Just Grace Goes Green (8 page)

WHAT MADE ME NOT HAPPY AGAIN

Right before bed I looked out at Mimi's window. I was holding Chip-Up to show her how happy I was. She was standing there with Gwen and they were waving and laughing
and passing Willoughby back and forth. They were having way more fun than a normal Willoughby night. If normal-size Willoughby was a regular happy night, then tonight he would have been super-jumbo-size!

I should have been super happy for them, but I couldn't do it. I kept trying to think good thoughts, but still the bad thoughts kept coming through.

GOOD THOUGHTS

1
Mimi is my best friend and she would never do anything to hurt me.

2
This exact same thing happened when Max moved in next door and it all turned out fine.

3
We can all be friends together.

BAD THOUGHTS

1
Maybe she is not hurting me on purpose but she is so busy having fun she's not even thinking about me at all.

2
Max is a boy and Gwen is a girl who is sleeping over at Mimi's house every night. It is completely different.

3
Why do they need me when they have each other and all their own special secrets?

The good-thoughts-bad-thoughts circle is not a good thing to have in your brain when you are trying to go to sleep.

RAINING

Sometimes when you are feeling sad it is nice for the weather to be rainy. That way the outsides of the world match up with what you are feeling on your insides. After breakfast I went over to Mimi's house to get her. Gwen didn't seem very happy when we left, so she was probably glad it was raining too. Mimi's mom had a table all set with pencils and paper supplies so Gwen could sit in the dining room and do her homework. Suddenly I felt pretty lucky that we were going to get to go to school.

MORE SAD

Learning about recycling today made me feel even more sad than yesterday. Every time I had to throw something in the garbage I just imagined it sitting buried underground forever.

At lunchtime we watched everyone throw plastic bottles into the recycling bin. Hardly anyone threw plastic bottles into the garbage anymore. That was good, but still it would have been better if they just took their bottles home to use again for the next day. Mimi said that that was what we should try to do as our project. Somehow make everyone use their same bottles over and over
again. I tried to sound cheery and excited, but I was not 100 percent feeling very full of energy about anything today.

HOW TO MAKE A BAD DAY WORSE

Study the multiplication tables!

Marta said there was some kind of trick that let you use your fingers to cheat when you did the number nine multiplication tables but she couldn't remember exactly what it was. So that was not so helpful. Robert Walters said he was going to ask his cousin because his cousin knew all about cheating. This was not such a big surprise and not hard to imagine.

MY BAD DAY WAS NOT BAD AFTER ALL

Mimi could not wait to get home to see Gwen. I pretended I was excited about that too. I did not want Mimi to know I was feeling bad inside. It was the kind of thing I would have told Augustine Dupre about, except she was in France for three weeks, so I couldn't. Augustine Dupre is my grown-up friend who lives in the fancy apartment in my basement. She is a good listener and an excellent solver of problems, so it really was bad luck that she was not around right now. She spends a lot of time in France because she is a flight attendant.

Gwen was happy to see us again. Mimi's mom was there too. She said it had been a hard day. Then she gave Mimi some money
so we could all go and buy ice cream. This was not a normal afterschool thing for her to do. While we were eating ice cream Mimi wanted to know all about Gwen's day. Mimi was probably imagining that she had missed out on a lot of fun stuff. This kind of imagining was not true.

WHAT GWEN DID THAT DAY

1
Homework while Mimi's mom vacuumed the house.

2
Reading while Mimi's mom talked on the phone.

3
Grocery shopping with Mimi's mom.

4
Sitting in a chair at the bank for a really long time with no magazine or anything to
look at while Mimi's mom talked to the bank people.

5
More homework while Mimi's mom put the groceries away.

It was no surprise that she was overjoyed to see us. She had had a very horrible, boring day.

WHAT HAPPENED NEXT

1
I went home and had dinner.

2
Mimi called me to tell me that Gwen was going to get to come to school with us. And that even though she was a year older she was going to be in our same class. "That's great!" I said. Even though I was not 100 percent sure that it was.

At least my conservation chart was easy to fill out.

Will reuse my plastic water bottle every day.

After that I decided to make my bottle more beautiful by drawing on it and gluing on some jewels.

GOOD NIGHT

When I looked out my window Gwen was holding Willoughby and Mimi was holding Bunny. I held up Fluffy. It was that kind of night.

WALKING TO SCHOOL

It was weird walking to school with Gwen, and then when Sammy and Max showed up it was even more weird because suddenly we were a whole gang. Sammy knew he wasn't supposed to say anything about Gwen's parents being gone, so he started asking her all sorts of strange questions instead. She probably thought he was crazy, but I could tell that he was trying to be sneaky and find out if her parents were spies. He was asking her stuff like...

Do you practice kung fu or karate at home?

Is your house the kind with a secret room in the basement?

Do you have a big satellite dish on top of your roof?

Do you have lots of cool-looking remote controls all over?

When we finally got to school Gwen whispered, "What's wrong with him?" I couldn't answer her back because we were all going to the same class and Sammy would have for sure heard me. And then right before we went into the room Mimi said, "I have to tell you something." This sounded very mysterious and exciting, and it filled my head with questions and wondering, which is not a good thing if you are supposed to be concentrating on schoolwork instead.

ALL ABOUT GWEN

Pretty much the whole morning was all about Gwen. She got a desk near the back of the
class, and when the rest of us were learning the stuff that she already knew, she just did her homework. Miss Lois said that she was going to let Gwen work with Mimi and me on our recycling project even though she had already done one last year at her regular school.

Miss Lois said, "There can never be too many cooks in the kitchen when it comes to saving the earth." That is a saying I know all about, because sometimes Mom says it when she is complaining about some of the parent meetings she goes to for school. What it really means is that everyone wants to be the boss and no one wants to be a helper. And usually if you have too many bosses then people get into fighting arguments about who gets to make the rules.

This is not something I was wanting for our plastic bottle project, and I was secretly
hoping that Gwen was not going to turn out wanting to be top cook!