It’s so weird.
It feels like everything in my life is changing, but some things don’t.
I still have to go to school.
And I still have to sit through reports as if everything is normal.
Jimmy Russell and Bobby Clifford get up to give their reports.
I, Amber Brown, can’t believe that Mrs. Holt let them be a team. They goof around so much.
“We are the Billington brothers,” Jimmy Russell and Bobby Clifford say at exactly the same time.
“I am John, and I was seven when the Mayflower came over to America,” Jimmy says. “And I almost blew up the Mayflower with gunpowder when it got to Plymouth.”
It’s obvious that Jimmy likes the character he is playing.
“And I am Francis, and I was nine. During our first winter in Massachusetts, I climbed a tree and saw a lot of water. I thought it was the Pacific, but it was a large pond.”
“Quiet,” Mrs. Holt says.
Bobby says, “Yeah, quiet…. They named the pond ‘Billington Sea.’”
“Double duh,” Hal says quietly.
Then Bobby and Jimmy tell how the Billingtons were TROUBLE…. How John got lost in the woods for days, and how the Indians found him and helped him return. How their father was so bad that he was one of the few people arrested during the Pilgrims’ first year in America because he wouldn’t stand watch … and how he was hanged nine years later because he killed someone.
Now this is interesting Thanksgiving information, I think. How come no one ever told us all of this before?
This is such a great report they are giving that I wonder if they are telling the truth.
I look at Mrs. Holt to see if she’s going to yell at them for making this all up, but she doesn’t. In fact, when they are finished, she tells them what a good job they did.
Then she tells us how the Pilgrims who were going to the “New World” for religious reasons called themselves the “Saints” and all the others the “Strangers.” She says the Billingtons were part of the “Strangers” group.
That explains why Bobby and Jimmy did such a good job…. They are a little strange themselves.
I’m not sure I like the way the Pilgrims labeled the people who weren’t them.
Next, Hannah Burton and Hal Henry get up.
“I am a Pilgrim mother,” she says.
“I am a Pilgrim father,” Hal says.
I, Amber Brown, think that these two Pilgrims are definitely not “Saints” …… that both of them are “Strangers.”
Pilgrim mothers ……
Pilgrim fathers …….
I start thinking about my own mother and father.
I feel more like a Pilgrim turkey than a Pilgrim child…. And if I can’t decide what I am going to do this Thanksgiving, my goose is cooked.
I think about it…. How can a turkey think about having a goose that is cooked? What does it really mean to have a goose cooked? Max is always saying that when we are watching television and someone gets into trouble. “His goose is cooked” is what he always says. And why do people call other people “turkeys”? I also wonder if someone could goose a turkey. These are a few of the things that I think about while I should be listening to the report.
I kind of giggle when I think about someone goosing a turkey. Maybe that’s what it’s called when my mother goes into the turkey and pulls out one of those plastic bags filled with turkey parts, like the gizzard and liver and heart and whatever. She says that the first Thanksgiving dinner she cooked, she didn’t know that it was in there, so she cooked the bird with the bag still inside, mixed in with the stuffing.
I wonder what the real first Thanksgiving would have been like if a Pilgrim mother had done something like that. Probably they didn’t have plastic bags then, though.
I wonder what’s going to happen if Mrs. Holt realizes that I’m not paying attention to the report.
Maybe if I paid attention to the report, I would find out more about geese and turkeys, but I, Amber Brown, have a lot on my mind.
Tonight’s the night that my father gets back to America.
I look over at the clock on the wall to see how many hours until his plane arrives.
Five more hours …. and then he has to go through customs, rent a car, leave the airport, and go to the Donaldsons’ house, where he is going to stay until he finds an apartment.
The Donaldsons used to be friends of my parents, until my parents got a divorce…. But after the divorce they were just friends of my dad’s. Mom says that in the divorce settlement, he got custody of the Donaldsons. She’s kidding, I think.
I look at the clock again. Four hours and fifty-three minutes until he is in America…. And then, as soon as he can, he’ll come over to our house. He and I get to go out to dinner. Then we’ll come back home, and he and Mom and I will talk.
I can’t wait.
I look at the clock again.
This time, Mrs. Holt is standing under the clock and looking at me.
Quickly, I look back at the Pilgrim father and mother, Hal and Hannah.
I use the Amber Brown technique of looking interested even when I’m not.
I pick out something on their faces that I can stare at.
Hal has a little scar above his left eyebrow.
Hannah has a milk mustache.
I am so glad that Hannah has a milk mustache and that no one told her before her report.
I stare first at the scar and then at the mustache.
That way I look very interested.
Sometimes I make a little nod so that it looks like I’m thinking about what has been said.
I only hope that Mrs. Holt doesn’t give us a quiz on this as soon as the report is over.
She doesn’t.
Hannah hands out a list of the real Thanksgiving Day menu, reminding us that it was cooked by four women.
Hal hands out a list of all the known people at the first Thanksgiving Day dinner.
It’s kind of weird.
Mrs. Holt says that it wasn’t even called Thanksgiving Day when it first happened … and she gives us a lot of the real facts.
This would be very interesting if I didn’t have so much on my mind.
The only fact that I really want to know is which parent I spend Thanksgiving Day with this year.
And no one else in the world has the answer to that but me.
And I, Amber Brown, don’t have that answer yet.
