ONE

Leeva Thornblossom flew outside the instant she heard the NUTSMORE WEEKLY thunk against the door. Fetching the newspaper was the only time her parents permitted her to step into the front yard.

Ignoring the paper, she jumped off the step, crossed the driveway and waded through the weeds to the towering hedge that surrounded her yard. There, she knelt and cautiously worked her hands into the sharp-needled branches to open a sightline. Her eyes swept the sidewalk, and yes! She was in luck today: A woman gripping a little boy by the hand, approaching from the right.

Leeva scarcely blinked as they drew near. First, she would call out a bright Hello! Then, when the woman located her in the hedge, she’d add…well, this was the hard part. What Leeva ached to say to someone was, I am here! And you are here! But somehow those words seemed too important, and yet too peculiar, to call through a hedge. Besides, what would she say next?

Just as the woman reached the edge of Leeva’s yard, she scooped up the toddler and crossed the street.

Again! Why did people always do this, as if avoiding an invisible barbed wire fence? Crestfallen, Leeva watched the woman hurry past on the far sidewalk, the little boy jouncing on her hip, until she was out of sight.

Better luck next week, she told herself as she plodded back to pick up the paper. There on the step, she flipped through it, looking for the Improve Your Vocabulary column filler – there was never any actual news in the paper, but a new word, complete with definition, every week, at least she had that. Before she found it though, a headline caught her eye. And Reader, for the first time ever, Leeva saw actual news: NUTSMORE ANNOUNCES OPENING DAY OF SCHOOL FOR CHILDREN SIX AND OLDER

Well, she practically toppled over into the doorway briars in her shock. Her town had opened a school! And since she was eight or nine – not knowing her birthday, she had never been able to calculate her age exactly – she would be going to this school! At last, it was out into the world for her, in only – she checked the announcement – seven weeks and three days.

She would tell her parents after dinner, when they were in the least rotten of the moods they simmered in all day.

“Wait, that’s silly,” she chided herself out loud, walking back inside. Her mother was Nutsmore’s mayor and her father was its treasurer. Surely, they already knew about this new school.

Then why hadn’t they told her?