Strider: Part 6

By BEVERLY CLEARY, Illustrator PAUL O'ZELINKSKY

The basic Brinkerhoffs are the parents, Barry, and five little sisters.

Two girls belong to Barry's father, two to his stepmother, and the little one, who crawls and likes to play peekaboo around corners, belongs to both parents.

Sometimes the girls seem like more than five because their friends come over, and they all dress up in old clothes Mrs. Brinkerhoff keeps in a big box.

This morning a bunch of girls were kneeling on chairs around the kitchen table, popping corn in the electric corn popper. When they dumped it out in a bowl, Barry and I reached for some.

The girls tried to slap our hands away. "This is for shrinking."

That stopped us. Whoever heard of shrinking popcorn?

The girls were busy dropping perfectly good popcorn into a bowl of water, one piece at a time, to watch it shrink until nobody would eat it except maybe a hamster.

"That's a stupid thing to do," Barry told the girls.

"It is not," said the oldest sister. Betsy I think is her name. "We are performing a scientific experiment to prove that popcorn has memory. Drop it in water, and it remembers it is supposed to be little and hard instead of big and fluffy."

Barry and I helped ourselves to more popcorn. "You're being mean to popcorn," said one of the girls, which made me wonder what popcorn remembered when I chewed it.






Strider: Part 4

03.05.2001 By BEVERLY CLEARY, Illustrator PAUL O'ZELINKSKY
I worry about what I'm going to do with my life, and so does Mom. Dad is probably too busy worrying about meeting his deadline with a trailer load of lettuce before it rots to even think of me. Or maybe he is wasting his time playing video games at some truck stop.

Until the last sentence, I enjoyed writing this. Maybe I'll go back to writing in composition books, but not every day, just once in a while, like now, when I feel like writing something.

The gas station next door has stopped ping-pinging, which means it's after ten o'clock. Mom gets home about eleven-thirty, and my room is still a mess. No problem. Except for books and my diary, I'll dump everything in the trash.

I just remembered. I forgot about Barry.

Publisher: Harper Collins, $12.95

Age group: 10-13 years