Just Grace Goes Green

by Charise Mericle Harper

  WHY I COULD BE MAD

  1 Mimi was totally being bossy about the project and not talking to me about it before so we could decide together like a team.

  2 She was being with Gwen more than she was being with me.

  WHY I WASN'T MAD

  1 A plastic bottles project was perfect for us because we both felt guilty about just throwing them away.

  2 It was nice of Mimi to make Gwen feel like she was important, because she was probably feeling all alone.

  3 It was great to have Mimi feel full of energy about the project like I was.

  WHAT IS EASY

  Saying, "Let's do an amazing, totally important project about plastic bottles that will help save the earth!"

  WHAT IS HARD

  Figuring out what that amazingly totally important project about plastic bottles that will help save the earth will be.

  WHAT YOU SHOULD DO IF YOU CAN'T THINK OF ANYTHING

  A parent or a teacher would say, "Read a book." Mimi or I would say, "Time to watch Unlikely Heroes," which is what we did right away. Unlikely Heroes is our most favorite show ever, and it was the perfect show to be watching when we were thinking about how we could be heroes ourselves. I couldn't believe it, but Gwen had never seen it before. Because of that Mimi and I decided that she needed to see the tape of our top five favorite episodes. That way Gwen would love it for sure.

  TOP FIVE EPISODES OF UNLIKELY HEROES

  1 Girl saves man from drowning by using her clothes as a rope. She helps pull him out of the water.

  2 Pet pig saves his family from a burglar by trapping the burglar in a closet.

  3 Man lifts car off of dog who was run over. Dog only has a broken leg.

  4 Cat meows and wakes up family when there is a fire.

  5 Baby calls 911 and he can't even walk yet.

  I had to go home before the end because it was a school night and I'm never allowed to stay over at Mimi's house for dinner on a school night. Mom has lots of rules about stuff like that. It was super hard to leave because Mimi and Gwen were still watching Unlikely Heroes and my favorite part was about to be happening. I love it when the baby pulls the phone onto the floor and the noise scares the cat.

  WHAT SHOULD NOT BE HAPPENING

  Mom and Dad were being funny at dinner, and we were having artichokes, which is my most favorite vegetable ever, but still I was not 100 percent completely feeling normal. I could not stop thinking about Mimi and Gwen over at Mimi's house having lots of super-type fun without me. I was thinking about it so much, I almost forgot to do my one conservation thing for my chart.

  I was just going to turn off the lights like before, but Mom was in her bedroom using the laptop computer and that was the only extra light that was on. She likes to take the computer in there when she is thinking about buying stuff online. That way Dad can't know about it and be grumpy about her spending money. It's always a good time to try to get her to buy me something new too, so I said, "What are you buying?"

  "I'm throwing this ugly thing away and getting myself a new one," said Mom, and she pointed to her old gray fleecy jacket. "I can't decide between getting a new brown one or a black one." I was shocked. "Mom! You can't buy a new fleecy! You have to keep this one. If you throw it away, that's like throwing twenty-five plastic bottles right into the garbage can!" I didn't know if this next part was true, but I said it anyway. "Plus, that fleecy is probably going to take over five hundred years to disintegrate! It's going to be sitting in the earth forever!"

  Of course Mom was pretty surprised. "Who told you that?"

  "We learned it at school," I said. "And if you loved the earth then you would keep your old jacket and not buy a new one. It's important to be green!" Suddenly I was a superhero of conservation right in my own house, and it felt great!

  Mom does not like to be told that she can't buy stuff. "Okay, Little Miss Green Pants, what if I donate it to charity so someone else can wear it, or make a pillow out of it? Would that be okay? Can I buy a new jacket then?" Sometimes you have to take what you can get, so I said, "I'd get the brown one—it's totally cuter," and then I did a Green Pants victory dance all the way to my room. Now I had something to write about.

  Saved one fleece jacket from the garbage.

  I was so filled with good feelings that I decided to make a comic about it to show Mimi and Gwen, and now I was not feeling sad about them being together without me anymore.

  SAVE THE EARTH

  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 n
ot 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!

  LUNCH TIME

  Gwen, of course, had lunch with us. Mimi would not tell me what her big secret was, so I knew it had to be about Gwen. Now that she was with us all the time, it was going to be hard to find out what it was. We sat with two of the other Graces while we had lunch.

  Gwen said she had met only one other Gwen in her whole life, so she thought it was pretty cool to have so many Graces around every day at school. I'm sure she wouldn't have thought it was cool if she had to be called Just Gwen for the rest of her school life.

