I heard about the next winner in school. By now, the Christmas/New Year's break was long over. The third ticket finding was all over the radio, and one of the secretaries in the principal's office heard it and spilled the beans. I scored a newspaper on the way home. I didn't buy it; I watched a man throw it away, and I was lucky: the bin was freshly emptied, so the newspaper stayed clean. When I got home I saw my dad sitting at the table. I handed the paper to him. It was important he feel important. Grandpa Joe had already heard, or else he knew by how serious I was what the news must be. I had handed over the newspaper with military precision.

'Alright, let's see who found it,' he said.

'The third ticket was found by Miss. Violet Beauregarde,' my Dad read.

The article said Violet had a black belt in karate, and in the photo she was dressed in karate clothes. She liked to fight. She made me think of Mr. Salt, with his love of hanging animal heads on his wall. They were both aggressive.

I wonder if Mr. Wonka likes aggressive people? I'm not aggressive, at least, I don't think I am. I don't have the energy to fight anyone, for any reason, and when bullies pick on me, I don't say a word. If they tell me to get out of their way, I get out of their way. If they tell me to hand over my lunch, I hand it over. I did that one day, and all I had in my brown paper bag was an apple. The bully punched out the bottom of the bag, and wanted to know where the rest of my lunch was. What could I say? That was lunch. One of his friends figured it out. 'C'mon, you don't want t' eat a wormy old apple,' he said, but apparently his friend did, because he ate it.

There was no worm, and now I had no apple.

I had no lunch that day, but after that, they didn't ask for my lunch. They also didn't ask me for money. I never had any. It was a waste of their time. They pushed me once or twice, kicked me in the ribs, stuff like that, but if they started with that I'd drop to the ground and curl up in a fetal position. What choice did I have? If I fought 'em, I wouldn't have the strength to make it home. No matter that I was down, they'd kick me anyway, but not for long. There's something disgraceful about kicking a person when they're down, and even bullies know that. They told me I was yellow, so not worth their time, and maybe I am yellow. I'd have to have a lot more food in me to find out.

The teachers saw some of this. Some of them think kids have to sort these things out for themselves, and so they look the other way. Some get involved, but it doesn't really help, because they can't be everywhere at once. I think some of them decided I was yellow, too, thinking I should at least should have landed a punch or two, even if I knew the battle was lost before it began, but that was okay. I'd rather avoid the bloody nose, or broken rib, that would surely be mine, than cater to their expectations. The up-shot was that they all learned to ignore me—teachers; bullies; the other kids—who I think thought poverty was catching—and that was fine with me.

I kept what happened at school to myself, because, mostly, nothing happened at school anymore. There was no need to drag my family into it: they had enough worries. Violet Beauregarde was thin, but she must have lots to eat, if she fought for fun.

Later, the television station replayed her interview, and my family and I watched that together. We got to the end of it, and I couldn't figure her out. The first two kids were like me: they were thrilled to go to the factory, and see it, and meet Mr. Wonka, but this kid … All she wanted to do was win something. She said she was going to win the big prize, whatever that was, but I don't think she cared if the tour were of a chocolate factory or a skunk farm, as long as she won.

In her interview, she chewed gum with stopping. She said she was all about gum chewing. It was very distracting. I don't know how she could do that, but she did. She told us even her gum chewing was a competition. Wow. She had to be crazy, but she knew other crazy people, too, because she had trophies for gum chewing. It made me think trophies are less than they're cracked up to be. Anyone can chew. And chew, and chew. A cow can chew. Those trophies were about being able to withstand monotony.

Her mother dressed the way Violet did, or the other way around, and her mother interrupted Violet, lots of times, to talk about the things she had won. '…mostly baton…' Baton. I had never heard of baton. It must be hard to be Violet, with her mother running over her all the time like that. Her mother, truthfully, was kinda creepy, and I was glad I didn't live in that family.

My Grandma Georgina felt the same way. She summed them up as 'despicable'. I know what that means. When the others aren't watching, I get a lot of my vocabulary words from my Grandma Georgina. The others thought she was talking about Violet, but I couldn't tell. It may have been the gum chewing, or her mother, who was despicable. When my Grandpa George told my Grandma Georgina she didn't know what they were talking about, she replied, 'dragonflies', and they all shook their heads, but I knew dragonflies are the bullies of the insect world, and my Grandma Georgina was right-on with that answer!

