Spelldown

SIMON & SCHUSTER BOOKS FOR YOUNG READERS

An imprint of Simon & Schuster Children’s Publishing Division
1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, New York 10020
www.SimonandSchuster.com

This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real locales are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 2007 by Karon Luddy

All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.

S
IMON
& S
CHUSTER
B
OOKS FOR
Y
OUNG
R
EADERS
is a trademark of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

Book design by Einav Aviram

The text for this book is set in Bulmer.

Manufactured in the United States of America

2 4 6 8 10 9 7 5 3

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Luddy, Karon.

Spelldown / Karon Luddy.—1 st ed.

p. cm.

Summary: In 1969, the town of Red Clover, South Carolina, led by an enthusiastic new Latin teacher, supports thirteen-year-old Karlene as she wins her school spelling bee and strives for the National Bee, despite family problems and a growing desire for romance.

ISBN-13: 978-1-4169-1610-9
eISBN: 978-1-4391-0415-6

ISBN-10: 1-4169-1610-5

[1. Spelling bees—Fiction. 2. Family problems—Fiction. 3. Teachers—Fiction. 4. Alcoholism—Fiction. 5. Schools—Fiction. 6. South Carolina—History—20th century—Fiction.] I. Title.

PZ7.L9744Spe 2007

[Fic]—dc22

2006021956

This book is dedicated to my mother, Frances Robertson Gleaton, for her extraordinary faith, beauty and strength
.

To the memory of my father, Cecil Lamar Gleaton—the coolest man—Ever
.

And to the memory of my sixth grade teacher, Perry Gardner: Her laughter nourishes me still
.

With special thanks:

To my daughter Charlotte Bowman, my son David Luddy, and my soul-sister Sharon Wells Frazier for loving me unconditionally all these years—and for convincing me I had no other choice but to birth this fat sassy baby.

To my earliest readers for their enthusiastic feedback: my sisters Wanda and Sandra, Nichole Potts Gause, Rosalind Morrison, Henry Berne, Sally Miller, and Philip Loydpierson. To my Squaw Valley comrades: Melanie McDonald, Andrea Sanelli, and to Kim Whitehead for her superb editing skills. To Philip Cole, the Great Listener.

To my other true loves: Todd, Grayson & Genevieve Bowman, Erin Hubbs, Olivia Rozell, Margaret Currie Granger, Barbara Conrad, and Kenneth Smothers, my soul-brother on the Other Side. To my brothers, Brother, Jeffery, and Dennis, and all the other Gleaton family members. To Pat and Tom Luddy and the entire Luddy Clan.

To Talia Cohen, my courageous agent, and Alyssa Eisner, my crackerjack editor, for their wholehearted, painstaking efforts on my behalf.

To Fred Leebron for his literary generosity and to my other teachers and classmates in the MFA Creative Writing Program at Queens University, especially Michael Kobre, Jenny Matz, Pinckney Benedict, Elizabeth Stuckey-French, Daniel Mueller, Jenny Offill, and Cathy Smith Bowers, a.k.a. HomeGirl.

To Wayne Chapman, the editor of the
South Carolina
Review
, for publishing my first short story and for his unwavering support of my work. To M. Scott Douglass, the editor of
Main Street Rag
, for publishing my first poem.

To Pamela Eakins, for her brilliant book
Tarot of the Spirit
, which helped me fathom the intricacies of it All.

To my students and colleagues at UNC-Charlotte.

To every person who encouraged me while writing this novel—you know who you are!

And finally, to Tom Luddy—my brilliant and stalwart husband—for making our journey so comically
real
.

Of course I’m ambitious. What’s wrong with that? Otherwise you sleep all day
.

—Ringo Starr

1: a mania for great or grandiose performance

2: a delusional mental disorder that is marked by infantile feelings of personal omnipotence and grandeur

The sun bakes my doughy brain as I stand in the front yard, watching my twin brothers dance like little spastics wearing their homemade Indian headdresses. Bored to the point of madness, I fling my hands down on the brown grass and turn cartwheels all across the front yard, going faster and getting dizzier with each turn. My feet land in the flower bed, squashing one of Mama’s Lilliputian zinnias that’s full of tiny purple blossoms. I hold them to my nose. They smell like nothing at all.

I sit down on the front porch step, pick up a stick, and write
jackasses
in the red clay dust. This morning, when I called the twins jackasses, Mama accused me of cussing. She didn’t care that
jackass
was in the dictionary. I had used the word in a cussy way, and that was that. That’s why I won’t be watching Gloria Jean ruin her life this afternoon. Instead, I’ll be babysitting the twin male donkeys.

