“Any other ideas?” Kelsey asked.
“You haven’t had any yet,” Izzy pointed out.
“Maybe … I could read one of the same books as Simon and say something to him about the book, something wrong about the book. And see if he notices. Like, if it was The Secret Garden, and he had read it, too, I’d say, ‘Wasn’t it sad when the secret garden burned down?’ And if he says, ‘Yes, it was sad,’ then I’d know he hadn’t really read the book. Because the garden doesn’t burn down.”
“Which plan should we do?” Annika asked.
Kelsey jammed her Kelsey of Troy flower, which kept on slipping, back behind her ear again.
“All three,” she said.
* * *
Kelsey had two bookworms to put in her worm folder that morning. While she was over by the worm box, she casually pulled out Simon’s folder. Anybody could pull out the wrong folder by mistake. Anyway, the box was conveniently far away from Mrs. Molina’s desk.
Simon’s folder had eight worms in it, from the last five days. But had they been long books or short books? With big print or small print? Pictures or no pictures?
She needed to write down the titles, but she didn’t have a piece of paper with her. Maybe she could remember them in her head. Frindle was one. Dear Whiskers was another.
“Frindle. Dear Whiskers,” Kelsey repeated under her breath as she went back to her desk. “Frindle. Dear Whiskers.”
“Did you have a question, Kelsey?” Mrs. Molina asked.
Kelsey shook her head.
She started a list on the last page in her spiral-bound language arts notebook. S.B., she wrote on the top of the page. That was code for Simon’s Books. She wrote down the two titles she had memorized. Now she needed to go back to Simon’s folder for the other six.
Notebook in hand, she started toward the worm box, but Mrs. Molina stopped her. “Kelsey, your worms aren’t going anywhere.” Mrs. Molina gave a small smile, as if she had said something clever. “You can visit them after math time.”
Kelsey wanted to say that “visiting her worms” was part of math time. Getting the titles of Simon’s other six books was going to help Annika do the most important math problem that had ever been done in the history of Franklin School.
Instead, Kelsey had to sit back down and drag out her math book.
Wait. She remembered one more of Simon’s titles. Something about a mouse. The Mouse and the Motorcycle. She wrote it down on her S.B. page and then opened her own library book, Amber Brown Is Not a Crayon, to see if she could read just one or two pages before math time officially began.
The classroom door opened. Mr. Boone bounced in, bearded and beaming.
Mrs. Molina forced a smile. “Yes, Mr. Boone? We’re just starting math.”
This time Mr. Boone perched himself not on Mrs. Molina’s desk but on the desk of the boy closest to the door.
“Good morning, third graders!” he boomed.
“Good morning, Mr. Boone!” everyone shouted.
“I just wanted to say that I’m very impressed by your good start on the reading contest. No, make that your great start.”
“Did you do the totals for today yet? Are we number one?” a kid in the back of the room called out.
“Right now, you’re still number two, behind Mr. Thurston’s fifth graders. But”—Mr. Boone dropped his voice to a loud whisper—“I heard their star reader, Lindsay Conant, is going to be gone all next week on a family trip to Disney World. This could be your chance!”
“Thanks for that encouragement,” Mrs. Molina said. Her tone said, And now it’s time for you to go. Mrs. Molina did love math time more than anything.
“Keep reading!” Mr. Boone ruffled his beard and winked at the class as he turned to walk away.
* * *
By the end of the day, Kelsey had made two more trips to visit the worm box and had written down all eight of Simon’s titles. Actually, all nine. During silent reading time, Simon had finished Alvin Ho: Allergic to Girls, School, and Other Scary Things.
“We can get the number of pages for the books on Amazon.com,” Annika said as the three girls walked out of school to get a ride to Kelsey’s house with Kelsey’s mom.
“How do you know that?” Izzy asked.
Annika shrugged. “I know a lot of things.”
