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About the Author and Illustrator
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For my mother and father, who’ve always paid attention
Special thanks to Cindy Goldrich, EdM, author of 8 Keys of Parenting Children with ADHD, for her help as an expert consultant
Chapter 1
My name’s Veronica Conti and I love contests.
Staring contest? Sign me up.
Arm-wrestling contest? Yee haw!
Eating contest? I’m your girl … unless I have to eat broccoli. Or cauliflower. Or arugula. I have never tried arugula, but the name sounds gross. Ar-uguuuuuu-la.
I love contests. Sometimes you win, and sometimes you lose, and it’s fun either way.
But it’s more fun if you win. Especially if you win a trophy.
Trophies! Glorious, golden, gleaming trophies! You put them on your shelf, and they sit there shouting, Hear ye! Hear ye! This person is a winner!
At least, I think they do that. I don’t know for sure, because I, Veronica Conti, have never won a trophy.
Yes, that’s right. I’ve been alive almost eight years, and I have won zero trophies.
What makes it even worse is that everyone else in my family has one!
My big brother, Jude, is only two years older than me, and he has loads of trophies! He won them for chess championships, drawing competitions, sand-castle contests, and other stuff, too. He has so many trophies, they don’t all fit on the shelf above his desk. So Dad had to put up another shelf for the extras. How greedy can you get?
Jude is soooooo proud of his trophies. He polishes them every month. Just to make sure he doesn’t forget, he writes Polish trophies on the calendar hanging by his desk, on the last Sunday of every month. Once I tried to touch one of his trophies, just to see how it felt, and he snapped, “Get your grubby hands off!”
“I’m the only person who doesn’t have a trophy,” I complained to Mom. “Jude has too many to count. Cora has three for spelling bees. Ezra has two for robotic contests. Minnie has a whole matching set from piano recitals. Even Matthew Sawyer has a trophy from the science fair last year! For a project called Fantastic Phlegm! And it’s not even fair, because his mom helped him and she’s a doctor. So of course he won!!”
“It matters not if you win or lose, but how you play the game,” Mom replied.
Easy for her to say! She’s got a bunch of trophies!
Okay, not trophies exactly. Mom has plaques, which are basically just flattened trophies that hang on the wall. She got them in college, and they’re in Latin so I have no idea what they say. For all I know, she got them for winning spitting contests.
Even my dad has trophies from when he was a basketball star in high school.
When I complained to him, Dad said, “You’re not the only one in the family without a trophy. Pearl doesn’t have one, either.”
“Well, that doesn’t count!” I replied. “She’s only two years old!”
And then something totally impossible happened.
Pearl got a trophy.
Chapter 2
Technically, what Pearl brought home from day care was a medal and not a trophy. But what’s the difference, really? They are both golden and special and prove you’re a champion.
Jude and I were in our room, getting ready to do our homework after school. Jude was sitting at his desk, sharpening all his pencils to perfect points. I was lying on my bed, putting kitten stickers on my math notebook because the notebook looked a little boring and because I didn’t feel like starting my work.
I heard the sound of footsteps on the stairs, and then Pearl burst into our bedroom, with Mom right behind her. Pearl was holding her favorite stuffed rat, Ricardo, in one hand and a shiny golden thing in the other hand.
Ricardo looked different. Here’s why: He was wearing a pair of Pearl’s underwear. It was pink with bunnies all over it. Even though Pearl’s underwear is itsy-bitsy, it was still humongous on Ricardo, so somebody had made it tighter with a safety pin.
Ricardo has been dragged around everywhere with Pearl since she turned two. He had already lost his whiskers and pretty much all his dignity. But he had a tiny shred of dignity left … until the bunny panties.
“Wook, Wonny!” said Pearl. She shoved her medal in my hand. “Wook! So pwetty!”
When I saw that medal, I felt two things:
1. Super jealous.
2. Super confused.
Because the medal had a picture of a toilet on it.
“Is this some kind of joke?” I whispered to Mom.
“It’s something new the day care is trying, to encourage the kids to use the potty,” explained Mom.
Mom and Dad had been trying to toilet train Pearl for a few months. They even got her a little potty that played music when you sat on it. The song it played was really fast and really loud and totally hilarious.
When Pearl first got it, Jude and I spent about an hour taking turns sitting on the potty—with our pants on, of course—so it would play the song. It went like this:
When you really have to go
Here’s what you need to know:
Going potty is so fun
In the rain or in the sun!
Just don’t forget to wipe
When you don’t wear a diape-
Rrrrrrrrrrrrrr!
It’s potty time!
It’s potty time!
It’s potty time!
It’s potty time!
“It’s the worst song ever!” I laughed.
“Who rhymes wipe with diaper? It’s terrible!” Jude cackled.
After an hour, though, the song started to get a little annoying. After a day, it started to get really annoying. And after a few weeks, it drove us so crazy that Dad tried to take out the batteries. But it turned out you couldn’t take the batteries out. And there was no off switch.
