?”

  Jura said she was sure her ma and her auntie would be fine with that.

  We pulled up to Jura’s house. A face appeared in the window and disappeared. A few seconds later, Miz Carver—who was as tall and round as Jura was petite and lean—appeared on the porch, opened an umbrella, and ran out to greet us.

  “Thanks, Ham!” She waited for us to climb out, then waved Ham away with a friendly, “Now, go home! Before you have to swim there!” As she escorted us to the house, she poked each of us in turn. “Where have you been? You don’t call your mama when you’re running late?”

  Inside, we started peeling off our wet clothes.

  Miz Carver handed us towels for our hair. “Go upstairs and put some dry things on. You are staying the night, aren’t you, Genuine?”

  “Yes, ma’am. If you don’t mind.”

  She laughed. “Mind? You two have been joined at the hip for a month, and I haven’t even had a chance to show you my collection of Fisk fuel extraction converters!”

  “Mom!” Jura protested.

  “I’m joking!” Miz Carver replied. “Unless you want to see them, Genuine?”

  “Mom!”

  “You don’t know what you’re miss-ing,” Jura’s ma sang. “Fine. Go change. And hurry. A glass of warm milk and then it’s off to bed with you. It’s already—” She glanced at the clock. “Lordy, it’s already past ten!”

  Miz Carver tucked Jura and me into her big bed and kindly said she’d take the foldout sofa downstairs. Jura’s auntie Trish said she’d hear none of that—that we girls couldn’t have all the fun of a slumber party and leave the women out. Aunt Trish promptly grabbed an armful of pillows and blankets and joined Miz Carver on the sofa bed.

  We could hear their glad, sisterly chatter between the breaks in the wind—till we fell asleep, at least.

  Thanks to the rough weather the next morning, TV reception was reduced to pure static. The radio was clear enough, though: school had been canceled on account of rain. Government offices were closed and so was Ham’s, the grocery, and every other business in town. Every thinking person should stay in, because a number of the main roads were flooded and more rain was on the way.

  “Does this happen a lot?” Jura asked me while us four women sat around the radio with blankets snug on our shoulders.

  “Hardly ever,” I told her. “But then, our autumns aren’t usually as wet as this one, either. The only other time I remember, I was real small. I think some of the low-lying houses got evacuated.”

  “Are we low-lying?” Miz Carver asked her sister.

  “Not especially,” Jura’s auntie replied. “I don’t think.”

  Jura and I exchanged a worried glance.

  By two that afternoon, the winds had picked up again and the electric went out. We found some batteries for the radio, but the DJ said he may not be broadcasting for much longer. The station’s generator was hiccoughing and the backup broke last winter.

  “If you’re out there, Genuine Sweet,” the DJ joked, “wish me up some repairs!”

  It was nearly six p.m., and the rain still hadn’t stopped. The water had crept up to the front door, and the house began to smell of damp.

  “What should we do?” Jura wondered aloud.

  “Don’t suppose you can wish the rain away?” Miz Carver asked me.

  “No, ma’am,” I replied. “Sorry.”

  We didn’t sleep at all that night. The ceiling sprang a leak, and despite the caterwauling of the rain and wind, it was the dripping sound that kept us up.

  The only food we had left was salty canned or salty bagged. The tap water was contaminated from the storm, and we didn’t have any electricity to boil it. We were thirsty.

  Still the rain went on.

  Around eight the next morning, a boat floated up to the house. It was Ham and his dog, Meaty, who greeted us gladly, his pink tongue a-flopping.

  “Lotta rain!” Ham shouted. “We’re all of us gathering at the Community Center. They got generators and food, and a whole mess of bottled water.”

  Jura and me climbed in first, then Miz Carver and her sister.

  It took nearly an hour to row to the Community Center. It sat on the tallest hill in town—and even its parking lot was a little flooded. The rain, for now, was only a drizzle, but more fat, dark clouds loomed in the distance.

  “It’s got to stop sometime,” Ham observed.

  We clambered from the boat and half walked, half climbed to a dry spot on the hill. Through the windows of the building, we could see lights on inside. I couldn’t help sighing my relief. Just seeing those lights after so long without electricity was proof, somehow, that something normal still existed in the world.

  It was a strange thing to see pretty much everyone I knew sitting around on cots, every one of us greasy-haired and smelly from worry and lack of clean water.

  It was even stranger to see the hope bloom on their faces when I arrived.

