The Campaign

by Leila Sales

  PUBLISHER’S NOTE: This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Sales, Leila, author. | Balacuit, Kim, illustrator.

  Title: The campaign / Leila Sales ; illustrations, Kim Balacuit.

  Description: New York : Amulet Books, an imprint of Abrams, 2020. | Audience: Ages 8 to 12. | Summary: Twelve-year-old Maddie runs her babysitter Janet’s campaign to become mayor of their city and protect arts funding.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2019053253 | ISBN 9781419739743 (hardback) | ISBN 9781419739750 (paperback) | ISBN 9781683357162 (ebook)

  Subjects: CYAC: Political participation—Fiction. | Elections—Fiction. | Middle schools—Fiction. | Schools—Fiction.

  Classification: LCC PZ7.S15215 Cam 2020 | DDC [Fic]—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019053253

  Text copyright © 2020 Leila Sales

  Illustrations copyright © 2020 Kim Balacuit

  Book design by Marcie Lawrence

  Published in 2020 by Amulet Books, an imprint of ABRAMS. All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, mechanical, electronic, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission from the publisher.

  Amulet Books are available at special discounts when purchased in quantity for premiums and promotions as well as fundraising or educational use. Special editions can also be created to specification. For details, contact specialsales@abramsbooks.com or the address below.

  Amulet Books® is a registered trademark of Harry N. Abrams, Inc.

  ABRAMS The Art of Books

  195 Broadway, New York, NY 10007

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  For Brian Pennington

  CHAPTER 1

  When I showed up for the first day of seventh grade, I’d already color-coded my schedule.

  Gray was for periods that were definitely going to be miserable (math, science and technology, social studies, Spanish, health, homeroom, assembly).

  Yellow was for periods that might be okay (English, PE).

  Red was for periods that I was actually looking forward to (art, music, lunch).

  School had barely begun, and already this year was looking like just one big expanse of gray.

  Social studies was the first class of the day, and the teacher, Mr. Valdez, began by handing out blank paper and telling us to draw maps of the United States. “Don’t stress over this. I don’t expect you to know where every state is,” he said.

  Which was a relief, since I didn’t know where any states were, and even though I was accustomed to failing to meet expectations, I’d hate to do so on the first assignment of the year.

  “Just do your best for today,” Mr. Valdez went on. “Put down whatever states you can remember, wherever you think they go. Trust me, by the end of the semester, you’ll be able to draw this map with your eyes closed!”

  Which is not true. I can’t even draw my own face with my eyes closed, and I’ve been working on that for years. It always winds up with the nose and mouth on top of each other and the ears way off somewhere in space.

  “Please take the next ten minutes to work on this,” Mr. Valdez instructed.

  I started out trying to follow the assignment to draw a faithful map of the country, but then I wound up going in sort of a different direction . . .

  “Okay,” Mr. Valdez said once our ten minutes were up, “now I’d like you to share your map with the student sitting next to you.”

  Naturally the student sitting next to me was My Friend Daniel, and naturally he just about died laughing when he looked at my map. Which would have been fine, because I knew what I’d done was kind of ridiculous, and I knew My Friend Daniel would appreciate it. But what wasn’t fine was that he then tapped on the shoulder of Polly, the girl sitting in front of him, and said, “Hey, take a look at what Maddie drew. She thinks the state of Colorado is actually shaped like a mountain!”

  “I do not,” I objected. “I just thought it’d be more interesting to draw a mountain than to draw a rectangle in the middle of the page and call it Colorado. I was capturing the essence of the state. Colorado’s essence is mountainous.”

  Now Polly’s two best friends, Molly and Holly, also turned around to look at my map.

  “What?” giggled Molly. “Why didn’t you just do the assignment, Maddie?”

  Holly just gave me a look. Holly rarely says much—at least not loud enough for me to hear, though she’s always whispering with her friends. Instead, she just communicates by looking sort of disgusted.

  The three of them held up their maps, which all looked pretty much the same and pretty much like every other map of America that I’d ever seen.

  “I was being creative, Molly and Polly and Holly,” I told them wearily.

  “Who are you calling Molly and Polly and Holly?” asked Polly.

  “You three.”

  “But none of those is my name,” said Molly. “My name is Adrianne.”

  “And my name is Dahlina,” said Polly. “You know that.”

  I turned to the last girl and asked, “Do you have anything to add?”

  “Not really,” she said. “My name actually is Holly.”

  “You might as well all have rhyming names,” I said, “since it seems like you want to be as similar to one another as possible.”

  Of course they’re not exactly the same—for one thing, Holly is white, Polly is Indian, and Molly is black, plus they all have different body shapes and hair colors. But none of this stops them from acting like identical triplets or clones.

  Molly rolled her eyes. “Why are you so weird?”

  “Wasn’t her map weird?” asked My Friend Daniel. “That’s why I wanted to show it to you guys. I was like, whoa, Maddie’s map is so weird, I bet they’d want to see how weird it is!”

  “You are not helping, My Friend Daniel,” I told him.

  “See, even that is weird,” commented Polly. “Why do you call him My Friend Daniel?”

