“It really looks like she’s painting,” Weird Harold tells me on the last day of winter break. He’s leaning against our front gate, staring at our yard. His breath explodes out into the air as he talks.
“Thanks,” I say, beaming like a thousand-watt lightbulb. Somehow, getting a compliment on my company is better than having a teacher tell me I’m clever, or overhearing a couple of girls in the bathroom saying that I really am kind of pretty, despite my crazy hair.
The last person we added, just yesterday afternoon (the same one that Weird Harold is staring at in admiration), is a girl who loves to paint the outdoors. She’s standing in front of an easel that holds a big tile with an outdoor design on it. Gus and I have put a piece of wood cut like an artist’s palette in one of her hands and a paintbrush in the other. I’ve even added an old beret to the top of her head.
“I love the way that none of the people in your yard look like they’ve ever wanted to be anywhere else,” Weird Harold says. It’s the prettiest thing he’s ever said to me. Right then, everything seems calm and perfect, for a little while.
But then, Harold nudges me. “You get your mail yet?”
The warm cocoa he’d put in my stomach turns into a popsicle. “Why?”
“It came. To my house,” Harold confesses.
“The reevaluation?” I screech.
He nods.
“It’s already come?” I remember the flash from Victoria’s camera, and get hot and cold all over. I hadn’t expected the reevaluation to be just another picture taken back to the committee. Somehow, I’d been expecting something loud and full of trumpets—like a parade.
He doesn’t even get his entire second nod in when I start to race across the street, to our mailbox, where I find our own notice from the House Beautification Committee. My throat feels clamped off as I tear open the envelope:
ATTENTION
AUGUST JONES
An Individual Residing at 779 Sunshine Street
Willow Grove, Missouri
Following our reassessment, we have deemed the property located at the above address to be in violation of the following city ordinances:
1. Inoperable Machinery on Premises
2. Improper Maintenance of Property
3. Abundance of Trash on Property
The previous twenty-dollar ($20) per-day fines have accumulated to nine hundred dollars ($900).
Due to additional violations and recent accumulation of trash, Mr. August Jones, property owner, will hereby be fined one hundred dollars ($100) each day the property remains in violation.
Payment can be made at City Hall.
Thank you,
The House Beautification Committee
(Making our city beautiful, one house at a time.)
I feel sick. Trash? They think we live around trash?
I glance back at my front yard, at the painting girl that Harold had just been admiring. How can this be?
“Trash?” I ask Harold, finally managing to say the word out loud. “Trash is stacked up, piled high—like at McGunn’s. How can figures like ours, that we’ve turned into something wonderful, be trash? And we don’t have inoperable machinery—look! Our motors move! According to this, they even fined us during all that time they were reevaluating. How can that be fair?”
Weird Harold takes a deep breath. “You’re finally starting to ask some of the right questions,” he tells me.