An hour later, Annika had gathered all her data, using the computer on Kelsey’s desk. Kelsey and Izzy sat side by side on Kelsey’s bed, watching as Annika turned on her calculator. This was definitely more exciting than doing fractions with Mrs. Molina. Kelsey had never known that there could be a reason for doing a math problem.
She imagined it as a word problem:
Simon Ellis says he has read 9 books with a total of 1,413 pages in 5 days. If Simon reads 5 hours a day, how many pages would he have to read per minute? IS HE OR IS HE NOT CHEATING?
“So?” Kelsey asked, as Annika finished writing the last number on her page of calculations.
“He’d have to read about a page a minute.”
“Could he read a page a minute?” Izzy asked.
“Let’s time Kelsey. Of course, some pages have a lot more words than others. Kelsey, pick a book that has kind of average pages.”
Kelsey picked Sarah, Plain and Tall; Annika had given it to her that afternoon.
“Wait until the clock clicks to the next minute to begin,” Izzy commanded. “Okay … go!”
Kelsey read as fast as she could. She had just finished the page when Izzy called, “Time!”
“Okay,” Annika said. “I guess it’s possible that Simon can read a page a minute. But it would be hard to read that fast for a whole entire book. Not to mention nine whole entire books.”
“So is he cheating?” Kelsey asked.
Annika turned off her calculator. “We still don’t know.”
4
By the end of the second full week of the contest, Mr. Thurston’s class was still ahead. Maybe their star reader had mailed her worms back from Disney World. Kelsey could picture this famous reader reading on the plane, reading in her hotel room, reading in the line for the Space Mountain ride.
Unfortunately, Simon was still ahead, too. Just by three books, but with both Simon and Kelsey reading as fast as humanly possible—if Simon wasn’t cheating—this meant that every time Kelsey read another book, Simon read one, too. Plus, one afternoon Kelsey had to go to Dylan’s track meet, and another evening she had to go to some awards ceremony for Sarah.
“Why do I have to go to everything?” Kelsey wailed, when she found out about Sarah’s banquet.
“Because you’re part of this family,” her mother replied serenely.
Kelsey thought her mother could come up with some new lines once in a while.
“Sarah can show me her award when she gets home. You’ll put it up in the hallway by our bedrooms, like you do with all our awards, and I’ll see it every day for the rest of my life.”
“Kelsey,” her mother said, less serenely this time.
“How can I ever get an award if I have to spend all my time watching other people get awards?”
Kelsey stomped up to her room and slammed the door. In the time she had spent arguing with her mother, she could have read five more pages of Mr. Crumb’s Secret.
The girls hadn’t spied on Simon yet. Izzy kept being busy with Fitness Club and softball, which unfortunately meant that she had only read three more books for the classroom total.
Even Annika, who had a less good excuse, had only read six.
Kelsey tried mentioning the contest to Annika one day when the two of them were alone at Kelsey’s house.
“How is your reading for the contest coming along?” she asked casually, as if she didn’t already know Annika’s pitiful worm total perfectly well.
“Don’t,” Annika said.
“Don’t what?” Kelsey said, even though she knew.
“I don’t ask you how your fractions are coming along, do I? Reading is your big thing, not mine.�
�
But reading was different from fractions, in Kelsey’s opinion. Not everybody liked fractions; in fact, as far as Kelsey knew, nobody liked fractions except for Annika. But everybody should like reading. And there wasn’t a fractions contest the way there was a reading contest. Though, to be fair, Kelsey wasn’t sure she would have tried hard on fractions even if there had been a fractions contest with a possible pizza party and a beard-shaving at the end of it.
Kelsey was going to have to accept that she could count on Izzy for running and Annika for math, period.
Kelsey hadn’t tried to trick Simon yet, either. Just the thought of it made her heart race and her palms sweat. She knew she’d turn bright red and ruin the whole plan by stammering.
But one of these days they’d do their spying. And one of these days Kelsey would make herself do her tricking.
Just not quite yet.