  “Because Daniel is his name,” I answered, “and ‘My Friend’ is an honorific. You know, like how you’d say ‘Prince William’ instead of just ‘William’ or ‘Captain Underpants’ instead of just ‘Underpants.’ ‘My Friend’ is Daniel’s title.”

  They stared at me.

  “You don’t have to call him My Friend Daniel,” I reassured them. “He’s not your friend.”

  “But I could be,” Daniel interjected, still smiling. “I am fully ready to be Anybody’s Friend Daniel!”

  “Eyes to the front,” Mr. Valdez said from his desk. “Time to start talking about America, folks.”

  The Three Meansketeers turned back around. I spent the rest of the period refusing to look at My Friend Daniel, except to occasionally glare at him.

  “Do you think they want to be friends with me?” asked Daniel as the period ended and he watched Molly and Holly and Polly run for the door like a school of fish.

  “Um,” I said.

  My Friend Daniel didn’t wait for my reply. “They definitely seem to want to be friends with me,” he said with a nod. “Definitely. I’m going to invite them to my bar mitzvah.”

  And somehow I’m the weird one?

  CHAPTER 2

  The best part of the first day of school finally came at 12:55 in the afternoon: art class!

  “Hello, Mr. Xian!” I hollered as I ran into the art room. “Did you miss me?”

  Mr. Xian laughed. He is the only teacher in school who actually likes me
. “I certainly did,” he replied. “Now, let me see what you’ve been working on.”

  That’s what Mr. Xian says every time I see him. It makes me want to work on things just so I have something to show him.

  “I finished two sketchbooks over the summer,” I told him. “I brought them with me today so you could see. I’ve been working on superheroes. So here’s my Wonder Woman, and here’s my Thor, and this is—”

  “Batman,” the art teacher said, holding up my sketchbook so he could inspect it. “I love how you’ve captured the sense of movement here.”

  “Thanks! And then I made up superheroes of my own. This one is you.”

  “I am very flattered,” Mr. Xian said. “Though I’ll have you know that I do not need a haircut. This is just how Art-Guys wear their hair. Now, for the next superhero you draw, I want you to play with angles. Do you think Art-Guy would seem more powerful if we were looking down on him or up at him?”

  Mr. Xian simultaneously makes me feel like I’ve done good work and gives me ideas for doing even better. I don’t know how he does it. When we do peer critiques, usually the other students just say, “It’s good,” which, while flattering, doesn’t exactly help me improve. And I want to improve, because I want to be a professional cartoonist someday. Maybe I’ll write graphic novels or work for Marvel or an animation studio. I’m a better artist than most twelve-year-olds, I think, but I still have a lot of work to do before I’m as good as Mr. Xian.

  Once the rest of the class was seated, he started talking us through what we were going to be studying this semester. I doodled as he spoke, which is a thing I do that my fourth-grade teacher called “a bad habit.” She said it made me look like I wasn’t paying attention. I told her that I actually paid better attention if I was doodling at the same time. She didn’t believe me.

  Mr. Xian doesn’t care if I doodle during class. He can tell I’m paying attention.

  He told us about how we were going to do pottery this year, and for the first time all day, I finally relaxed. There aren’t many places in school where I can do that. But even people who are mean to me, like Holly and Molly and Polly, leave me alone when we’re in the art studio. I think it’s because I never do anything dumb or weird during art, like making a map wrong or forgetting the multiplication tables or sounding out a word that I’m supposed to know already.

  It’s not really possible to do anything dumb or weird during art, because art doesn’t have just one right answer.

  I think that’s what I like about it.

  When class ended, I very slowly gathered up my materials and very slowly packed up my bag. I’m usually in a rush to get to the next place, but I never rush to leave the art room. It smells good, like paint and turpentine and freedom. I took a couple more deep breaths, trying to keep the smell with me for the rest of the day.

  “Maddie,” Mr. Xian said as I was zippering up my bag. I was the last student left in the room. “I want you to know . . . well, just that I hope you don’t ever stop creating. You have a unique perspective. If you keep at it, you could be a truly top-notch artist someday.”

  This was, without question, the literal and absolute best thing that anybody had ever said to me.

  I was so happy that I couldn’t help but jump up and down a little. “Thank you so much!” I told him. “Of course I’ll keep at it. Making art is my favorite thing in the world.”

  “Good,” Mr. Xian said. “That’s good. You need to remember that, Maddie, because you’ll find that not everybody values art as highly as we do. Some people think it’s a waste of time and money.”

  “They’re wrong,” I said.

  He laughed. “Sure are.” But he sounded sad.

  “What idiots even think that?” I asked.

  “Unfortunately, one of them is going to be the next mayor of Lawrenceville,” he said.

  “Blech.” I made a face. “What’s happening to our current mayor?”

  “Mayor Peñate is retiring at the end of this term,” Mr. Xian told me. “So in November there’s going to be an election for a new mayor. But the election is basically all sewn up, because only one candidate is running. Her name’s Lucinda Burghart.”

  “And she doesn’t like art?” I said.

