Chapter One the mess It wasn’t that Beatrice More didn’t like boxes She did She especially liked boxes that were perfect squares They stacked easily They held things that would otherwise mess up the house They were neat and tidy But today Beatrice was sick of boxes Very very sick of boxes Looking around her new house all she could see were stacks of them On the floor On the kitchen counters On the furniture 1
Boxes everywhere Beatrice had tried to tell the movers where to put the boxes But they just carried them in and dumped them anywhere She tried to scrub off the smudgy sticky handprints the movers left on the walls But they kept making them faster than she could scrub them off She said Somebody’s walking through the house with their shoes on very loudly several times before her mother finally shushed her The moving guys were horrible listeners They just smiled carried in more boxes with their sticky hands and kept making a bigger and bigger mess But the movers were gone now The big noisy moving truck was just pulling away from the driveway 2
It’s about time grumbled Beatrice She stood in the living room with her hands on her hips As she looked around her eyes narrowed What a dump she said to herself shaking her head slowly Her mother came into the room She looked around happily Well this is exciting she said A new house a new neighborhood a new city Are you excited Bee Beatrice How many times had she told her family not to call her Bee Nine thousand Nineteen thousand Ninety thousand Bee was not a name at all It was a letter Or worse an insect An insect that buzzed annoyingly An insect people ran away from screaming Bee certainly wasn’t the name of a future Olympic gymnastics gold-medal winner 3