* * *
Instead, Kelsey decided to work on Cody Harmon. Cody’s worm folder was the only folder in the class that was completely empty. In two weeks, Cody had not read one single book, not even a first-grade-level book like Frog and Toad Together, which Mrs. Molina would probably consider worm-worthy if it were read by Cody.
Monday morning of week three, Kelsey made a point of sitting next to Cody on the round carpet by Mrs. Molina’s rocking chair for the after-lunch read-aloud of Stuart Little. As Mrs. Molina was waiting for a few straggling students to take their places, Kelsey asked Cody point-blank, “Why aren’t you reading any books for the contest?”
Maybe it was too blunt a thing to ask. Kelsey was better at bluntness than she was at trickery.
Cody turned his pale blue eyes on her. Cody’s hair was straight and brown, like hers, but it stood up in a funny way on the top of his head. From all her reading, Kelsey knew that this was called a cowlick. Why it was called a cowlick, she didn’t know. Maybe it would take a cow licking it with her huge pink tongue to make it lie down flat.
“Why aren’t you reading?” she repeated.
Cody answered with a question of his own: “Why don’t you jump in a lake?”
“You’re making us lose!”
“All right, class,” Mrs. Molina said in her settle-down voice. “Let’s see what happens to Stuart in chapter seven.”
Kelsey hardly listened to Stuart’s race in a toy sailboat across the pond in Central Park. She was so mad at Cody Harmon! It would take him five minutes to read a Frog and Toad book. He could earn a worm for the glory of his class in just five minutes, and he refused to do it. He was a traitor—a Benedict Arnold! Kelsey had read a biography of Benedict Arnold just yesterday, as a matter of fact. Benedict Arnold lived during the Revolutionary War; he was an American general, but he tried to sell West Point to the British. Ever since then, someone who betrayed his country was called a Benedict Arnold. Well, someone who was a traitor to his third-grade class should be called a Cody Harmon.
* * *
During math time on Tuesday, Kelsey was reading a collection of Aesop’s fables, little stories that each had a moral at the end. She had been so good at not reading during math time for the last two weeks, but it was too close to the end of the contest now to waste math time doing math.
The first story in the book was about a contest between the wind and the sun to see which was the strongest. The test for being strongest was seeing which one could make the man in the story take off his coat first.
The wind tried to blow off the man’s coat, but the more the wind howled, the more tightly the man clutched it. Then the sun took its turn, shining down gently on the man, and the man got so warm that he took off his coat simply because he wanted to. The moral of the story was: “Kindness is stronger than force.”
Mrs. Molina called on Kelsey for a fractions problem. This time Kelsey didn’t wait for Annika to whisper the correct answer. She blurted out any old wrong answer, so that she could finish the thought that was bursting in her brain.
Kindness is stronger than force.
She had a new plan for dealing with Cody Harmon.
* * *
Luckily, their class had their library time on Tuesday afternoons. Instead of hunting for a new stack of short but age-appropriate books, Kelsey found some appropriate-for-Cody books. She took them over to the big beanbag chair where Cody was sprawled, staring off into space.
“I found you some books,” Kelsey said.
“I don’t want any books,” Cody replied.
“I’m going to help you read them. Here. This one’s good. Henry and Mudge and the Forever Sea.”
Cody squinted at the cover. “What’s a forever sea?”
“It’s poetic. It means a big, big sea.”
“What’s so great about the big, big sea?”
“Read it and find out.”
No, that sounded bossy, like something the wind would say.
“Let’s read it together.” Kelsey smiled: a warm, sunny, take-off-your-coat smile.
“Go read your own book,” Cody said.
Kelsey tried to make her voice as coaxing as her smile. “Don’t you want to have some worms—well, at least one worm—like everybody else?”
Cody looked as if he was thinking it over. He couldn’t like being the only kid in the class without a single worm to his name.
“Please?” Kelsey asked.
Cody didn’t say anything, but he let Kelsey sit down cross-legged on the floor next to his beanbag. He could have gotten up and stalked away, but all the kids liked to sit on the squishy beanbag chairs, and the other beanbag chairs were already taken.
