The Great Gilly Hopkins Book Read Online Free

  The Great Gilly Hopkins

Katherine Paterson

Dedication

For Mary

from her existent

and adopted mother

with love

Contents

Dedication

Welcome to Thompson Park

The Man Who Comes to Supper

More than Unpleasant Surprises

"Sarsaparilla to Sorcery"

William Ernest and Other Mean Flowers

Harassing Miss Harris

Dust and Desperation

The One-Style Ticket

Pow

The Visitor

Never and Other Canceled Promises

The Going

Jackson, Virginia

She'll Be Riding Six White Horses (When She Comes)

Homecoming

About the Author

Also by Katherine Paterson

Credits

Copyright

About the Publisher

WELCOME TO THOMPSON PARK

"Gilly," said Miss Ellis with a milkshake of her long blonde hair toward the passenger in the back seat. "I need to experience that you lot are willing to brand some effort."

Galadriel Hopkins shifted her bubble glue to the front of her mouth and began to blow gently. She blew until she could barely come across the shape of the social worker's caput through the pink bubble.

"This volition exist your tertiary home in less than 3 years." Miss Ellis swept her aureate head left to right and then began to turn the bicycle in a cautious maneuver to the left. "I would be the last person to say that information technology was all your fault. The Dixons' move to Florida, for instance. Just one of those unfortunate things. And Mrs. Richmond having to go into the hospital"—it seemed to Gilly that in that location was a long, thoughtful pause before the caseworker went on—"for her nerves."

Pop!

Miss Ellis flinched and glanced in the rear-view mirror but continued to talk in her calm, professional voice while Gilly picked at the bits of gum stuck in her straggly bangs and on her cheeks and chin. "We should take been more alert to her status before placing whatever foster child there. I should have been more alarm." Cripes, thought Gilly. The woman was getting sincere. What a pain. "I'm non trying to blame y'all, Gilly. Information technology's merely that I need, we all need, your cooperation if whatsoever kind of arrangement is to work out." Some other break. "I can't imagine you enjoy all this moving around." The blue eyes in the mirror were checking out Gilly'south response. "Now this new foster mother is very different from Mrs. Nevins." Gilly calmly pinched a blob of gum off the end of her olfactory organ. At that place was no utilize trying to get the gum out of her hair. She sat back and tried to chew the bit she had managed to salve. It stuck to her teeth in a sparse layer. She fished another ball of gum from her jeans pocket and scraped the lint off with her thumbnail before elaborately popping information technology into her mouth.

"Volition you practise me a favor, Gilly? Try to get off on the correct human foot?"

Gilly had a vision of herself sailing around the living room of the foster home on her right foot similar an ice skater. With her uplifted left foot she was shoving the adjacent foster mother foursquare in the mouth. She smacked her new supply of glue in satisfaction.

"Do me another favor, will y'all? Get rid of that bubble gum earlier we go there?"

Gilly obligingly took the gum out of her mouth while Miss Ellis's eyes were all the same in the mirror. Then when the social worker turned her attention back to the traffic, Gilly carefully spread the gum under the handle of the left-hand door every bit a glutinous surprise for the next person who might endeavor to open up it.

Two traffic lights farther on Miss Ellis handed back a towelette. "Here," she said, "encounter what you can practice most that guck on your confront earlier we become there."

Gilly swiped the little wet paper across her oral fissure and dropped it on the flooring.

"Gilly—" Miss Ellis sighed and shifted her fancy on-the-floor gears. "Gilly—"

"My name," Gilly said between her teeth, "is Galadriel."

Miss Ellis appeared not to have heard. "Gilly, give Maime Trotter half a chance, OK? She's really a nice person."

That cans it, thought Gilly. At to the lowest degree nobody had accused Mr. or Mrs. Nevins, her most recent foster parents, of beingness "squeamish." Mrs. Richmond, the one with the bad nerves, had been "overnice." The Newman family, who couldn't keep a five-year-old who wet her bed, had been "dainty." Well, I'm eleven now, folks, and, in case yous haven't heard, I don't wet my bed anymore. But I am not prissy. I am vivid. I am famous beyond this unabridged county. Nobody wants to tangle with the swell Galadriel Hopkins. I am as well clever and too hard to manage. Gruesome Gilly, they call me. She leaned back comfortably. Here I come, Maime infant, prepare or not.