My family doesn't give my Grandma Georgina enough credit.

Just then, the fourth Golden Ticket was found! Mike Teavee was his name, and he was in the Violet camp. He didn't care a fig about going to Mr. Wonka's factory! He was proving a point, and that point was that if you have a brain, finding a ticket was easy. He had a brain, and he had found a ticket! He'd only bought one candy bar.

That gave me pause. My family had bought one candy bar, and that bar hadn't had a Golden Ticket under its wrapper. I wasn't as lucky as Mike Teavee. Oh, he gave some mumbo-jumbo about weather, and delivery dates, and Nikkei indexes, but I didn't believe a word of that. It was luck; dumb luck. It was dumb luck he lived in a town Mr. Wonka had sent a ticket to, and that Mike had been the one to find it.

I confess, I was envious. I lived in a town that would never see a bar with a Golden Ticket in it. That was my luck: bad.

When he wasn't finding tickets, Mike Teavee was playing video games, killing as many fake people as he could, as quickly as he could. His parents didn't seem to mind. I don't think they thought about him much. If he was in front of the video screen, he wasn't in front of them, and I think they liked that. I felt sorry for him for that, but not too sorry: he had a Golden Ticket, and I didn't. Mike would feel right at home with Mr. Salt and Violet and her mother on the tour. I could curse the two of them, kids who didn't care about Mr. Wonka's Chocolate Factory, but I knew that would be wrong. The good news was, I didn't have to curse Mike Teavee, or his hatred of chocolate. My Grandpa George did it for me.

'Why, it's a good thing you're going to a chocolate factory, you ungrateful little bugge—'

My Dad clamped his hands over my ears at the 'bu' sound, but I knew Grandpa George was cussing up a blue-streak, for as long as my father's hands stayed where they were, and I couldn't have been happier. Grandpa George was a good cusser, and that boy was getting his due.

My Dad took his hands away, and I heard the television again.

'That question is, who will be the winner of the last Gol—'

Golden Ticket. Right. Like I need to hear that. I turned the television off before the announcer could say the words. And pasted a fake smile on my face. I'm such a good sport I wanted to say with that smile, but I'm not, really. Really, I want to go to that FACTORY! My mother smiled back, but she was faking, too.

That's when I realized. My Dad shouldn't be home now. He should be at the toothpaste factory. I knew it was a mistake to ask the question, but I had to ask this one. Had things gotten—please, no, God—worse?

'Dad?'

'Yes, Charlie?'

'Why aren't you at work?'

He glanced at my Mum, and she glanced at him. If I knew not to ask questions, maybe they knew not to answer them, if I forgot.

'Oh, well, ah, the toothpaste factory decided they'd give me a little time off.'

Uh-oh. I knew I shouldn't have asked. 'A little time off.' Did that mean he had lost his job? I'd better play along. 'Like summer vacation,' I said.

'Sure. Something like that.'

'Something like that.' My father never could lie. He'd lost his job. I couldn't ask why. I had to play as if I didn't know he'd lost his job. If they weren't willing to tell me, what else could I do? Anything else would worry them, and they had enough worries, especially if this were true. I put my hands around an empty bowl on the table, and hoped for the best.

As soon as I could, I went up to my loft. Upstairs, the Chocolate Factory held no charms. I couldn't bring myself to look at it through the hole in my roof. Four tickets were found, and the fifth one would be found any day now, and not by me. My Dad had lost his job. Sitting on my bed, I let the worry I'd been hiding downstairs cross my face. If my Dad had lost his job, we were in dire, dire straits. This couldn't be happening, but it was. Slumping, I buried my head in my pillow, face down, my worry, against my wishes, turning itself into hot tears. The Golden Ticket contest hardly seemed to matter any more.

Are these my characters? They are not. Is this purely for entertainment? It is.
Thanks for reading.
Have my reviewers made my day? They have, and I thank them, one and all.
As it ever is in my stories, direct quotes from the 2005 movie are in italics.