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Well, that might be true, but ever since Fregley ditched my textbooks, it's been a little hard for me to do my assignments. Then Vice Principle Roy totally dropped a bomb on me. He said that if I didn't improve my grades in the next few weeks, I was gonna have to go to SUMMER school. THAT got my attention. I've heard rumors about summer school, and it's not something I really want to be a part of. For one thing, I know they shut off the air- conditioning during the summer to save money.

The classes are more like detention than school, and none of the regular teachers are there. In fact, I heard the English teacher for summer school is the JANITOR. I don't know if Vice Principle Roy was just trying to scare me, but if he was, it WORKED. Because the thought of spending my summer vacation with Mr. Meeks is enough to turn me into a straight-A student. Thursday I'm not really sure how my grades got so bad, because my year actually started off pretty GOOD. In the first quarter I got A's and B's on my report card, and Mom even took me out to get a hot-fudge sundae to celebrate my accomplishment. RODERICK got in on the action, too, even though his

report card that quarter was lousy. That taught me that even if you try your best, someone's just gonna mooch off your hard work. I know I'm not the best student or anything, but I've never had to worry about going to SUMMER school. So this week I've been doing everything I can to get my situation under control. Mom got me a set of used textbooks, and I've been catching up on my assignments every night. But some of the classes I'm flunking don't even HAVE homework. One is music, and my problem THERE is that I don't participate. None of the boys really do, which is why Mrs. Norton comes right up in our faces and tries to get us to sing.

If Mr. Meeks is the ENGLISH teacher in summer school, then I don't even wanna imagine what music class looks like. I decided that, starting TODAY, I was gonna be Mrs. Norton's best student. So when she called my name at the start of class, I stood right up and belted out the song we've been

working on. Mrs. Norton waited until I was finished, then she said she wasn't asking me to SING, she was just calling attendance. All week, Mom's been helping me catch up on my missing homework assignments, but the one thing she says I'm gonna have to do on my OWN is the Science Fair project. And that kind of stinks, because Science isn't exactly my strong suit. For LAST year's Science Fair, my experiment was on metamorphosis. I collected a dozen or so caterpillars

and put them in a box with leaves to eat, and they all made cocoons. My plan was to open the box at the EXACT moment they turned into butterflies and blow the judges away. I worked hard on it, and even turned in my project a day EARLY. But I left the box with the caterpillars on the heater in the Science classroom, and unfortunately that was the end of that.