The worst part was how that annoying song kept getting stuck in all of our heads. So even when Pearl wasn’t sitting on the potty, one of us would start singing, “Just don’t forget to wipe…” and then someone else would shriek, “NOOOOOO! Not the potty song!” and the person would stop singing. But it would be too late, because the song would already be stuck in our heads.
I guess they had a potty at day care, too, because there Pearl stood, showing off her potty medal.
I tried to be happy for Pearl. But now I was the only person in the whole family who didn’t have a trophy. It was too much!
“I’ve never gotten an award for going to the toilet!” I grumbled to Mom as Pearl ran out of the room. “Do you have any idea how many times I’ve gone? Like, a thousand!”
“Oh, it’s way more than that,” Jude piped up. He was emptying out his pencil shavings. “Let’s say you go to the bathroom an average of six times a day—that’s forty-two times a week, which is … about 160 times a month. So that would be—” He squinted one eye closed. “That’s about 2,000 times a year, and you’r
e almost eight, so … you’ve gone to the toilet 16,000 times.”
He snapped his pencil sharpener closed.
“Roughly,” he said.
Jude’s in fourth grade, so he knows how to multiply and divide and also how to show off.
“See?” I said to Mom. “I have gone to the bathroom 16,000 times! But guess how many toilet medals I have?
“Zero?” asked Mom.
“That is correct! Zero!”
At that moment, Pearl ran back into our room, wearing nothing but a pair of red socks.
“I’m so big!” she announced. “I did peepee!”
“You did peepee in the potty?” Mom asked.
“No,” said Pearl. “On the fwoor! Come see!”
She ran out and Mom followed her, sighing.
“I thought for sure I’d get a trophy for being the president of the Fix-It Friends,” I grumbled to Jude. “I save lives, for crying out loud!”
“You’re not the president,” Jude said. “And you don’t save lives. You help kids solve problems.”
“What’s the difference?” I snapped.
“And,” he went on, “if you do ever get a trophy for being a Fix-It Friend, then I should get one, too—and Ezra and Cora. Because we do just as much work as you. We all work together when someone at school has a problem.”
He tidied some piles of papers on his desk before opening up his homework folder.
“If you really want a trophy that much, do a great job on your 100 Days project,” Jude said. “My class just started working on ours today.”
I jumped off my bed and threw my arms around good old Jude.
“Yes! Yes! The 100 Days contest! Of course! You’re a genius!”
Every year, in February, my school has a big celebration on the one hundredth day of school. The teachers tell us how proud they are that we’ve been working so hard for one hundred whole days.
I’m no dummy. I know the real reason the school has a 100 Days celebration. It’s a way of tricking us into doing math. They try to make it so much fun that we don’t even notice we’re learning stuff. Like when Dad puts broccoli in the blender and tries to sneak it into my scrambled eggs. I can always sniff out the broccoli and the math, too. They don’t fool me!
But the 100 Days contest is pretty fun, so I don’t mind. All the kids work in groups, and you can do absolutely anything you want. Well, not anything. The project cannot include:
1. Live animals.
2. Dead animals.
3. Acrobatics.
I found that out the hard way.
But, besides that, you can do whatever you want. The only rule is that it has to include one hundred of something.
Then, on the one hundredth day of school, each grade has a big 100 Days gallery with all the projects, and the students vote for the one they like best.
Here is the important part. Each person in the winning group gets a big trophy. Jude has two of them, from second and third grade. They have a base of pure marble with a big golden 100 on top. They are glorious!
When Jude reminded me about the 100 Days contest, I decided right then and there that I would be the winner for the second grade. I would win that trophy.
After all, if Matthew Sawyer could win a trophy, how hard could it be?
Chapter 3
That Monday, Miss Mabel announced that we were starting our 100 Days projects, just as Jude had predicted. I was super excited and just a little worried about who would be in my group.
Miss Mabel doesn’t let us pick our own groups, because she says it causes too much drama. This is the only thing I don’t like about her … well, this and how she makes us meditate sometimes. Everything else about Miss Mabel is marvelous.
I don’t know exactly how old Miss Mabel is, because my mom said it’s rude to ask, but she looks really young, almost like a teenager. She isn’t married and doesn’t have kids. Instead, she has a roommate and two black cats named Trick and Treat. Mabel is her first name, and she lets us call her that because her last name is very long and hard to say. It starts with a y and has four i’s and three l’s and three a’s in it.
This is what makes her my BTF (Best Teacher Forever):
1. She plays music for us while we work. Miss Mabel says music is like fertilizer for your brain—it helps ideas grow. Miss Mabel has a lot of cool music on her phone. She used to play it through a little speaker on her desk, but that speaker stopped working just after the holiday break. I have no proof, but I suspect Matthew Sawyer. I always suspect Matthew Sawyer.