Kelsey opened the book to the first page and held it out to him.
“You read it,” he said.
“You can’t get a worm if I read it.”
“You can get a worm.”
Not for reading a first-grade baby book.
Kelsey pointed at the opening lines. She tried to make her smile extra encouraging, as sunny as a smile could be.
Cody read the first page slowly. Kelsey had been wrong: it was going to take him a lot more than five minutes to read about the forever sea.
He stumbled over the words vacation and beach. Kelsey wasn’t sure if she should correct him or not.
What would the sun do?
She decided the sun would just sit there and shine.
She shone through the whole book. Cody finished it two minutes before library time ended. Kelsey would have to come back another time to get her own books, but she didn’t mind.
Cody Harmon had earned his first bookworm for Mrs. Molina’s class. Kelsey filled it out for him the minute they got back to their classroom; it was easier to do it herself than to try to talk him into doing it. Talking him into reading the book had been enough for one day.
Go, third grade!
5
Kelsey had been sure Cody would come into school the next day with ten new bookworms from all the Henry and Mudge books she had sent home with him.
He didn’t.
“Here are some blank worms for you to fill out,” she said, standing next to his desk as the rest of the students were taking their seats before morning announcements and the Pledge of Allegiance. “You know, for all the books you read last night.”
“I didn’t read any.”
“You didn’t read any?”
Cody’s face set in that stubborn way Kelsey had already gotten to know.
Sun, sun, Kelsey reminded herself. But the Aesop fable hadn’t said what happened the next day, or the day after that. Did the sun just keep on shining down on the man, whether he took off his coat or not? Did it continue shining down on him warmly and pleasantly every single day?
“Okay,” Kelsey said. “That’s fine. Really, it’s fine. It’s completely fine! We can read another one together. At lunch.”
Though lunch was when Kelsey had planned to finish reading Ramona the Pest. She had only one more chapter left. The book was longer than she had wanted, but the print was pretty big. And Ramona was so much fun to read about—on st
rike from kindergarten after her teacher scolded her for pulling Susan’s boing-boing curls. Would Ramona ever go back to kindergarten again?
“Do you have your Henry and Mudge books with you?” Kelsey asked. “Did you remember to bring them back to school today?”
Cody opened his desk to show her it was filled to the brim with Henry and Mudge books. He hadn’t even bothered to take them home.
“But how could you possibly read them if—?” Kelsey felt her voice rising higher in a gust of windy fury.
She didn’t know what she would have said if the morning announcements hadn’t clicked on in the nick of time. The thought of all those wasted worm possibilities nearly broke her heart.
After the pledge, as soon as Mrs. Molina told the class to get out their math books, Kelsey put Ramona the Pest in place on her lap. She was up to such a good part in Ramona that she couldn’t bear not to read just a few more pages.
Dimly, she heard Mrs. Molina explaining something about fractions. Maybe something about adding them. Maybe something about subtracting them. She vaguely heard Simon asking some show-offy question that had the word denominator in it.
As she read on, Ramona’s sister, Beezus, called Ramona a kindergarten dropout.
Beezus teased Ramona for misunderstanding the words of “The Star-Spangled Banner.”
Ramona burst into tears and threw her crayons all over the floor.
“Kelsey Green!”
The voice was Mrs. Molina’s. But it wasn’t coming from the front of the room. It was coming from next to Kelsey’s desk.
In an instant, Mrs. Molina had snatched Ramona the Pest off Kelsey’s lap and was brandishing it in the air for the whole class to see. Kelsey could hear Annika’s gasp and Izzy’s low moan.
“No wonder you’re having trouble with fractions!” Mrs. Molina thundered.
Mrs. Molina had no right telling the whole class how badly Kelsey was doing in math. Of course, from the fact that she got every single answer wrong, except when Annika prompted her, they probably already knew.
Mrs. Molina strode back to her desk, carrying Kelsey’s book with her. “I am not returning this to you until three o’clock this afternoon.”
Kelsey Green, Reading Queen Page 2
