I really didn’t want to erase that stupid little t. I didn’t want to mess up that whole page, not after I’d copied so much already. Not after Ms. G. had said it was a good job. It didn’t seem fair that I should have to start all over again because of one tiny mistake.

I stared at that bad t for a long time. Then I got an idea. I could leave it alone. I could keep it the way it was and give it another, longer line at the top. Now it would look like a fancy, old-fashioned kind of T, the kind of T it could be good to write Terabithia with.

7. Black, Laser Lemon

After Ms. G. went over the morning message, she passed out some drawing paper. Then she drew two big circles on the board, side by side, with a part overlapping in the middle. She told us to do the same.

When I drew my circles, they looked like two big eyes staring up at me, so I gave them some eyelashes and little eyeballs at the bottom.

Ms. G. was walking around the desks while she waited for the kids to finish. I tried to put my hands over my paper, but she’d already seen it. Most teachers don’t like it when you draw stuff on your work. But all she said was: “What a good idea, Austin.”

She walked to the board and added some eyelashes and eyeballs to her own circles. She stood back to look. “Not bad,” she said.

“What about eyebrows?” Nia asked.

“And a nose,” Mia said.

And before you knew it, everybody had these funny faces on their papers.

“Please make sure your name is also on your paper,” Ms. G. said.

Bertie raised her hand.

“And no, it doesn’t matter where you put it,” Ms. G. added.

Bertie put her hand down.

I took my time and wrote my name real neat and tiny in the corner. It doesn’t matter what school you’re at—the smart kids always write things real neat and tiny, probably because they have so much to say and they need to save up on space.

“Today,” Ms. G. said, “we are going to talk about comparing and contrasting, same and different, alike and not alike. For example, Bertie and I are alike in some ways, but we are different in other ways.”

Bertie got another big smile on her face, I think because Ms. G. picked her to talk about.

“In what ways, Bertie,” Ms. G. asked, “would you say that you and I are similar?”

“We both enjoy vocabulary words,” Bertie said without even having to think about it.

“That’s true,” said Ms. G., and she started writing in the overlapping part of her two eyeballs.

I copied.