They had reached a neighborhood of huge trees and one-time houses. The social worker slowed and stopped beside a dirty white fence. The house it penned was former and brown with a porch that gave it a sort of potbelly.

Standing on the porch, before she rang the bell, Miss Ellis took out a comb. "Would you endeavor to pull this through your hair?"

Gilly shook her head. "Tin can't."

"Oh, come on, Gilly—"

"No. Can't comb my hair. I'm going for the Guiness Tape for uncombed hair."

"Gilly, for pete's sake…"

"Hey, there, I thought I heard y'all pull up." The door had opened, and a huge hippopotamus of a woman was filling the doorway. "Welcome to Thompson Park, Gilly, beloved."

"Galadriel," muttered Gilly, not that she expected this bale of blubber to manage her real name. Jeez, they didn't have to put her in with a freak.

Half a small face, topped with muddy brown pilus and masked with thick metal-rimmed glasses, jutted out from backside Mrs. Trotter'southward mammoth hip.

The woman looked downward. "Well, 'scuse me, dearest." She put her arm effectually the caput as if to draw it frontwards, merely the caput resisted movement. "You want to meet your new sister, don't you lot? Gilly, this is William Ernest Teague."

The head immediately disappeared behind Mrs. Trotter's bulk. She didn't seem bothered. "Come in, come in. I don't mean to leave yous continuing on the porch like you was trying to sell me something. You belong here now." She backed up. Gilly could feel Miss Ellis's fingers on her backbone gently prodding her through the doorway and into the house.

Inside, it was night and crammed with junk. Everything seemed to need dusting.

"William Ernest, honey, yous want to show Gilly where her room is?"

William Ernest clung to the back of Mrs. Trotter's flowered housedress, shaking his caput.

"Oh, well, we can see to that later." She led them downward the hallway to a living room. "Just sit down and make yourself at domicile, now." She smiled all across her face at Gilly, like the "Later" in a magazine diet ad—a "Earlier" body with an "After" smile.

The burrow was dark-brown and squat with a pile of cushions covered in graying lace at the far end. A matching brown chair with worn arms slumped at the opposite side of the room. Gray lace curtains hung at the single window between them, and beside the window was a black table supporting an quondam-time Boob tube with rabbit ears. The Nevinses had had color TV. On the right-hand wall between the door and the brown chair stood a black upright pianoforte with a dusty chocolate-brown bench. Gilly took i of the pillows off the couch and used it to wipe every trace of dust off the piano demote earlier sitting down on it.

From the dark-brown chair Miss Ellis was staring at her with a very nonprofessional glare. Mrs. Trotter was lowering herself to the sofa and chuckling. "Well, we been needing somebody to rearrange the dust around here. Ain't we, William Ernest, honey?"

William Ernest climbed up behind the huge adult female and lay behind her dorsum like a eternalize pillow, p

oking his head around from time to time to sneak another look at Gilly.

She waited until Mrs. Trotter and Miss Ellis were talking, and so gave fiddling W.Due east. the virtually fearful face in all her repertory of scary looks, sort of a cross betwixt Count Dracula and Godzilla. The piffling muddy head disappeared faster than a toothpaste cap down a sink bleed.

She giggled despite herself. Both of the women turned to expect at her. She switched easily and immediately to her "Who, me?" expect.

Miss Ellis stood up. "I demand to be getting dorsum to the office, Mrs. Trotter. You'll let me know"—She turned to Gilly with prickles in her large blue eyes—"yous'll allow me know if there're whatsoever bug?"

Gilly favored Miss Ellis with her all-time barracuda smile.

Meantime Mrs. Trotter was laboriously hefting herself to her anxiety. "Don't worry, Miz Ellis. Gilly and William Ernest and me is nearly friends already. My Melvin, God rest him, used to say that Trotter never met a stranger. And if he'd said child, he woulda been right. I never met a kid I couldn't make friends with."

