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Show Moon - 45 roses, and a crabapple tree with marvelous twisted branches. She went to school on a yellow bus all the other kids rode in and she didn't have to worry about getting off at the right stop. The kids weren't as rough here, and though none of them talked to her much because she was a stranger, she became sort of famous for her drawings of trees and flowers, which she passed around the classroom when the teacher wasn't looking. "They look like they're alive," the kids would say, pointing to the sketches drawn in quick, wild strokes of pencil. "They look almost like people. They're spooky." She had trouble following what the teacher was saying, as if she were listening through a smudged pane of glass. She thought she wasn't smart, which made her sad because there was so much she wanted to know. The other children seemed to know how to make jokes and how to be mean when they were angry. This was a great mystery. How could people be ^o sure of things? Even so, she was finding some good ways of being in the world. She'd begun ballet lessons, and soon became the best in her class. Being best wasn't what she wanted, for it made the other girls slide their eyes away from her and whisper things she couldn't hear. But she loved the ache in her muscles telling her what her body was learning. And to be able to spin and leap to beautiful music was more wonderful even than swaying in the tops of trees. In springtime after the rain stopped, her mother took down the lacy curtains, washed them in a tub of suds, and stretched them on a wooden rack, lifting up the edges of the curtains over little nails studded around the frame. For dinner she made pineapple upsidedown cake and roast beef and gravy. She sang as she worked, and Joy studied her mother, saw her as an important |