The Green Lantern

When Jeannette lived in battle mountain her and Brian liked to spy on a place called the Green Latern. It was a big green house with a saggy porch right near the highway. Rose Mary told them that it was a cat house. But Jeannette and Brian never saw any cats there, only women wearing bathing suits or short dresses and sat or layed down on the porch. Rose Mary would tell them that only bad things happen there which made the Green Lantern an irresistible mystery to them. One day Jeannette dared Brian to go up to one of the women and talk to them, so he did. He had asked the girl what goes on inside of the Green Lantern and the girl had told Brian that when men went in there, the women inside would be really nice to them.




                                                          
                                                         The Green Lantern

Jeannettes adventure with Billy Deel

Just after Jeannettes 8th birthday a boy named Billy Deel and his dad moved into the Tracks. Billy was three years older then Jeannette. He was tall, skinny with a sandy crew cut and blue eyes. Billy is a certified juvenile delinquent. Shortly after he moved into the Tracks he started following Jeannette around everywhere and telling everyone that he was her boyfriend. He had givin Jeannette a turquoise silver ring. 

One day Jeannette was playing hide-and-seek with a couple of kids from the Track. Jeannette found a really good hiding spot in a shed where no one had hid before. Billy Deel had followed her and made her let him fit in the spot with her. He made her kiss him while they were in the spot then he started raping her. In order to get him to stop, Jeannette had to bite his ear and thats when he punched her in the face.

Jeannette went to Billy's house, threw the ring at him and left. The next day Billy came to Jeannettes house with a pellet gun and started shooting at Jeannette, Lori, Maureen and Brian. Jeannette got a hand gun, shot at him once and BIlly went running.

                                  This is what Billy Deel's pellet gun looked like

Jeannettes christmas disaster related to a few of mine

Jeannettes mom Rose Mary wanted to have a really good Chrstmas this time.

"Mom took us thrift store shopping for weeks before christmas, giving us each a dollar to spend on presents. I got a red glass bud vase for Mom, an onyx ashtray for Dad, a model-car kit for Brian, a book about elves for Lori and a stuffed tiger with a loose ear that Mom helped me sew back in place for Maureen"

On Christmas morning Rose Mary took Jeannette and her siblings down to a gas station that sells Christmas trees and got a tree. Everyone was super excited to be having a Christmas on Christmas day. 

When Rex got home he was drunk, he was looking at the lighter that Rose Mary had gotten for him for Christmas, and lit the Christmas tree on fire. Everything was destroyed. All of the presents, the tree, everything.

When I had read that it had reminded me of a few christmas's I have had. Three years in a row I had the flu. I wasn't able to go and see either side of my family which I never get to see in the first place and I was stuck in a bed, in the dark because of my migraine, trying to eat food without throwing it up and my Christmas's were just ruined. The past Christmas would have also been ruined if I hadn't of gone to the hospital. I had strap throat and couldn't swollow anything until I went to the hospital and they gave me a steroid pill so I could eat my Christmas dinner.

Jeannettes Christmas tree

My opinion on Jeannettes life.

      Jeannette has an interesting life. So far in the book she has lived in a trailor, a desert, a train station and a house or in Jeannettes words "a mansion". In reality she could literally live through anything and live in anything. She knows how to live off of a little amount of food, no furniture and shes able to not become attached to things which could be a good thing. She is super thankful and she is very smart. She knows how to defend herself and she knows when she's doing something wrong. But in a sense she has also had an adventuras life. She has been able to experience a desert, and a bunch of different cities and towns. She has travelled a lot and she is only very young. She later on in life became a very successful person and actually deserved the life she has yet to live.

                                                      Jeannette Walls now

Jeannettes new fascination with fire.

As soon as Jeannette got home from the hosptial she started to cook hot dogs.
Instead of being afraid of fire, Jeannette became fascinated in it.

"Instead, I became fascinated with it. Dad also thought I should face down my enemy, and he showed me how to pass my finger through a candle flame. I did it over and over, slowing my finger with each pass, watching the way it seemed to cut the flame in half, testing to see how much my finger could endure without actually getting burned." 

She would try to involve herself in fire like things as much as she coud. When the neighbors would burn trash she would run over and watch, she would get closer and closer to the fire feeling the heat against her face until she was so close to the fire that it would become unbearable. She had gone behind the house and lit her favorite tinkerbell doll on fire on one half of the dolls body to show the doll what it felt like. Jeannette would steal matches from her dad, go behind her house and light the matches. Jeannette had said in the book;

"I loved the scratching sound of the match againsr the sandpapery brown strip when I struck it, and the way the flame leaped out of the red-brown strip when I struck it and the way the flame leaped out of the red coated tip with a pop and a hiss." .

What she reminds me of at this point is a type of person called a pyromania (someone who likes lighting things on fire).

Jeannette in front of the neighbors trash fire

My connection with Jeannette and her road trips

In the book Jeannette had said;

"Dad drove fast and sang really loud, and locks of his hair fell into his face and life was a little bit scary but still lots of fun."

When I read that it reminded me of all of the fun times I with one of my best guy friends. We used to go for "cruises" all the time. We would go hang out with each other and everytime we got bored the first thing him and I would think of is "lets go to timmies then go for a cruise!". We would go and get ourselves a coffee, blast country music in his truck and just start driving down back roads. We would go up to his hunt camp, get lost somewhere but we'd make sure that it's hopefully somewhere close. We'd go out to Washago and just have a bunch of fun. The windows would be opened so my hair would fly everywhere and we would never get bored. 

This is a picture of the type of backroads we'd drive down

Jeannettes Hospital Trip

"I was standing on a chair in front of the stove, wearing a pink dress that my grandmother had bought for me. Pink was my favorite color. The dress's skirt stuck out like a tutu, and I liked to spin around in front of the mirror, thinking I looked like a ballerina. But at that moment I was wearing the dress to cook hot dogs, watching them swell and bob in the boiling water." 
Jeannette had noticed that her black dog named Juju was watching her, so she pricked at one of the hot dogs, turned around and fed the hotdog to Juju. Once she continued cooking the hotdogs she felt an enormous amount of hear on her right side, she then noticed her dress was on fire. In shock, she watched the flame crawl up her body, once the flames hit her face she screamed. Her mom came running in, grabbed her and took her to the nabour who then rushed her to the hospital. When she got to the hospital and put onto a stretcher she heard the nurses talk in a loud worried whisper and cut off what was left of her new pink dress. The nurses put Jeannette in a tub of ice and spread ice all over her body. One of the nurses told her she was lucky to be alive. The doctors wrapped half of her body up in bandages. Jeannette liked the hospital. It was quiet, it had a television, the nurses changed her bandages for her, she got chewing gum which she had never had before and she got food every day. Her dad hated the fact that she was in the hospital so 6 weeks after Jeannette was in the hospital her dad Rex, picked her up and carried her out.



                                               Jeannette in her pink dress.