CHAPTER 1 At the beginning of the school year Audrey had been super-duper-duper sure that SECOND grade would be twice as fun as first She was ready She’d remembered the best parts from first grade like snack time and the sunny yellow paint on the door and Diego’s jokes that sometimes made her snort Surely second grade would have all of those things plus better cooler older things Second graders even got to put on a whole play with costumes and everything 9
But second grade was not that great yet It definitely had all kinds of new things New things like grades on spelling tests and Coach Mallory’s contests in P E and Mr Francis’s Music Stars New things mattered this year like who had the coolest sneakers or whose paintings the teacher hung on the filing cabinet 10
New things mattered like who was who And Room 19 was full of characters Like Mimi One time she stole a piece of printer paper when nobody was looking and called it a fluffy wuffy bunny lost in a snowstorm She had seen the actual Mona Lisa all the way across the ocean in France so she called herself an arteest Is that what arteests do It seemed like cheating to Audrey It was just a piece of paper But Ms Fincastle oohed and ahhed and asked Mimi to autograph it and then she hung it right at the tip-tip top of her filing cabinet with three magnets shaped like little frogs And whose drawing was somewhere in the middle Dangling from one plain silver magnet Audrey’s It was a rainbow made of only pink and purple and blue with one cloud on either side But each cloud was 11
