Section 1

Dear Aunt Kayla,

Mom and Dad say I have to write to you and apologize for getting you so upset that you had to go to the hospital. Mom says you almost had a heart attack when you saw me on CNN waving my protest sign and that your neighbor, Mr. Fitzgibbons, had to call an ambulance to come and get you. In addition to writing you an apology I also have to clean out the garage and paint the downstairs bathroom so be assured that I am being well disciplined from my little mistake. And Dad says I’m grounded for the next two weeks so I won’t have any excuses for not getting those things done.

Mom and Dad weren’t very happy to see me on TV either. Ms. Kuhn, my science teacher, said we failed to get our point across and just looked silly. The principal, Mr. McAdams, is really mad at her because he thinks she put us up to staging the protest in the first place but she didn’t. It was all my idea at first but then Lenny took it over and the others joined in. I should have known it was a bad idea when Lenny insisted on being involved. If we’d left him at home none of this would have happened. Ms. Kuhn said all the people who saw us on the news were probably confused about the issues we were trying to raise. The costume Lenny wore and the fact that he fainted and had to be rescued by the paramedics detracted from the whole point of our protest.

Anyway, Mom says you wanted an explanation of what happened. It all started with a field trip Ms. Kuhn took us on for our science class. Ms. Kuhn is a new teacher and she’s very gung-ho. She makes us do a lot of labs in our class, which is fun but kind of messy, especially since Lenny is my lab partner and he’s always spilling stuff. Next time I’m going to get a neater lab partner.