2. She lets us dance to doo-wop. Sometimes school gets so boring, and it’s hard to pay attention because it sounds like the teacher is just saying “So you blah blah blah blah blah, and then you blah-de-blah-de-blah, and finally, you just blaaaaaaaaaaaaaah.” When school gets this boring, we just talk or horse around. Instead of getting mad at us, Miss Mabel plays a really fast, old-timey song called “Rama Lama Ding Dong.” We stand up and dance in our spots like crazy until the song is over. After that, it’s easier to pay attention.
3. She has the best outfits. Grown-ups usually wear super-boring colors like black or brown or gray and hardly any patterns. But Miss Mabel wears bright clothes with flowers or zigzags or even animals on them. She sort of looks like a beautiful, bright piñata. It is exactly the way I want to dress when I am a grown-up.
That Monday afternoon when Miss Mabel announced the groups for the 100 Days project, she looked extra great. She was wearing green corduroy pants with red boots and a button-down shirt that had swans all over it!
“Your attention, please!” she said in a funny voice, like she was the ringmaster of a circus.
Then she told us to get our math notebooks out, so we could take notes for our 100 Days projects.
I looked in my desk, but I couldn’t find my notebook anywhere. Just as I was about to tell Miss Mabel that I didn’t have it, I heard a huge crash. Whose desk was it coming from? Take one guess.
Matthew Sawyer’s, of course.
Matthew Sawyer is like a pebble in my shoe. Every year, he is in my class, and every year, he drives me bonkers. Here’s how:
1. He grosses me out.
2. He plays dumb.
3. He copies me.
4. Other ways that are too many to even count.
The huge crash was the sound of absolutely everything sliding out of Matthew Sawyer’s desk. It was an avalanche! Out fell papers and books and broken pencils and dried-up glue sticks and dried-up markers and granola-bar wrappers and winter gloves and hats and dirty tissues. There was even a whole carton of mushrooms in the pile. Why would someone have a carton of mushrooms in their desk?
In the middle of the pile was a math notebook.
“Just what I was looking for.” He grinned. But when he picked it up, he frowned. “Ugh, kittens! This isn’t mine!”
I recognized a sticker of a tabby cat wearing an astronaut helmet.
“Hey, that’s mine!” I said. I marched over and grabbed it out of his hands.
“Stop taking my stuff!” I whispered to him, so Miss Mabel wouldn’t hear.
“Why would I want a dumb notebook covered with disgusting kittens?” He made a grimace. “You stop leaving your stuff on my desk.”
“I would rather leave my notebook in a volcano than—” I started to say, but then Miss Mabel walked over, so I piped down and went back to my desk.
Miss Mabel helped him shove all the stuff back into his desk and asked him, “Did you forget your notebook at home again?”
Matthew Sawyer rubbed his head, which is what he does when he is nervous. He has a buzz cut, so his brown hair is very short. It looks like it would feel fuzzy and soft, but I will never know because I will never, ever in a billion years touch Matthew Sawyer’s head.
“I guess I left it in my room,” he said. His face got red like he was embarrassed. “Sorry.”
He’s so forgetful that he’d lose his teeth if they weren’t stuck to his gums. Practically the whole Lost and Found belongs
to him. There should be a sign on it that says: PROPERTY OF MATTHEW SAWYER.
Miss Mabel told him to just use a piece of loose-leaf paper. Then she read the list of kids in group one and two and three and four and even five. My name wasn’t called. I was beginning to think she had forgotten about me when she said, “Last but not least, in group six, we’ve got Veronica, Cora, Minnie, and—hold on, I can’t read my own handwriting here.”
As Miss Mabel squinted, trying to see what she had written, Cora and Minnie and I clapped our hands in delight.
Not only are Minnie and Cora my two closest friends, but also they are both great students. Cora is an absolute math whiz! With them in my group, I knew I’d get the trophy for sure. I was so happy, I was bouncing up and down in my seat.
Then Miss Mabel read the name of the last member of our group.
I instantly stopped bouncing. In fact, I felt like my butt had turned into a block of concrete.
I wanted to grab the sides of my face with my hands and howl, “Nooooooooooooo!”
The name she read was Matthew Sawyer.
Chapter 4
As everyone met with their 100 Days groups, I walked over to Miss Mabel. Her wavy black hair was swept up into a bun with a pencil stuck in, to hold it in place.
I think this is the coolest hairstyle ever. Not only does it look great, but also it’s useful, too! You always have a pencil when you need one.
“I love your pencil bun,” I told Miss Mabel.
“Thanks, lady.” She smiled. “What’s up?”
“I think there may have been a tiny mistake,” I said. “I can’t work with Matthew Sawyer.”
At just that moment, Matthew Sawyer appeared next to me and said, “Yeah, we can’t be in the same group.”
Miss Mabel crossed her arms. She looked from me to him and then at me again.
“Kids, I’m disappointed by this,” she said. “You haven’t even given the collaboration a try.”
Eyes on the Prize Page 1