  “I don’t know her, so I can’t say that she doesn’t like it, but she certainly doesn’t think it’s very important. She’s been on the city council for years now and is always putting forward bills to cut ‘unnecessary’ expenses—and she definitely puts art in that category. She’s been very clear that once she becomes mayor, the first thing she’s going to do is slash funding for arts education: visual arts, drama, music, all of it. Which means no more art supplies, no more art shows, no more museum field trips . . . and no more job for me.”

  Mr. Xian gave me a weak smile. “I’ll be fine,” he said. “As soon as I saw which way this election was going, I started putting out feelers for jobs teaching art in other cities. Or maybe I’ll move to a private school where they have a budget for arts education. I’ll find another job, Maddie—don’t worry about me. It just won’t be in any of this city’s public schools.”

  “Okay . . .” I said. I believed Mr. Xian when he said he’d get a job someplace else, because he was a really good teacher and I bet lots of places would want to hire him. But it didn’t seem fair. And anyway, he didn’t—and maybe couldn’t—answer my next question:

  Without art, what was I going to do?

  CHAPTER 3

  “Janet!” I shouted as soon as I reached her car at the end of the school day. I threw my bag into the back seat, slammed the back door, threw myself into the front seat, and then slammed that door, too.

  “What’s up, Mads?” Janet asked.

  Janet is twenty-three, and she used to babysit me when I was little and she was in high school. Then she went off to college, and I didn’t see her for four years. Now she’s back and she’s taking care of me again, which is kind of stupid, because I am already as old as she was when she first started babysitting other people’s kids. But I’m not complaining, because there are things Janet can do that I can’t, like drive and cook. Plus she’s basically paid to hang out with me, which is nice because most people won’t hang out with me for free.

  “It’s going to rain tomorrow,” Janet told me as she started up the car and began driving toward my house. “I can’t wait.”

  Janet is extremely into weather. It’s her favorite hobby. She’s the moderator of this amateur meteorology website, where she’s always chatting with other weather fans about storm systems and air pressure and something called “isobars.” She likes big, dramatic blizzards best, but she also loves a good sunny day, and she says that rain is beautiful and that even general cloud cover can be pretty interesting. I have never found a type of weather that Janet doesn’t like, which means that whatever is going to happen tomorrow, she is always excited for it.

  I think that seems like a nice way to live.

  That day, though, I felt like there were things going on the world that were even more important than weather.

  “Did you know that we’re getting a new mayor this year?” I demanded. “Her name is Lucinda Burghart. And she’s going to get rid of art classes in schools.”

  Janet thought about this for a moment. “I knew Mayor Peñate was retiring,” she said. “I haven’t been paying much attention to who might take over after him. But hold on—Election Day isn’t even until November. So there’s no guarantee that she’ll be the next mayor.”

  “Yes, there is.” After talking to Mr. Xian, I’d looked up Lucinda Burghart in our local newspaper, the Lawrenceville Gazette, just in case I’d misunderstood or he’d gotten it wrong. But the situation was exactly as Mr. Xian had said. “Nobody is running against this Lucinda person. Which means she will definitely be elected mayor, which means she will definitely stop paying for us to have art.”

  “Someone should run against her,” Janet said.

  “Janet, I cannot survive school without art! I can
’t!” I rolled down my window, because the very idea made me feel hot and claustrophobic.

  “The only thing that makes school bearable is art,” I told Janet. “That’s it. And now the mayor is going to take that away from me?!”

  I kicked my feet like a little kid throwing a tantrum and accidentally stubbed my toe on the bottom of the glove box. Then I yelled, “Ow, ow, ow!” a few times, because it hurt, and because it felt good to be loud.

  Janet stopped at a red light and didn’t say anything. She just looked sad.

  “Janet!” I shouted. “You’re supposed to tell me not to yell and kick!”

  She shrugged. “I don’t care if you yell and kick. I’d do the same. But you know it won’t fix anything. What are you going to do about this new mayor?”

  “There’s nothing I can do.” I realized it was true as I said it, and I let my head fall back against my seat. “I’m just a kid.”

  “So what?” Janet asked.

  “So everything. I get no say in any of this. I can’t stop Lucinda Burghart from becoming mayor, because I can’t even vote yet. When she makes school even worse than it already is, I can’t just quit seventh grade. I can’t hire Mr. Xian or buy good art supplies on my own, because I have no money. I’m trapped.”

  “That sounds very defeatist,” Janet said, turning right onto my street.

  “Oh, I’m so sorry,” I said. “I’ll try to be more positive about the fact that someone who I don’t even know, who doesn’t even know me, is about to destroy my life for no reason!”

  “That’s an idea,” Janet said as she pulled into the driveway.

  “What, being positive? Janet, I was being sarcastic.”

  “No, I mean trying to meet Lucinda Burghart. Maybe if she knew you, she’d understand why this new policy would hurt you, and if she liked you, then she wouldn’t want to hurt you. Right? Maybe she doesn’t have any kids or grandkids, so she doesn’t get it. Maybe if she really saw and understood one of the people her plan would affect, it would change her mind.”

  “Are you sure?” I asked. “Because I’m pretty sure she’s just, like, evil.”