I smooth over
jackass
and continue to cuss in the dirt:
imbecile—maniac—moron—miscreant—bastard—doofus—
and
turdling
, a new word I learned at Vacation Bible School
last month from Preacher Smoot’s nephew, who was visiting from Miami. When the teacher heard him say it, she almost strangled to death on lime Kool-Aid.

I write some difficult spelling words in the dust:
serendipitous—myogenic—existential—
and
monosyllabic
, a five-syllable word that means having one syllable! Then I wipe it away and write
gargantuan
. I love that word. Etymologically, it’s based on a giant named Gargantua, who loved to eat and drink and be merry. Since Mama bought the encyclopedias with the two-volume dictionary at the beginning of summer, I’ve been studying the dictionary like a megalomaniac.

I wipe away
gargantuan
and scribble
crapulous
, a word I discovered yesterday. At first I thought it had something to do with feces, but it comes from the Latin word
crapula
, which means intoxicated. I rub out
crapulous
and write
panacea—
a fancy word for cure-all. It’s the word I missed last year at the Shirley County Spelldown. I’d never seen the damn word. Spelled it
p-a-n-a-c-i-a
. The year before that, I misspelled
ravine
, a dumb-ass word for gully. I spelled it just like it sounded:
r-a-v-e-n-e
, not
r-a-v-i-n-e
. That’s two years in a row I’ve been defeated by
i’s
and
e’s
impersonating each other.

I go into the living room and plop down on the brown vinyl sofa, trying not to look at my sister’s beige American Tourister suitcase sitting in the corner, packed for her honeymoon trip to Gatlinburg, Tennessee. Gloria Jean keeps the suitcase locked as if its contents were top secret, but I
know she hides the key in her jewelry box. Every night, after everyone is asleep, I unlock the suitcase and sniff through her dumb matrimony stuff. The most disturbing items are the white see-through nightie with matching see-through robe, the white satin high-heel slippers with yellow feathers, and a half dozen pair of expensive lace panties in pastel colors. It’s discouraging. I always imagined Gloria Jean would get hauled off to Hollywood by a beauty scout, not marry an insurance adjuster from Shirley County. The idea of her traipsing around in her panties in front of Wendell Whetstone makes me feel like puking.

A new wall plaque hangs over the mantelpiece. Mama picked it out of the
S&H Green Stamps Ideabook of Distinguished Merchandise
. “Chevalier and Steed” is how it was listed in the catalogue, and it cost six and a half books of stamps.
Chevalier
is a fancy word for knight. The plume on his helmet is crimson, the armor a dull gray. The only thing I like about the plaque is that the horse appears to be galloping as if the knight is in a big hurry to do something good, unlike Wendell Whetstone, whose main goal is to chisel my big sister out of my life.

Suddenly, without knocking, the black-haired, short-as-a-leprechaun, Snidely Whiplash-looking groom opens the screen door and steps into the room. His shiny black shoes crunch on the tiny pieces of gravel I was supposed to have swept up before company came. The fact that Gloria Jean might have to stare at his stupid face till death does them part makes me want to yank out my hair. Today isn’t the first time
he’s come into the house without knocking. He hasn’t even brought any flowers.

Daddy walks into the room, looking like a movie star in his navy blue suit. Mama follows, wearing her bad-mood dress, a beige shift that looks like it has tiny black daggers all over it. Daddy shakes Wendell’s hand real hard while Mama fusses with the bent Venetian blinds. She’s flabbergasted that Gloria Jean is getting married at the magistrate’s office instead of Red Clover Second Baptist, but that’s what Wendell wanted, because he was raised by a mama who is halfway convinced there is no God.

Mama walks over and pats me on the head. “Karlene, be a good girl and get that ironing done, okay?”

“Yes ma’am,” I say, but feel like barking.

Suddenly, the bride-to-be steps into the living room, her red, wavy hair flowing around her shoulders. Gloria Jean’s eyes are sometimes green and sometimes brown, but today I can’t tell what color they are because she’s staring at the floor. Wendell walks over and puts his arm around her and whispers something in her ear. She’s wearing the blue linen suit I helped her pick out in the fancy-clothes department at Belk Department Store. That’s where Gloria Jean buys all her clothes since she graduated last year and started working at Catawba Insurance Company, which is where she met El Creepo.

Gloria Jean walks over and stands quietly in front of me, but I can’t look up. I rock back and forth hugging my knees, remembering how she looked the night of her senior prom,
in that blue satin strapless dress, her long white gloves, and that tiny waist. The thought of losing all that beauty mutilates my nerves.