Rabble Starkey by Lois Lowry

"A
nut
tree, that's what it would be."
    Secretly I was glad that Veronica was laughing again, same as before, because I surely didn't know what to do when she cried.

6
    I find it powerfully amazing how things go on just the same even after some enormous change has taken place.
    Places where they have great earthquakes, when skyscrapers and hotels fall down and holes open up in the ground and swallow cows and cars? People go on living there, and after a while they build other buildings and buy new cows and cars, and talk about gossip and weather and such. Just as if the thing never happened.
    When Dorothy got back to Kansas after being in Oz? She probably just went back to school, same as always, and took spelling tests and played kickball at recess, I expect.
    I bet anything she had nightmares now and then, though.
    Me and Veronica, we went back to school on Monday morning, and she even handed in her original family tree with her mother's name. Nobody—not
even Norman Cox—said nothing about what had happened, though they all knew. In Highriver, when there's trouble, everyone knows.
    Mrs. Hindler hung all the family trees around the room, right out there for everyone to see. Nobody objected, but I thought it was real tasteless to do that, exposing everybody's family like that. Maybe there was stuff people didn't want anyone to know. I didn't go up close to examine them or nothing, but just from my desk I could see some stuff I hadn't known before—like Diane Briggs had one time had a sister who died. There it was, on her tree: Shirley Ann, Dec., age 1.
    And over on the other wall—I couldn't see it real plain from my desk, and I surely didn't want to go up and peer intently at it—but it appeared that Parker Condon's grandmother had been married two times. Now wouldn't you think that should be kept private?
    I like Mrs. Hindler a lot, but I believe she doesn't understand about privacy very well. All those secrets were there hanging around the sixth grade room exposed, and for all I could tell, she planned to let them hang there all year.
    Corrine Foster's mother was expecting a baby around Thanksgiving.
That
surely wasn't a secret, what with all the baby showers people was giving for her already. Fifty people came to the one down at the Presbyterian church, and she got so many little jumpsuits that Sweet-Ho said she wouldn't even need to wash them, she could throw them away after each wearing, though of course it would be wasteful. I
wondered if Corrine would climb on a chair with a crayon to add a new little-bitty apple to her tree when the baby came.
    There hung Mrs. Bigelow, the mother apple on Veronica's tree. Of course no one sneaked over to climb up and pencil in "Crazy" after her name, but I wondered if the thought might be in people's heads.
    There hung my tree, with the father apple crayoned in "Ginger Starkey" with his date of birth, and no one asked "Who's he?" (course they could see, he was my father) or worse: "
Where's
he?" I wondered if people thought it should be penciled in: Gone. Which is, of course, a form of dec.
    It was time for English, and we all sat there at our desks, expecting that Mrs. Hindler would say, same as always, "Get out your
Understanding Grammar
books, people." But she didn't. Instead, she picked up a fat book off her own desk and held it up.
    "Who here has heard of a thesaurus?" she asked.
    Stupid old Roger Watkins shot up his hand fast as anything. I laughed inside myself. Roger Watkins never
listened;
he always just shot up his hand and gave wrong answers.
    Mrs. Hindler looked around to see if anybody else wanted to answer. But Roger Watkins was the only one, and finally she called on him, though you could tell she didn't want to. He was waving and waving his grubby old hand in the air.
    "Our bull is named that," he said. Everybody in the class burst out laughing, all but Mrs. Hindler.
    "Your
what?
" she asked, with her face all puzzled.
    "Our bull is named