Gilly hadn't learned however how to vomit at volition, but if she had, she would have dearly loved to throw upward on that one. So, lacking the truly perfect response, she lifted her legs and spun around to the piano, where she proceeded to bang out "Middle and Soul" with her left mitt and "Chopsticks" with her right.

William Ernest scrambled off the couch after the ii women, and Gilly was left lone with the grit, the out-of-tune piano, and the satisfaction that she had indeed started off on the right human foot in her new foster domicile. She could stand anything, she thought—a gross guardian, a freaky kid, an ugly, dingy house—equally long as she was in accuse.

She was well on the fashion.

THE Human WHO COMES TO SUPPER

The room that Mrs. Trotter took Gilly to was about the size of the Nevinses' new station wagon. The narrow bed filled up most of the space, and fifty-fifty someone equally skinny as Gilly had to kneel on the bed in order to pull out the drawers of the bureau contrary it. Mrs. Trotter didn't fifty-fifty try to come up in, simply stood in the doorway slightly swaying and smiling, her breath short from climbing the stairs.

"Why don't you just put your things away in the bureau and get yourself settled? Then when you lot experience like it, you tin can come on down and watch Boob tube with William Ernest, or come up talk to me while I'grand fixing supper."

What an atrocious smile she had, Gilly thought. She didn't even have all her teeth. Gilly dropped her suitcase on the bed and sat down beside it, kick the bureau drawers with her toes.

"You demand annihilation, dearest, only let Trotter know, OK?"

Gilly jerked her head in a nod. What she needed was to be left alone. From the bowels of the house she could hear the theme song from Sesame Street. Her first job would be to improve West.E.'southward taste in TV. That was for sure.

"It's goin' to be OK, honey. I know it's been hard to switch effectually so much."

"I like moving." Gilly jerked one of the acme drawers and so hard it most came out onto her head. "It'southward dull to stay in ane place."

"Yeah." The large adult female started to turn and then hesitated. "Well—"

Gilly slid off the bed and put her left paw on the doorknob and stuck her correct manus on her hip.

Mrs. Trotter glanced down at the hand on the knob. "Well, make yourself at home. You hear now?"

Gilly slammed the door after her. God! Listening to that woman was like licking melted water ice cream off the carton. She tested the dust on the meridian of the agency, and so, standing on the bed, wrote in huge cursive curlicues, "Ms. Galadriel Hopkins." She stared at the lovely letters she had made for a moment before slapping downwardly her open palm in the middle of them and rubbing them all away.

The Nevinses' firm had been square and white and dustless, simply like every other foursquare, white, dustless business firm in the treeless evolution where they had lived. She had been the simply thing in the neighborhood out of place. Well, Hollywood Gardens was spotless again. They'd got rid of her. No. She'd got rid of them—the whole stinking lot.

Unpacking even just the few things in her brownish suitcase ever seemed a waste of time to Gilly. She never knew if she'd be in a place long enough to make it worth the bother. And however information technology was something to make full the time. There were 2 footling drawers at the top and four larger ones below. She put her underwear in one of the little ones, and her shirts and jeans in i of the big ones, and then picked up the photograph from the bottom of the suitcase.

Out of the pasteboard frame and through the plastic cover the brown eyes of the woman laughed upwardly at her equally they always did. The glossy black hair hung in gentle waves without a hair astray. She looked as though she was the star of some Tv show, only she wasn't. Run into—right at that place in the corner she had written "For my beautiful Galadriel, I will always beloved yous." She wrote that to me, Gilly told herself, as she did each fourth dimension she looked at it, just to me. She turned the frame over. It was still there—the niggling piece of tape with the proper noun on it. "Courtney Rutherford Hopkins."

Gilly smoothed her own straw-colored hair with one hand as she turned the picture once again. Even the teeth were gorgeous. Weren't girls supposed to expect similar their mothers? The word "mother" triggered something deep in her stomach. She knew the danger signal. Abruptly she shoved the picture under a T-shirt and banged the agency drawer shut. This was not the time to get-go dissolving like hot Jell-O. She went downstairs.

