he said We can pick teams then Adam loved that the class was so into baseball When he first suggested playing a couple of weeks ago nobody seemed that excited But now they were hooked They wanted to play every recess He loved that they all wanted to be on his team too They said he was the best player in the class Secretly Adam agreed Jack was a good pitcher and Trixie ran the bases super fast But nobody could hit like him Adam swung a pretend bat CRACK The ball soars over the left field wall and the crowd goes wild Okay everybody Get out your maps called Mrs Buckle 12
Ugh thought Adam His pretend home run turned into a foul ball Mrs Buckle was teaching the third grade about the fifty states For two weeks they’d been singing state songs playing state games and doing state puzzles They even ate a State Plate lunch with food from around the country Adam liked the Texas chili best Most of it was fun but there was one part Adam couldn’t stand map time Every morning Mrs Buckle gave them a list of states and a blank map of the country They were supposed to fill in the states all fifty of them 13
Grace could already do it So could Newton Their photos were on the Nifty Fifty wall at the front of the room Their smiling faces beamed down at Adam How was he ever going to get on that wall No matter how hard he tried he couldn’t remember where the states belonged He could swear they switched places when he wasn’t looking
He bent over his map and chewed his pencil Think Adam he told himself The state that poked out at the top might be Maine Florida was the droopy one down in the corner wasn’t it And the really big state was Texas Or maybe Tennessee What about the states in the middle Two of them looked exactly the same like plain old rectangles How was anybody supposed to remember those He started to write Colorado in one rectangle Then he crossed it out and wrote Nebraska Then he crossed that out and put in Utah
