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comes home.

Chapter
Eleven

    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,” JimmyRussell 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.”

    “Duh,” Hal Henry calls out.
    “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?
    I look at Bobby and Jimmy.
    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 thethings 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