"There you lot are, honey." Trotter turned away from the sink to greet her. "How almost giving me a hand hither with this salad?"

"No."

"Oh."

Score a point for Gilly.

"Well"—Trotter shifted her weight to her left foot, keeping her optics on the carrots she was scraping—"William Ernest is in the living room watching Sesame Street."

"My god, you lot must retrieve I'm mental or something."

"Mental?" Trotter moved to the kitchen tabular array and started chopping the carrots on a tiny round lath.

"Impaired, stupid."

"Never crossed my mind."

"Then why the hell yous think I'thou going to lookout some retard testify like that?"

"Listen hither, Gilly Hopkins. 1 thing we better become straight right now tonight. I won't take you making fun of that boy."

"I wasn't making fun of that boy." What was the woman talking about? She hadn't mentioned the boy.

"Simply 'cause someone isn't quite as smart as you lot are don't give you lot no right to look downward on them."

"Who'one thousand I looking down on?"

"You but said"—the fat woman's voice was rise, and her knife was crashing down on the carrots with vengeance—"you just said William Ernest was"—her vocalism dropped to a whisper—"retarded."

"I did not. I don't even know the stupid kid. I never saw him in my life before today."

Trotter'south eyes were notwithstanding flashing, but her hand and voice were under control. "He'south had a crude fourth dimension of it in this earth, simply he'due south with Trotter now, and as long as the Lord leaves him in this house, ain't anybody on earth gonna hurt him. In any way."

"Good god. All I was trying to say—"

"One more than thing. In this house nosotros don't have the Lord's name in vain."

Gilly threw both her easily up in mock surrender. "All right, all right. Forget it." She started for the door.

"Supper's 'bout set up. How about going next door and getting Mr. Randolph? He eats here nights."

The word No was just about to pop out of Gilly's mouth, only one look at Trotter's eyes, and she decided to save her fights for something more important. "Which house?"

"The grayness i on the right." She waved her knife vaguely uphill. "Just knock on the door. If you do information technology good and loud, he'll hear you. Better take your jacket. Cold out."

Gilly ignored the last. She ran out the door, through the spotter gate, and onto the porch next door, stomping and jumping to go on warm. Bam, bam, bam. Information technology was too cold for October. Mr. Ran

dolph's house was smaller and more grubby-looking even than Trotter's. She repeated her knock.

Suddenly the door swung inward, revealing a tiny shrunken human being. Foreign whitish eyes stared out of a wrinkled, brownish confront.

Gilly took one look and ran back to Trotter'southward kitchen as fast equally she could go.

"What's the matter? Where'due south Mr. Randolph?"

"I don't know. He'due south gone. He'southward non there."

"What d'y'all hateful he's non there?" Trotter began wiping her easily on her apron and walking toward the door.

"He's gone. Some weird little colored man with white eyes came to the door."

"Gilly! That was Mr. Randolph. He can't see a thing. Y'all've got to become back and bring him past the paw, so he won't autumn."

Gilly backed away. "I never touched one of those people in my life."

"Well, and then, it's nearly fourth dimension, ain't it?" Trotter snapped. "Of course, if you tin't manage, I can ever ship William Ernest."

"I can manage. Don't you worry most me."

"Y'all probably got Mr. Randolph all dislocated and upset past at present."

"Well, you shoulda warned me."

"Warned you?" Trotter banged a spoon on the table. "I shoulda warned poor Mr. Randolph. You lot want me to transport William Ernest?"

"I said I could manage. Good god!" At this, Trotter'south spoon went upwards in the air similar a fly-swatter. "All right! I didn't say it. Hell, a person can't even talk around here."

"A smart person like you oughta exist able to recall of a few regular words to stick in amidst the cusses." The spoon went into the salad and stirred. "Well, bustle up, if you lot're going."

The little blackness man was nevertheless standing in the open doorway. "William Ernest?" he chosen gently as Gilly started upwardly the steps.

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