  “It’s Genuine!” someone whispered.

  “Thank goodness!” another someone replied.

  People stood up. They smiled. They gathered ’round.

  You know what they wanted, of course. They wanted me to wish away the storm.

  “Leave her be,” Ham shouted. “She’s tired like the rest of you. She’ll get to it when she’s good and ready.”

  “Our houses’ll float away if she waits too long,” someone said.

  “She can rest after she wishes all this water away.” It was Chickenlady Snopes.

  “Please—” I said softly to Ham.

  He looked down at me.

  “I can’t,” I told him.

  “That’s what I said,” he spoke to me, but loudly enough for other folks to hear. “Too tired to wish anything right now. Of course you are.”

  “No. Ham.” I tugged on his sleeve. “I really can’t. The magic’s gone.”

  He looked at me as if my words didn’t make sense. “For real?”

  I nodded.

  “Dang.” He deflated before my eyes.

  I nodded again.

  The voices around us grew louder and keener—some of them angry, even. Why hadn’t I fixed the flooding already? Didn’t I know people was losing their homes? Fairly irresponsible of me to let things get this far out of hand. Guess I took after my pa after all—born tired and raised lazy.

  They crowded around me. They made faces and pointed fingers. They were, all of them, full-grown tall, and I was feeling mighty overwhelmed.

  “Hey!” a voice called.

  Like a school of guppies, everyone turned at once.

  Travis stood on top of a crate of canned peas, waving his arms wildly. “Quit your bellyachin’ and back the blazes off!”

  When they saw it was Travis, most folks turned my way again and carried on with their complaining.

  Travis wasn’t deterred. “Hello! Stupid people of Sass!”

  That got their attention.

  “Y’all seem to think this girl owes you something!” he shouted.

  “Them what has, does,” Jerry Tatum shouted in reply.

  “I think you mean, them what has, gets, Jerry,” Travis called back. “As in, them what has a lick of sense gets off their butts and solves their own problems.” He folded his arms over his chest. “Do you realize you’re expecting a twelve-year-old kid to save you from an act of nature? Now, I know as well as anyone that Genuine is a magical girl.” He met my eyes and nodded. “But is it fair—or even moral—to lay your troubles at her feet? In this town, of all places?”

  “Heck, yeah!” Ruby Hughes hollered unprettily. “All she has to do is snap her fingers and the storm’s gone! You think we can do that for ourselves?”

  Ruby glared at me, full of hate. I couldn’t help thinking back to the day in the girls’ bathroom, when she’d gotten so mad because I wouldn’t wish up her horse tack. Any fool can
wish on a stupid star, she’d said. Ruby had been spouting nonsense out of anger and spite, but . . .

  Any fool can wish on a stupid star.

  Huh.

  Following Travis’s example, I grabbed a chair and stood on it. “Maybe you can! Have you tried?”

  “We ain’t no wish fetchers!” Dirk Yardley shouted.

  I was running out of patience. Did I mention? It really clumps my grits when people give up easy.

  “How do you know?” I called back.

  Oh, they didn’t like that at all. There was grumbling and griping, and I think someone even spit.

  Sheriff Thrasher appeared at my side. He had his hands on his belt and a no-nonsense look on his face. “That’s enough, now, Genuine. It’s time to wish the flood away.”

  “I’m sorry, sir,” I said, still on top of the chair. “I really can’t. I broke the wish fetcher’s first rule, and now my magic’s gone.”

  Somebody threw a balled-up piece of paper at me. Travis was off his crate in a flash, making his way through the crowd toward me.

  Meanwhile, I heard somebody say, “Arrest her, Sheriff!”

  A choir of other voices agreed.

  Sheriff Thrasher looked one way and then the other, like he was thinking it over. “All right, Genuine, I can see you need some time to get back to right thinking.” Turning his eye toward the rumbling posse, he added, “And these folks need some time to cool off. Let’s go.”

  “You’re joking, Mike!” Ham exclaimed.

  “Take your hands off her, you cull!” Travis shouted.

  Suddenly, I was struck with the silliness of the situation. I laughed. “You can’t honestly mean to row me to the jail, Sheriff?”

  The sheriff tugged me away from the throng to a gray door that said STAFF. Somebody had stuck a little yellow piece of notepaper to it that read Jail.

  “It’s for your own good, girl. Git.” Sheriff Thrasher opened the door, nudged me into what was plainly a broom closet, and locked the door behind me.