  MIMI'S SECRET

  Gwen was having a good time talking to Grace F., so Mimi was able to get us to go to the bathroom alone. As soon as the bathroom door shut, Mimi said, "Gwen thinks I gave her Willoughby to keep! She is sleeping with him, and last night I even heard her crying on him! What am I going to do?" When someone asks you something that you can't even imagine the answer to, you have to just say something like "Wow," or "Oh, no."

  Willoughby is Mimi's favorite stuffed animal ever since she was born. When you love something that much, and have it for that long, you usually want to keep it for the rest of your life.

  MIMI AND NORMAL-SIZE WILLOUGHBY

  We could not stay in the bathroom forever, so finally we had to leave even though we did not have any brilliant ideas about how to solve Mimi's problem. It was not an easy problem to fix.

  ANSWERS WE THOUGHT OF AND WHY THEY WON'T WORK

  1 If Mimi just asks for Willoughby back, then Gwen will not have the stuffed animal she already loves, and she will cry even more and be sad that her parents are missing her birthday and she is stuck here with us.

  2 If Mimi asks Gwen to pick a different stuffed animal to love, then Gwen will not have the stuffed animal she already loves, and she will cry even more and be sad that her parents are missing her birthday and she is stuck here with us.

  3 If Mimi could find another Willoughby, she could give that one to Gwen and then she could get her own old Willoughby back. This seemed like the best idea, but Mimi has never in her entire life seen another Willoughby anywhere. Willoughbys are not like Graces.

  4 Mimi could ask her mom to help, except that her mom already saw Gwen with Willoughby and said to Mimi, "That was very nice of you to let Gwen have Willoughby to help her feel better."

  I didn't say anything about it but there was one thing that I was thinking about stuffed animals that was not going to help Mimi. All stuffed animals are not the same. Some you like, some you don't, and some you love. The weird thing is that you can't make the love thing happen on purpose—some stuffed animals have love magic for you and some just don't.

  MY FANCY BOTTLE

  I was 100 percent glad that I had decorated my water bottle, because as soon as Mimi saw it she did a lot of forgetting about the whole Willoughby problem. I could just tell. Gwen said it was a fantastic idea and a great way for everyone to keep using bottles over and over again.

  She had lots of craft ideas about how to decorate the bottles, and suddenly without even doing lots of thinking about it, we had our great idea for our passionate plan for saving the earth. If we were real superheroes, we would have been flying around the room in excitement!

  This reminded me to tell Gwen that she should draw her costume for the superheroes of conservation project. That way she could be in the model we were going to make about all of us flying to save the poor red panda from extinction.

  She said she was going to work on it after lunch when everyone else was studying the times tables for the one hundredth boring time. She already knew them all by heart. Even the really hard ones like the sevens, the nines, and twelves. She was lucky!

  DOUBLE GREEN ME

  When someone is jealous or wish they had what someone else already has, you can say they are green with envy. If someone is just happening to be doing a project about saving the earth, then you can say they are being green. And if both these things are going on at the exact same time, then you can say that person is double green.

  I was double green about Gwen's super-great awesome superhero of conservation costume. It was fantastic! If we were all real superheroes, she would have for sure been the leader and Mimi and I would be the helpers and not one bit sad about that at all.

  Gwen said her most favorite animals in the whole world were owls. This was an excellent pick for a superhero costume because owls can turn their heads all the way around to the back and look behind them. This would be a good extra if you are a superhero.

  When Sammy saw Gwen's drawing he said, "I knew it!
Your parents are spies! A regular person could never think of all those gadgets and stuff."

  Then Robert Walters said, "Really? Cool! I wish my parents were spies. Is there a secret spy room in your house?" Miss Lois had to interrupt the class because suddenly everyone was getting all excited about Gwen being part of a secret spy family.

  Miss Lois said, "Now, class, let's settle this right now." Then she asked Gwen the big important question. "Gwen, are your parents spies?"

  Gwen smiled a funny smile and said, "No, Miss Lois, my parents are not spies."

  "Fine," said Miss Lois. "Now we can finish our lesson."

  Miss Lois thought we were all finished with the spy stuff, but she was wrong. She wasn't thinking about how a real spy daughter would never in a million years say that her parents were spies. A real spy daughter would lie about it every time. I could tell that everyone in the class was thinking about the same thing I was, because even though Miss Lois was telling us all important information about how tomorrow was presentation day for our animal mascots, we were still all sneaking back looks at Gwen.

  SAMMY'S NEW BEST FRIEND

  Sammy was waiting for Gwen, Mimi, and me when it was time to walk home. Even though we were standing next to Gwen, he kept trying to get closer so he could walk next to her. The sidewalk is only big enough for three people to walk together in a line. If there is a number four person, that person has to walk in front of or behind the other three. By the time we got home I was the one walking behind.

  I was surprised about it but Gwen didn't seem to mind Sammy asking her all sorts of questions. It was like she was suddenly famous.