After dinner that night, I took my championship rodeo belt buckle off my belt and started polishing it, the way I do every evening. It’s oval-shaped and silver, with a picture of a horse rearing up on its back legs, and I put it on first thing every day, along with jeans, a T-shirt, and a pair of Keds tennis shoes. I’m not by any stretch of the imagination a fancy dresser, but I think my rodeo belt buckle shows a little flair. It was a gift to me from Mr. Willis, who found it at a flea market over in Cranberry one afternoon.
“Where’d you get that?” Murphy asked when she saw me hold the buckle up to the light and inspect it for marks. “Did you ever ride in a rodeo?” She got up from her bed, where she’d been staring up at the ceiling like she was studying it for a test, and walked over to my desk. “Can I see it?”
I handed her the buckle, suddenly a little scared she was going to steal it from me and claim it as her own. A girl in second grade had taken my favorite drawing pad from me once and went so far as to tell everyone she’d drawn the pictures in it. I’d considered almost everyone I met a little untrustworthy ever since.
“A friend gave it to me,” I told her. She peered at it closely, as though she were making sure it wasn’t a fake. “I know it’s on the small side, but I’m pretty sure it’s real.”
“Oh, it’s real all right,” Murphy said, nodding like an expert. “I knew a boy once who was a famous rodeo star, and he had twenty or thirty of these in a trunk in his room. I’d know if this one were fake.”
She walked back to her bed still carrying the belt buckle, and I had to keep myself from jumping over to snatch it back from her. When she went on talking, it was like she was having a conversation with the buckle, not me, since she never once looked me in the eye.
“This boy grew up on a ranch in Arizona, so riding horses was like walking to him, and breaking colts was something he’d been doing since he was a little kid. He started riding in rodeos when he was really young, too, and he was pretty good, but he wasn’t the best, and he was the kind of kid who wanted to be the best at whatever he did.”
“So what did he do?” I asked, inching my chair closer to her bed, in part to let Murphy know I was interested in what she had to say, in part to lunge for her if she tried to make a break for it with my belt buckle.
Murphy balanced the buckle on the palm of her hand. “He went east to live with his aunt. I don’t know if you ever heard of Ocracoke Island, but that’s where he went because that’s where they have wild ponies. Worse than wild. Those ponies were feral.”
“Doesn’t feral just mean wild?”
Murphy shook her head, still not looking at me. “You might think so, but they’re two different words completely. Feral is wild to the furthest degree. No one could ever break those ponies or even get near them. But this boy, he figured out how to talk to the ponies. For hundreds of years, people had been trying to break the feral ponies of Ocracoke Island, and this boy finally learned the secret. After that, he was never bucked from a horse again. If you know anything about rodeo, you’d know his name.”
I had to admit that I didn’t know a thing in the world about rodeo. “But what was the secret?” I asked, reaching for my buckle and feeling relieved when Murphy handed it back to me.
“Poetry,” Murphy said. “He told them poems, and after awhile they got so hungry to hear them, they’d do anything he asked.”
Murphy’s story made me want to draw something, which is usually how a good story affects me. I was about to ask her if she wanted some paper and pencils, thinking she might want to draw too, but before I had a chance, she’d already flipped off her desk light and headed out of the room.
Later, when I was lying in bed, I tried to figure out whether Murphy liked me or not. Every time I thought she wanted to be friends, she up and walked out the door. Maybe she thought I was too boring to be her friend. After all, she’d traveled all over the world and had artifacts hanging over her bed. What did I have? A belt buckle? No wonder she wasn’t the least bit interested.
Just when I’d halfway decided to give up on ever being friends with Murphy, her voice reached across the dark alley between our beds.
“Hey, Maddie,” she whispered. “Look at the clock.”
The digital clock on my desk read 11:11.
“What about it?”
“Make a wish. Whatever you wish for at 11:11 will come true.”
I thought about it for two seconds. “Okay, I wish for a million dollars.”
“Don’t tell your wish! Keep it to yourself. And make it serious.”
“A million dollars isn’t serious?”
“Of course not,” Murphy said. “It’s not even important.”
“You’ll get another chance in the morning,” Murphy whispered. “So make it something good.”
I closed my eyes and thought of good things to wish for. I would wish for Murphy to like me, even if she was exotic and interesting and I was just myself. I’d wish for Granny Lane to get her eyesight back and for Mr. Willis to win the Upper Room magazine essay contest, which he tried for every year. And right before I fell asleep, I decided to wish for a million dollars. Maybe it wasn’t important, but it sure would come in handy.
The next morning Corinne and her husband, Dan, loaded up the dorm van with everyone who went to the middle school and drove us to school. We usually had to ride the bus that pulled up at the end of the drive every morning at 7:30, but Corinne and Dan had to take Murphy to the front office to sign her in, so we all got to ride. I made sure to sit next to Murphy so I could point out the few spots of interest between the East Tennessee Children’s Home and Lawton Crockett Middle School.
“So do you know whose homeroom you’ll be in?” I asked her as the van neared the school.
“The paper they gave me says I’m in room one hundred and twenty-four,” Murphy said, leaning her head against the window. She sounded bored with school already. “Mrs. Cattrell. But I switch out for math, to the accelerated class.”
I was impressed. Not many of the foster-care children I knew were in the accelerated classes. I was in accelerated reading, but that’s just because I’d been reading since I was four. Mr. Virgil Willis taught me. Every morning he’d bring over the Johnson City Press, and we’d read through the sports section. As a result, I have an encyclopedic knowledge of baseball, which hasn’t come in handy so far, but you never know.
“I’m in Mr. Sanders’ class. We sit next to Mrs. Cattrell’s at lunch,” I told Murphy, “and they don’t care if we mix up tables. So we can eat together.”
“Girl, you talk too much in the morning,” Donita said, reaching out her foot to kick me lightly on the shin. “Fact is, you talk too much all the time.”
I knew she was just joking, because if she hadn’t been, she would have kicked me a lot harder. Me and Donita had always gotten along real well, even if we weren’t best friends. She and Kandy had naturally gotten matched up together, on account of them arriving at the Home at the same time and both of them from Knoxville. But I liked how Donita always had some interesting project going on. Last summer she started a green-bean business, growing beans in our garden and selling them to the congregation of the First Baptist Church after Sunday services, and lately she’d been talking about taking a correspondence course in how to speak Japanese so she could be an international businesswoman one day.
“I’m just trying to give Murphy some important information about her new environment,” I told Donita. “I’m trying to be helpful here.”
“Miss Murphy Oil Soap can eat lunch without your help,” Donita said, kicking my other shin. “She don’t need you there to hold her hand.”
“I’ll see you at lunch, don’t forget,” I called to Murphy after we arrived at school, and she was headed toward the main office with Dan and Corinne. She nodded without turning her head, but I was pretty sure she’d heard me.
When lunchtime came around, I carried my tray, with its taco, salad, beans, and Jell-O square, out into the cafeteria, searching for Murphy. I expected that she’d be sitting all by herself, looking lonely, hoping that I’d be there any minute to save her from the humiliation of eating alone.
Which was why it was such a surprise to see Murphy with her head thrown back, laughing like she’d heard the funniest thing in the world, and Logan Parrish beside her chewing on a taco, smiling and smiling.